Manchester City’s Financial Scandal Raises Questions About What Happened After 2018
The extraordinary findings against Manchester City have raised fundamental questions about how the club’s finances were presented to football authorities and whether the story ends with the period covered by the Premier League’s financial charges.
An independent Commission has found Manchester City guilty of serious financial rule breaches, including using what it described as “sham” commercial arrangements to artificially inflate revenues and reduce costs by more than £900 million.
The Premier League says City filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from auditors and football regulators. It concluded that the arrangements were designed to circumvent Premier League and UEFA spending rules.
The findings cover financial information from 2009/10 to 2017/18. But there is another crucial part of the case.
The Premier League also brought charges concerning City’s conduct during its investigation, covering the period from December 2018 onwards. The Commission upheld three of four alleged breaches relating to the club’s failure to co-operate with the investigation.
That distinction matters.
It would be wrong to state as an established fact that Manchester City have been “cooking the books” continuously from 2018 to the present day. The Commission has not made that finding.
But the findings inevitably raise questions about the reliability of the club’s financial reporting after 2018, particularly given the scale and nature of the misconduct uncovered before that date.
If a club was found to have systematically used disguised funding arrangements, artificially inflated revenues and understated costs over a period of years, supporters are entitled to ask what scrutiny was applied to its subsequent accounts.
Manchester City have denied wrongdoing and have the right to appeal the Commission’s findings. The question of sanctions has yet to be decided.
What is no longer simply a matter of speculation, however, is that an independent Commission has found that Manchester City breached financial rules on a remarkable scale.
The football world now has to confront the consequences and ask whether the full financial story of Manchester City’s rise has yet been told.
Lying to Their Players?
That also raises an uncomfortable question for Manchester City’s players. If senior figures at the club had received the Commission’s decision before it became public, what exactly were players told about the outcome and the evidence against the club? For years, players have understandably been expected to accept the assurances of their employers that the allegations were unfounded. Former City midfielder Rodri has said that the players trusted the club’s repeated insistence that everything had been done correctly.
If the club had already been informed of the Commission’s findings before the wider football public, players were entitled to know whether those assurances still reflected the position reached by the independent panel. That does not establish that Manchester City deliberately lied to its players, particularly while the proceedings remained confidential and an appeal remains possible. But if players (and new players being bought) were continuing to be told that there was effectively nothing to worry about while the club already knew it had been found guilty of serious financial breaches, serious questions about transparency and trust are unavoidable. The players put their reputations and careers on the line for the club and they deserve to know whether they were given the full picture.
