Man City found guilty of financial 'sham': Club cooked their books by £900m & now could be RELEGATED

Manchester City cooked the books to the tune of £900m in a nine-year period peppered with ‘sham’ deals during which they became the major force in English football, a commission has found.

In a damning 40-page verdict City, who won eight trophies during the spell involved, artificially inflated sponsorship agreements and pumped money into the club from its Abu Dhabi owners via disguised payments in a bid to swerve Premier League spending rules.

The eight-times champions were found guilty of ‘all charges related to serious breaches’ of the regulations and the majority of those in relation to its failure to co-operate with the competition’s probe.

City witnesses were also accused of lying in front of the three-person panel, in an explosive verdict that will further send shockwaves through football after news of the club’s guilt first leaked on Friday.

All punishments, including expulsion, transfer bans and points deductions are open to the Premier League and a sanction hearing will take place in due course.

However, City quickly confirmed that it would be launching an appeal ahead of Friday’s deadline and - amid extraordinary scenes - accused the Premier League of creating a ‘conspiracy theory’.

A fiery club statement branded the verdict ‘opinion’ and tellingly labelled the independent panel a ‘Premier League commission’. In a video sent to 1,000 staff and seen by Daily Mail Sport, infuriated chief executive Ferran Soriano said the allegations were ‘just not true’ and repeated the claim that they had provided ‘irrefutable evidence’.

‘Very soon we will look back at this as another time in our history when we dealt with adversity and overcame it together,’ he added.

The bombshell statement was released late yesterday afternoon. In it, the Premier League said the panel found City arranged ‘sham contracts (which misrepresented the true agreement between the parties) with a number of its commercial partners, as well as relying on ‘sham’ agreements with others, to artificially inflate the club’s revenues and reduce its costs’.

It added that the panel, whose hearing concluded in December 2024, had found that the club had falsely altered the financial picture at the Etihad to the tune of £900m.

The Premier League said that City was actually ‘significantly in breach of both the Premier League’s and UEFA’s spending limits’ during the time period in question - 2009-2018 - when it won eight major trophies.

Deals with a number of sponsors were part of ‘a disguised funding scheme, whereby those companies were only required to pay a portion of the relevant sponsorship fees’, the statement added, saying that ‘the remainder was funded by Abu Dhabi United Group Investment & Development Ltd (ADUG), which owned the club’.

The panel also found further ‘sham’ arrangements, funded by ADUG, which allowed City to record lower operating expenses that it incurred, along with a ‘”sham” circular arrangement with Fordham, an entity that purchased the club’s players’ image rights, that was funded by ADUG’.

The result was that the club had ‘filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from its auditors and football regulators’.

Had City reported accurately ‘it would have been in breach of both the League’s and UEFA’s spending limits by a very substantial amount’.

The panel also found that City committed multiple breaches of its duties of co-operation and good faith in that it failed to assist the Premier League’s four-year investigation, triggered by the emergence of club emails obtained by a hacker. Indeed, City had ‘made concerted efforts to stop and frustrate the Premier League investigation’.

The report noted that issues ‘were fiercely contested between the parties’. It added that proceedings lasted for 42 days and acknowledged that it had ‘taken us much longer than we would have wished’ to reach a conclusion, which ‘was regrettable’. Transcripts of evidence given ran to more than 7,000 pages.

The lop-sided verdict also rounded on ‘a number of important factual witnesses’ who gave evidence on behalf of the club, saying such evidence was ‘false’ and stating that some gave evidence ‘they knew to be untrue and so had been dishonest’.

From 2009 to 2018 it found City claimed commercial income of £949.94m when only £119.25m had come from sponsors – which was the figure which should have appeared in the accounts.

The statement added that City’s core defence was ‘untrue’, describing it as an explanation ‘concocted well after the event in an attempt to obscure and conceal the realities of the Disguised Funding Scheme’.

Richard Masters, Premier League chief executive, said the competition had been ‘vindicated’ and that the club had ‘systematically broken Premier League rules for nearly a decade’.

‘It is a key responsibility of the Premier League to ensure that the Rules, approved by the clubs themselves, are upheld to protect the integrity of the competition,’ he said. ‘It is paramount that the League remains competitive and fair for all clubs and for the fans. We take that role extremely seriously.

‘This disciplinary case, and this decision, are the most significant in Premier League history. There are elements of the case that remain to be decided, including, importantly, what sanction must follow for these breaches. Now we have the Commission’s decision, we are committed to moving swiftly through the remainder of the process, to provide certainty for the League, our clubs and fans.’

Premier League rules state that after City lodges its appeal the chair of the panel should appoint a three-person appeal board ‘as soon as reasonably practicable’. Any objections to the subsequent appointments should then be lodged within two working days. The whole process should be concluded within 12 weeks. Whether that will be the case remains to be seen. It is unclear whether a sanction will be handed down before an appeal takes place.

In a statement released shortly after the Premier League, City said it was ‘both disappointed and surprised by the opinion of the Premier League Commission’.

It added: ‘The club is innocent of the accusations made by the Premier League and a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence exists in support of all of its positions, relating to this case. The club will therefore be relentless, and where necessary proactive, in any and all appropriate regulatory and legal forums.

‘The Premier League process remains ongoing, with significant elements uncompleted. Manchester City will now pursue the appeal avenues open to it, on the basis that the opinion contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe.’

Soriano added: ‘The whole Premier League case against us is based on a single false accusation – that the owner’s personal money was somehow and secretly put into the club via some sponsors from Abu Dhabi. This is just not true. Irrefutable evidence has been provided that shows it could not happen and that it did not happen. This includes bank statements, money transfers, witnesses and everything necessary to categorically demonstrate the money did not come from the owner.

‘Surprisingly for us and our lawyers after nearly two years the Premier League’s commission has issued an opinion that supports the Premier League’s conspiracy theory.’