The damage of the Manchester City verdict runs deep. An era of Premier League history is tainted (Oliver Kay, Sept. 26, 2026, The Athletic)
This is what the Premier League has been up against since City’s reputation was shaken by a series of stories published by Germany magazine Der Spiegel in November 2018, where hacked emails indicated that the club had run a concerted and sustained campaign to circumvent financial regulations (an allegation that City have consistently and vehemently denied).At various points over the past eight years, various people in the football industry have speculated about what a positive outcome for the Premier League might look like. The conclusion? There wasn’t one. Find City guilty on multiple counts? It would tell us that the league had allowed its rules to be flaunted for years, raising serious questions about the competition’s integrity over the period in question and its ability to regulate its clubs in future. The league’s brand, as well as that of its dominant club over the past decade, would be damaged.
But allow City to get off lightly, either with the charges not proven or with a lenient sanction? The league would risk anarchy, the rulebook found to be meaningless, and rival clubs would be furious. Nobody wants a league table pockmarked by asterisks and points deductions, but there is, as the Premier League’s frequently embattled chief executive Richard Masters told Sky Sports News in 2024, “no happy alternative to enforcing the rules”.
Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executiveCarl Recine/Getty Images
Win or lose, the reputational risk to the league threatened to be enormous. In recent months, it has already found Chelsea guilty of breaches of financial regulations relating to payments to agents and unregistered third parties between 2009 and 2022. To put it in context, an entire period of Premier League history — featuring multiple league titles for both City and Chelsea — has been tainted and compromised.