Manchester City has been found guilty of almost all of the more than 100 charges of financial wrongdoing, the Premier League confirmed on Tuesday, in one of the biggest scandals in English soccer history. City, the most successful team in England for the past 15 years and the current Premier League leader, now faces severe sanctions that could include a huge points deduction or even expulsion from the Premier League, causing huge reputational damage to its Abu Dhabi ownership.
The violations included failing to provide accurate financial information and submitting inflated figures for sponsorship deals out of Abu Dhabi, hiding payments that supplemented salaries of managers and players, and breaching financial rules established by the Premier League and UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, aiming to keep clubs financially stable by not spending beyond their means. City was accused of a raft of financial violations from 2009-18 – a period when the northwest club, long in the shadow of great rival Manchester United, was transforming itself into a record-breaking global superpower that has won multiple Premier League titles and the Champions League.
The explosive verdict by an independent commission “details how the club systematically broke Premier League rules for nearly a decade,” Premier League chief executive Richard Masters said in a case that was initiated by the competition more than three years ago and first arose in 2018 from leaked club emails and documents. “An independent commission has found Manchester City guilty of all charges related to serious breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules over a nine-season period,” the league said, “and the majority of charges in relation to its failure to co-operate with the league’s investigation. Regarding the sponsorship deals, the league said: “Manchester City arranged ‘sham’ contracts (which misrepresented the true agreement between the parties) with a number of its commercial partners, as well as relying on ‘sham’ agreements with others, to artificially inflate the club’s revenues and reduce its costs. “The club,” the league added, “filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from its auditors and football regulators.”
