Manchester City 115 charges Ended in Guilt. The Internet Has Already Cleared Them.

On 2 November, a Facebook post showed Erling Haaland from behind in a Manchester City shirt, under a red “BREAKING NEWS” banner and the words “MANCHESTER CITY ARE WINNING!!!”. The claim travelling with the picture was that the club had been cleared of the Premier League charges after winning an appeal, that the league was ready to apologise to avoid a defamation suit, and that City were demanding £500 million in damages. By 4 November the original post on X had passed 53,000 views, with 420 likes, 70 comments and 45 reposts, and similar claims were running on Facebook.

Dubawa’s fact-checkers called the claim false, in full. An independent commission found the club guilty of 114 of the 115 charges on 29 September. City have only appealed. No clearance has been granted. No apology has been offered, and no £500 million demand has been confirmed. The appeal process is still running, and since the appeal was lodged there has been no update or statement from the Premier League or from Manchester City.

Of £949.94 million recorded as Abu Dhabi sponsorship income over nine seasons, the sponsors paid £119.25 million. Abu Dhabi United Group paid the other £830.69 million. City signed sponsorship deals with Abu Dhabi companies at fees well above fair market value. The sponsors paid only a fraction, the base sum, and ADUG paid the rest, the tagged sum, which the club booked as commercial revenue. With sham image-rights and pay arrangements added in, the schemes inflated revenue and cut costs by more than £900 million. The commission concluded that “by its conduct the club clearly intended to circumvent the PL Rules”.

In May 2013, an unbudgeted liability of about £20 million opened a hole in the 2012/13 accounts. Less than a week before year end, the club found itself £9.9 million short against UEFA’s rules. In a matter of days, modified sponsorship agreements were generated. They increased fees, added bonuses for events that had already taken place, and funded a US tour. The sponsors had not even been approached. The shortfall was plugged. A similar pattern appears at the end of 2009/10, where agreements backdated sponsorship obligations to earlier in the season, and the scheme let the club avoid breaking the record for the largest single-season loss in Premier League history, then Chelsea’s £140 million.

Evidence given by a number of important factual witnesses called on behalf of the club “was false in a number of key respects”, the commission concluded, and certain of them had given evidence at the hearing that they knew to be untrue, and so had been dishonest. It also recorded that the club made “concerted efforts to stop and frustrate the PL investigation”, and that the club’s own explanation for the payments, that the Abu Dhabi government had subsidised the sponsors, was an explanation the club had concocted well after the event. There was one more allegation the league held back. It had reserved the right to say the club committed “additional and perhaps more egregious acts of non-cooperation” by making inaccurate, dishonest or misleading statements when answering the league’s questions. It never added that allegation to the charges, so the commission made no finding on it.

The commission found “no direct evidence” that one redacted individual was aware of or authorised the scheme, and concluded it was operated without that person’s knowledge, while finding the arrangements known to and approved by identified individuals inside the club. The redactions hide who exactly is exonerated. The figure everyone quotes, 114 of 115, does not appear in the decision at all. The commission refers to “well over 100 individual breaches” and finds every charge proven “bar Charge 4(B)”, the one sub-charge on cooperation that it rejected. The count is the press’s arithmetic. The identity of the person the commission cleared of knowledge is the single most consequential fact the redactions withhold.

City lodged their appeal at 7pm on 1 October, a day before the deadline, saying the decision contains clear material errors of law, principle and fact and is unsafe. Under the league’s standard directions, an appeal hearing of no more than five days should end within 84 days of lodging, by about 24 December. The decision would follow within 30 days, by about 23 January 2027. But Sky Sports reported on 12 October that City may argue those rules do not apply to this case, because they were introduced after the charges were brought. As of 28 October, no members of the Appeal Board had been named, no hearing date had been announced, and no appeal had been heard. The sanction is a separate matter, to be decided at a further hearing before the same commission, and no date has been set for that either. There is no fixed tariff. The commission’s powers run from fines and points deductions to suspension and expulsion.

The titles have not been touched, and the Manchester City 115 charges decision does not address them. Points can in principle be deducted from past seasons, and no English league title has ever been taken away. Nobody has decided anything about the 2012, 2014 or 2018 titles, or about the rest.

In a pub on 11 October, City supporters sang a new chant at the verdict: “WE’RE GOING DOWN TO LEAGUE TWO”, then “WE’RE NOT ARSED, TIL WE’VE BEEN CHARGED”, then “KHALDOON, CITY’S IN LOVE WITH YOU”. The club’s official position is innocence and a relentless appeal. The chant treats relegation as a joke to sing about, which is neither the club’s position nor the league’s. Dave, a City fan who rang talkSPORT on the morning of the verdict, has held a season ticket for 51 years, and he wanted to see the judgment in black and white before he believed any of it. He said that if the club were ultimately proven guilty, he would give up his ticket. The league published the 40-page decision later that day.

One City fan, posting as themancitylad, said the charges had caused “irreversible psychological damage”, that he cannot wear a City shirt in public without being called “cheat” and “criminal”, and demanded $3 billion in compensation from the Premier League, Sky Sports and the journalist David Ornstein. On the other side, a user called malpix23 answered the Premier League’s own post asking for a mind-blowing league statistic with four words: “114 charges no punishment”. At Anfield on 11 October, Liverpool supporters held up a banner reading “A GENERATION OF SUPPORTERS CHEATED”, with another reading “GUILTY 114” and red balloons spelling out 115, while City won 3-0.

Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executive, called the case the most significant in the league’s history and said the league was committed to moving swiftly through the rest of the process to provide certainty for the league, its clubs and fans. Ferran Soriano, City’s chief executive, told staff in a video that the verdict rests on a Premier League conspiracy theory. The chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, said the club’s confidence in proving its innocence was just as strong as when the case began. Gary Neville, speaking after City lost 3-1 at Nottingham Forest on 7 November, their third straight league defeat, said the talk of sanctions and relegation could not be ruled out as a factor in the players’ form. Maresca blamed a lack of intensity. City sit second, on 21 points from ten games, six behind Arsenal.

“114 charges no punishment.” That is the one sentence in the whole argument that both sides’ evidence supports. The club were found guilty. Nothing has followed yet. The commission’s 37 appendices, which hold the detailed reasoning behind the decision, have not been published.