The biggest club in English football was found guilty of breaking the rules, and within a week the same twenty clubs are sitting down to vote on handing £1.5 billion to everyone below them. That is not a coincidence. It is the entire financial plumbing of English football getting turned over in a single weekend, and it is the most interesting thing that has happened in this sport in a long time.
The verdict
On Friday, it was reported — first by David Ornstein at The Athletic, then picked up by Reuters, CNN and a dozen others — that Manchester City has been found guilty on 114 of the 115 charges brought against it for breaching Premier League financial rules. The Premier League had not, as of this writing, made the formal announcement, and the club is expected to appeal. But the direction of travel is no longer in question.
The charges date back to February 2023, when the league, following an investigation that had been running since November 2018, alleged that City failed to provide accurate financial information across nine seasons, from 2009-10 to 2017-18. That is not a small window. It is the entire era in which City went from a club that had won the FA Cup for the first time in 35 years to one that had won three Premier League titles, three League Cups and an FA Cup. The allegations spanned inaccurate financial reporting, breaches of UEFA’s financial fair play rules, and breaks of the league’s own profit and sustainability regulations.
City’s response is the one it has given, word for word, since February 2023: it has “diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League board and executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator.” Eight years. That is a long time to wait for a verdict, and Premier League CEO Richard Masters admitted in August that it was taking “longer than anyone expected.”
What could happen next
The Premier League handbook, rule W51, is the document that decides what happens now. It allows fines, points deductions, suspensions and even expulsion from the league, plus a catch-all for “such other penalty as it shall think fit.” It does not explicitly mention stripping past titles, but that open-ended clause is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the current speculation.
The precedents are useful for calibrating expectations. Everton took a ten-point deduction for PSR breaches, reduced to six on appeal, with a further two added later. Nottingham Forest had a four-point deduction. Chelsea took a record £10.75m fine and a suspended transfer ban in March this year. But none of those cases involved a club winning three league titles in the breach window, which is precisely what makes City’s situation unprecedented. And unlike the club’s earlier fight with UEFA, there is no route to the Court of Arbitration for Sport after the appeal — a three-person appeal board is the last stop.
The payday vote
Here is the part that makes the week strange. On Thursday, the Premier League’s 20 clubs are expected to vote on a deal worth around £1.5 billion, to be distributed to EFL clubs over the next decade. It is the product of more than three years of negotiation, and it requires the support of 14 of the 20 clubs to pass.
The mechanism is elegant in the way these things are. The Premier League’s transfer levy rises from 4% to 6%. On Chelsea’s £117m signing of Morgan Rogers, that takes the levy from £4.68m to £7.02m. The money comes back down the pyramid on a sliding scale — under £100m in the first season, rising to around £160m a year from year three. There is a £20m emergency fund for EFL clubs facing administration, and a requirement that 20% of the redistributed money goes into infrastructure rather than wages or transfer fees.
The reason the clubs are in a hurry is that the Independent Football Regulator has a “backstop” power: if the two leagues cannot agree, the regulator can impose its own settlement. A negotiated deal is the preferred outcome, which means the vote is less a formality than a deadline.
The irony
So you have the top of the pyramid found guilty of gaming the financial rules, and the same set of clubs voting to rebuild the money that flows down it. These are not unrelated stories. They are the same story, told from two ends. The rules that City is alleged to have broken are the rules that the rest of the league is trying to make work, and the money that was supposed to keep everyone honest is being redistributed while the biggest beneficiary of the old system sits in the dock.
I find it a fairer question than “will City be relegated?” The relegation question is a headline. The plumbing is the actual news. Whether the £1.5bn deal passes, whether the appeal succeeds, whether the fine is a rounding error or a genuine punishment — all of it lands in the same place. English football is about to find out, all at once, whether its financial rules mean anything. I intend to be here for it.
