Sheikh Mansour’s club held responsible for 114 charges out of 115 in an investigation born from the revelations of Der Spiegel. The case embarrasses English football and beyond.
Having metabolised the farewell to Pep Guardiola after ten years, the start of the new Maresca era, Manchester City now finds itself facing the most difficult battle in its recent history. A war that risks canceling some of the titles won in recent years or weighing down the future with the ballast of a penalty and which, whatever happens, casts sinister clouds over the reputation of the club owned since 2008 by Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United group.
Second The AthleticManchester City would have been found guilty of 114 of the 115 violations of which they were accused in a trial that lasted years and was grafted onto the investigation that arose after the revelations of the German newspaper Der Spiegel which in November 2018 had published confidential financial documents of City, triggering a real storm. The heart of the accusation was the lack of clarity in the information provided to the Premier League regarding payments to players and coaches, violations of UEFA’s financial fair play rules and those that regulated the English championship in a period extending from 2009 to 2018.
Accusations always rejected by Manchester City, ended up in a Premier League investigation closed in 2023 after four years of work and have now, according to rumours, resulted in an almost total guilty verdict. No sanction has yet been established and City has the possibility of appealing before reaching the conclusion of the trial which, however, puts the history of that decade of Sheikh Mansour’s club at great risk.
Premier League rules provide a wide range of sanctions for breaches of financial rules. They range from reprimand to expulsion from the league with the options of fines or penalties in between. Also retroactive and which could affect the palmares of Manchester City which in the period covered by the investigation won the Premier League three times (2012, 2014 and 2018), the FA Cup twice (2011 and 2019), the League Cup four times (2014, 2016, 2018 and 2019) and the Community Shield twice (2012 and 2018).
The mass of violations reported to Citiziens, 114 out of 115 in the investigation, can hardly be resolved with a slap. There are no precedents in English football and City have shown in recent years that they are ready to take any path to avoid serious consequences of the affair. In 2020, UEFA had imposed a two-season ban on Manchester City with a fine of 30 million euros, verdicts overturned by the Tas of Lausanne because the violations revealed by Der Spiegel were found not to be fully proven or, in any case, prescribed. City had in any case been fined £8.8 million for failure to cooperate with the UEFA investigative panel.
Now the step forward within English football where City’s situation has been the subject of periodic pressure in recent years to reach the end of the investigation and the pronouncement of a verdict.
