How drawn-out saga of Manchester City’s alleged cheating came to this (David Conn, 26 Sep 2026, The Guardian)
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”. […]
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.
It is the systemic nature of the violations that makes them so punishment-worthy.