Manchester City’s Financial Breaches Totaled Over £900 Million Over Nine Seasons

After Friday's unofficial reports that Manchester City had been found guilty on almost all of the 115 charges of financial rule breaching, it was only a matter of time before the true breadth of those breaches came to light. It was not surprising, save for maybe the almost perfect batting average of the charges, that City was found guilty, but the details are something to behold. The Premier League released its statement on the situation on Tuesday, and the headline number is eye-grabbing: City was found to have circumvented both the league's and UEFA's spending limits by over £900 million between the 2009-10 and 2017-18 seasons. (The investigation, which started in 2019, does not cover anything more recent than the title-winning 2017-18 season.) Just to establish a reference point about the scale of City's wrongdoing, when Everton was deducted 10 points in late 2023 for a similar style breach of the Premier League's profit and sustainability rules, the Toffees were found to have violated the limits by £19.5 million. A few months after that, Nottingham Forest received a four-point deduction for a violation of £34.5 million. (The difference there had to do with both an inconsistency in the application of the rules and Forest's more willing cooperation with the investigation in comparison to Everton's.) The punishment scale isn't a one-to-one factor, so it's not like City will receive a 461-point deduction, or even a 260-point deduction, but the £900 million number does help one understand the degree of malfeasance City has engaged in since the club was bought by Abu Dhabi United Group. As a refresher, the main charges against City came in the form of juiced up sponsorship revenue, in which the listed sponsors were recorded to have paid a much higher amount of pounds than actually received. The difference between the listed number and the actual number was found to have been paid by Abu Dhabi United Group, helping to increase City's commercial revenue from about £82 million the season before the period of investigation all the way to £500 million by the summer of 2018. The purpose of such a scheme is to circumvent the spending limits the Premier League puts on its teams. Even if a club has access to the kind of unlimited spending power an owner like the Abu Dhabi United Group can provide, it is restricted by rules stipulating that their spending on players and coaches must scale in relation to its revenue. Thus, City gained access to more of its owners' fortune by disguising incoming money as sponsorship revenue.

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