We’ve waited three and a half years for one word out of the Manchester City financial case, and we finally have it: guilty on 114 of the 115 charges. It turns out to be the least interesting part of the story. The Premier League’s independent commission has told us what happened. It has told us nothing about what comes next, and that gap is where this whole thing actually lives.
David Ornstein of The Athletic had the news first, and City’s own response tells you more than his reporting does. The club didn’t deny anything. It said it had “diligently respected due process,” maintained its innocence “throughout the process,” and flagged unspecified “significant elements to be completed” that remain under “strict confidentiality” — language that reads like a settlement in progress, not a defense. Ornstein posted the finding directly:
https://x.com/David_Ornstein/status/2103480016915009611
Sanctions undecided, process ongoing. That’s his framing, not the league’s official statement, and it captures exactly where this stands nine seasons after the alleged breaches started.
Nine seasons is the number that matters here more than 114. The charges cover 2009-10 through 2017-18, meaning the ESPN reporting on the verdict describes a breach period nearly a decade long, not the tidy single-season violations the league has punished before. The Premier League’s handbook lists four possible sanctions for a breach at this scale: an unlimited fine, a points deduction, a transfer ban, or outright expulsion from the league. Ian Hargreaves, a sports law specialist, told Al Jazeera that a transfer ban sits toward the moderate end of that range, and expulsion sits at the extreme end. He called expulsion extremely unlikely. (The Premier League has never removed a top-flight club over financial misconduct, and City’s broadcast revenue alone makes that scenario closer to fantasy than actual policy.)
The timeline alone tells you how contested this is. The Premier League filed the charges in February 2023. The independent commission held its hearing from September through December 2024. The guilty finding didn’t go public until now, nearly two years after testimony wrapped, which means either the panel took nine seasons of accounting as seriously as the scope demanded, or that even trained adjudicators needed that long to sort through it. Probably both.
Precedent points somewhere well short of expulsion, too. Everton were docked points twice in the 2023-24 season for financial-rules breaches, a net six to eight points across two separate rulings, and Nottingham Forest lost four points that same year for a comparable violation. Both of those cases covered three-year windows. City’s covers nine. Kieran Maguire, a football finance expert, told SI.com that the scale changes the math entirely: “The accusations against Manchester City cover a nine-year period, so it is far bigger… somewhere between a 40 and 60-point deduction would be… consistent with what we’ve seen with other decisions.” Forty to sixty points would be enough on its own to drop a title contender into a relegation fight most seasons.
The scarier hypothetical, for City fans, is retroactive punishment: stripping trophies the club already has on the shelf. Since 2008, City has collected eight Premier League titles, a Champions League, and a trophy case stuffed with FA Cups and League Cups besides, most of it built under Pep Guardiola, who ran the touchline for the back half of the charge period before stepping down this past summer. (He’s now a Global Ambassador for City Football Group; Enzo Maresca has the job.) Most of the 114 guilty counts predate his 2016 arrival, which is worth sitting with before anyone pins nine years of alleged rule-breaking on the manager who happened to be there when the trophies piled up. James Hill, a legal director at sports regulatory firm Onside Law, told The Athletic (via SI.com) that he’d expect any points deduction to apply going forward rather than backward. Panels tend not to reach into the past and pull a trophy off a shelf.
There’s a bitter irony sitting underneath all of this. The financial framework City is accused of violating doesn’t exist anymore. Premier League clubs voted in November 2025 to scrap the old Profit and Sustainability Rules for a new Squad Cost Ratio system starting this season, capping squad spending at a share of revenue instead of auditing three years of rolling losses. Swipe covered the financial rules that already replaced the ones in this case when Newcastle ran into the old PSR ceiling. City is being tried under a rulebook the league already decided didn’t work.
None of this touches the product on the pitch, at least not yet. Erling Haaland is still City’s frontline scorer. Rodri, who anchored the midfield through the trophy-laden stretch this case covers, left for Barcelona this summer. The team keeps playing games that count toward a table the league might eventually have to go back and adjust, which is a strange way to run a league, but here we are. Fans of every club City has beaten to a trophy over the past decade have a legitimate interest in how this resolves, and so does every rival executive deciding how aggressively to spend under the new rules. Nobody in this sport gets to plan around a sanction that hasn’t been written yet.
What I think actually happens, separate from what the league has officially decided (nothing, not yet): a fine gets treated as a footnote, and a points deduction lands somewhere in the range Maguire described, applied to a City side well removed from its treble-winning peak rather than retroactively to a banner year. City appeals no matter what number lands, because the incentive to fight is identical at 20 points and 60. Title-stripping stays a talking point in comment sections and nowhere else. Panels that have to live with the consequences of their own rulings tend to reach for the punishment that changes the future, not the one that tries to rewrite a past nobody can actually undo.
Watch the sanctions hearing, not the appeal headlines. City will contest the guilty finding no matter what number eventually gets attached to nine seasons of alleged rule-breaking, and that fight alone could run longer than the case already has. Whatever figure the commission lands on becomes the template every future financial case gets measured against, for City or anyone else who tries this again. For more, see the rest of our Premier League coverage.
