Manchester City spent £1.2bn on players between the summer window of 2009 and January 2018. Across those same nine seasons, an independent commission has now found, £830.69m of the commercial revenue that made such spending permissible was never commercial revenue at all.
The 40-page, partly redacted document published this week sets out the arithmetic with forensic bluntness. City declared £949.94m in sponsorship income from Abu Dhabi-linked companies between 2009-10 and 2017-18. Of that, the commission found, £119.25m represented base fees actually paid by the sponsors. The remaining £830.69m — 87 pence in every pound — was what the panel termed “tagged sums”, funded by Abu Dhabi United Group Investment & Development (ADUG), the vehicle through which Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan owns the club.
Supporters of rival clubs have settled on a shorthand for the period that City’s hierarchy will spend years trying to dislodge: the asterisk era. Seven major trophies were won inside it — three Premier League titles, an FA Cup and three League Cups — and the commission’s findings invite an uncomfortable question about every one of them.
The arithmetic of a disguised decade
What the panel called the “Disguised Funding Scheme” worked, on its findings, by allowing sponsors to pay a fraction of a headline fee while the owner quietly covered the rest. The proportions grew more extreme as the decade wore on:
- In 2016-17, only 8% of £140.59m in recorded sponsorship income came from the sponsors themselves.
- In 2017-18, City booked £145.73m in commercial revenue while roughly £11m arrived from actual sponsors.
- On 25 May 2013, five days before the financial year closed, the club found itself £9.9m short of compliance. The gap was plugged by modifying agreements to include bonuses for events that had already happened.
That last detail matters more than its size. It is the difference between a structural accounting dispute and a deliberate act, and the commission treated it accordingly. The panel found “continued concealment”, described operational “tweaking” designed to reduce regulatory scrutiny, and concluded that some witnesses gave evidence they “knew to be untrue”. City’s central defence — that the Abu Dhabi government approved sponsorship applications through a separate process — was rejected outright as untrue and as having been constructed “very late in the day”.
What £1.2bn bought
The transfer ledger from that window reads like a museum catalogue of the modern Premier League. Carlos Tevez arrived in 2009, David Silva and Yaya Touré in 2010, Sergio Aguero in 2011, Fernandinho in 2013, Kevin De Bruyne in 2015. The 93:20 title of 2012 and the 100-point season of 2017-18 both sit inside the affected period, as does Pep Guardiola’s arrival in 2016.
The commission has made no finding that any signing was itself improper, and it is worth stating plainly: nothing in the document suggests players or managers knew how the club’s revenue lines were constructed. But Premier League spending has never been free-floating. It is bounded by what a club can book as income, and the panel’s conclusion is that City’s bookable income was, for nine years, inflated by an amount comparable to two-thirds of its entire transfer outlay.
The precedent problem
Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executive, said the findings showed City “systematically broke Premier League rules for nearly a decade” and called the case the most significant in the competition’s history. The club said it was “disappointed and surprised”, and chief executive Ferran Soriano has characterised the whole proceeding as resting on “a single false accusation”. City must lodge any appeal by Friday, 2 October — 1,331 days after the charges were brought in February 2023.
Sanction will be decided at a separate hearing, and the commission’s powers are close to unlimited: fines, points deductions across one or several seasons, or expulsion. Everton (docked points twice) and Nottingham Forest in 2023-24 established that deductions are now ordinary tools rather than theoretical ones. What has no English precedent is the sanction the asterisk framing implies. The Premier League has never stripped a title. Serie A has — Juventus lost two after Calciopoli in 2006 — but that ruling concerned the manipulation of matches, not of balance sheets.
There is also the matter of how this case has gone before. In 2020, the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned a two-year UEFA ban on City and cut the fine from €30m to €10m, finding much of the alleged conduct either unproven or time-barred. That outcome is precisely why Tuesday’s document lands so heavily: the evidential ground City won on six years ago has now been taken.
What comes next
The realistic range of outcomes is narrower than the louder demands suggest. Retrospective title-stripping is legally treacherous, invites litigation from a club with the deepest legal resources in the game, and would require the league to rewrite competitions whose participants and prize money were settled a decade ago. A very large fine combined with a points deduction applied to the present season is the more probable shape.
Which leaves the asterisk as something the Premier League will not formally award and cannot practically prevent. City’s trophies are unlikely to leave the Etihad cabinet. The nine years that produced them now carry a published, evidenced account of how the money was made to appear — and no appeal, whatever it achieves on sanction, will unpublish it.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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