Manchester City Punishment Will Be Argued in the Gap Between 60 and Six

Sixty points is the number being shouted at Manchester City, and six is the most any commission has ever actually taken from a club.

The independent commission’s verdict, published on 29 September, found City guilty of 114 of the 115 charges brought against the club, covering nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18. City arranged sham sponsorship contracts to inflate revenue and cut recorded costs by more than £900 million, and the commission found the club clearly intended to circumvent the rules. Some of its witnesses gave evidence at the hearing they knew to be untrue. Of the £949.94 million recorded as Abu Dhabi sponsorship income, the sponsors paid £119.25 million of it. Abu Dhabi United Group paid the other £830.69 million. City deny everything and have appealed.

The punishment has to come from five people. The Premier League’s board, which prosecuted the case, must recommend it, and the same three-person commission that heard 42 days of evidence will decide it. The board has named numbers three times before.

Everton were the first, in 2023. The league’s arithmetic ran to 12 points: six as a starting point, three more for losses £19.6 million over the £105 million limit, one for overspending after repeated warnings, and a further increase for what it called misrepresentation. The commission imposed 10. On appeal the number fell to six, on two legal errors, and every ground of mitigation Everton argued failed. The commission had been wrong to treat Everton as having acted in less than good faith over its stadium debt, which was an innocent mistake, and wrong to ignore the available benchmarks, including the six points Sheffield Wednesday received in 2020.

Forest’s overspend was £34.5 million over a £61 million threshold, and the league asked for eight points before mitigation, on the ground that the breach was 77 percent larger than Everton’s. The league itself discounted that to six for an early plea and exceptional cooperation. The commission started at six, three for the breach and three for its size, and took two off for the plea and the cooperation, leaving four. Cooperation was worth two points. Forest’s best argument was the £47.5 million sale of Brennan Johnson to Tottenham, which would have kept the club compliant had it closed by 30 June 2023 instead of on deadline day two months later. The commission said the decision to sell so late flew in the face of mitigation and rejected it. What it did credit was cooperation, praising Forest’s exceptional cooperation and writing that the four points were imposed not so much to punish Forest as to be fair to the other clubs. Forest appealed and lost.

Leicester’s case was heard in the Championship, where the league sought a 12-point deduction for a £20.8 million overspend. The commission recommended six: a starting point of seven under a recalibrated form of the EFL’s sanctioning guidelines, with no increase for aggravating factors and one point off for a positive trend in the club’s losses. No cooperation was credited. Leicester withheld its accounts. The EFL imposed the six points at once, and Leicester dropped from 17th to 20th.

The league asked for 12, 8 and 12 points, and the final figures were 6, 4 and 6. The cuts were earned, each time, by something specific: a legal error in Everton’s case, an early plea and exceptional cooperation in Forest’s, a positive trend in Leicester’s. City’s case has none of those things to offer. There is no admission. The club calls the verdict unsafe. It says irrefutable evidence supports its innocence. There is no cooperation to credit; the commission found 34 of the 35 non-cooperation charges proven, and found concerted efforts to stop and frustrate the investigation. And there is no positive trend to point to, only a scale the precedents never priced: overspends of £19.5 million, £34.5 million and £20.8 million against more than £900 million disguised over nine seasons. The one precedent that helps City is Everton’s appeal. City’s whole case is an allegation of legal error, the kind that cut Everton’s ten to six.

The board’s own starting figure for Chelsea was a £20 million fine and a transfer ban for two complete registration periods, for £47 million in secret payments to players, unregistered agents and third parties between 2011 and 2018. Chelsea had self-reported the breaches in 2022, admitted them against their own interests and handed over around 200,000 documents. Cooperation halved the fine. The board cut it to £10 million and suspended the ban for two years, and was satisfied that in no scenario would Chelsea have breached the spending limit had the payments been disclosed. The fine is still the highest the league has ever imposed. City were reported by Bloomberg to have held confidential settlement talks with the league before the verdict, and then they fought the case instead.

The five people who must now name the number are the league’s chair Alison Brittain, chief executive Richard Masters, and three independent non-executive directors: Mai Fyfield, Dharmash Mistry and Matthew Ryder. Brittain, the league’s first female chair, describes herself as a lifelong Manchester United fan who stood in the Stretford End before it had seats, and is now also a Brentford supporter. She has said the point of running the league is to keep the competitive balance good. When asked if that was her job, she replied: “Absolutely. That’s my job.” Richard Masters has run the league since 2019. He said the verdict vindicated the league’s decision to pursue the case. Fyfield spent 20 years at Sky and led its bidding for three Premier League television cycles. Mistry chairs the league’s audit and finance committee. Ryder, a senior barrister and part-time judge, chairs its legal advisory group. The same board fined City £1.08 million on Thursday for nine delayed kick-offs last season.

City lodged the appeal at 7pm on 1 October, a day before the deadline, and the rules require the hearing to finish within 12 weeks, by 24 December, with a decision inside 30 days after that. That points to late January. The sanction hearing is separate, before the same commission. No date has been set. The league has not said whether it will go before or after the appeal. It could run alongside the appeal, Sky has reported, though sanctions usually follow it, and both sides could then appeal the sanction too. Meanwhile, executives are pressing the league to investigate the seasons since 2018 as well, and the league faces a dilemma over whether to wait for the current case to conclude first.

On SPORTbible’s post about the likely deduction, Michael Daly wrote: “40-50 points is an absolute joke really for what they’ve been found guilty for. If breaking the rules 113 times only gets you that then the prem are going to be in big trouble. If I was an owner breaching ffp wouldn’t bother me if thats the president they’ve set”. A City supporter on the same post, Jay Mcfc Olly, wrote: “We’d stay up this season if its only 60 points”. Jeremy Cooke, also there, put the question the other way: “The real question is, does the Premier League want to keep any credibility? The answer was always going to be “no, not really”. Will the punishment handed down be likely to determine any other clubs from performing the same offenses? Again, no, not really. The ruthless hammer used to punish teams for a single offense becomes a feckless feather when the offenses number several score.” The anger assumes the board’s ask becomes the sentence. The record says the ask is a ceiling the commission has never reached, and the largest deduction ever imposed is ten. But the fans have a point the record cannot answer: the precedents priced a single breach each, not 114 charges across nine seasons. Luke, a City supporter speaking on The Overlap’s Fan Debate, put the other side of it: “If we get sent down, we’ll be there. If we win the league, we’ll be there. And that’s the best thing about being a football fan.” He added: “I genuinely couldn’t care less.”

BDO has audited Manchester City since 2007. The Financial Reporting Council’s enquiries into those audits are preliminary, and no formal investigation has been announced.