There is no episode in English football’s history that even resembles a precedent for the epic Manchester City disciplinary drama, which encapsulates the modern game at breaking point. Here was a grand, stoic old club, taken over in 2008 by Abu Dhabi royalty and mega-funded to imperious success, then crowned serial champions by a league simultaneously pursuing charges of monstrous financial cheating. On Friday sources confirmed that saga, in which Pep Guardiola’s expensively constructed City teams won five Premier League titles and the Champions League during the years since the investigation began in December 2018, culminated in guilty findings on almost all of more than 100 charges.
There is no precedent either for the scale of these charges: that City failed to provide accurate financial information to the league for nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18 inclusive; failed to provide full details of payment in their contracts with manager Roberto Mancini from 2009-10 to 2012-13; failed to include full payment details in player contracts from 2010-11 to 2015-16; that they breached Uefa’s financial fair play regulations from 2013-14 to 2017-18, the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability regulations from 2015-16 to 2017-18 – and that City failed to cooperate with the league’s investigation throughout, from its inception in 2018-19 to the 2022-23 season in which the club was charged, including the duty to provide “documents and information to the Premier League in the utmost good faith”. News of the independent commission’s decision has finally emerged almost two years after the hearing of the charges in late 2024. Those hearings followed a mammoth investigation process, in which the Premier League and its lawyers insistently demanded to see all the documentation it requested, against repeated challenge from the club.
The period of the charges, 2009-10 to 2022-23, runs from the start of all the glittering success attained under the ownership of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, vice president and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. The era of dominance began with FA Cup victory in 2011 after 35 trophy-less years for the club, then the breakthrough 2012 Premier League title won by Mancini through Sergio Agüero’s celebrated 94th-minute winner. This stunning exposure of the modern Manchester City’s insides was precipitated in November 2018 by the German magazine Der Spiegel sensationally publishing internal City documents, leaked to it from a hack of City’s emails.
Most damaging in that exposé were emails and financial documents that appeared to show Sheikh Mansour’s ownership group was paying the bulk of the multimillion-pound sponsorship of the club by the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, which includes bearing the name of the stadium. The published documents suggested that City’s regime, in its determination to spend the vast money required to attain success in modern football, was circumventing the financial fair play (FFP) rules. Introduced by Uefa in 2011, then similarly by the Premier League in 2013, these rules seek to restrain overspending by clubs, particularly on soaring player wages, by limiting the financial losses that owners can fund.
Money must be spent from a club’s earned revenue, including TV and commercial rights, income from supporters and sponsorships – owners cannot use a sponsor as a vehicle for putting more funding in. Since days after the takeover, City’s board has been chaired by Khaldoon Al Mubarak, a senior Abu Dhabi political and business leader, long-term adviser to Mansour’s brother Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the ruler of the country and president of the UAE. It took the wider football world some time to understand that such powerful intent and expertise, as well as funding, were really here for City, a club which had suffered some famous cock-ups in the Premier League era, including relegation to the third tier of English football as recently as 1998.
But for those paying attention, the serious, total transformation of City’s fortunes had been clear from the start of the takeover. Although the new era began with huge losses sustained buying top players, including the statement signing of Carlos Tevez from Manchester United in the summer of 2009, Mansour promised long-term investment and success that would make City profitable. Within 18 months, Mansour had invested £395m.
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