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Richards ‘devastated’ by Man City guilty verdicts

Author Ahmad Ali Estimated read time 5 min read
Richards 'devastated' by Man City guilty verdicts
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Micah Richards joined Manchester City at 14, made his first-team debut at 17 and was part of the squad that ended a 44-year wait for a league title in May 2012, sealed by Sergio Aguero’s injury-time goal against QPR. This week he read the independent commission’s description of how that era was financed — “sham contracts” — and could not get past it.

“The reports were troubling,” Richards said on The Rest Is Football podcast. “I saw the words which were used by the Premier League in sham contracts and I felt absolutely devastated.”

On Tuesday 29 September, after a case that ran 1,331 days from the February 2023 charges, an independent commission found City guilty of every charge relating to breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules between 2009-10 and 2017-18, and all but one of those relating to a failure to co-operate with the investigation. The club deny wrongdoing and have until Friday 2 October to lodge an appeal. Sanctions will be decided at a separate hearing.

‘I would die for that club’

Richards made 245 appearances for City across a decade from 2005 to 2015, winning the 2011 FA Cup and the 2011-12 title — both inside the period the commission examined. His reaction was not that of a pundit weighing sanctions but of a former academy boy watching his own record get an asterisk.

“I’ve been at that club since I was 14 years old, I would die for that club,” he said. “I achieved my dream at Manchester City, but then to hear these reports, and not only me as an ex-player, but the fans, what they have to go through — absolutely devastated.”

He described a call from the family he lodged with as a teenager: “My digs man, he rang me and he was literally in tears and asking me about information, which I don’t know.” On the findings themselves he was unequivocal, and conflicted: “To have a headline of this nature for a club that I love so much, it’s been difficult. If you listen to the reports, they are damning. I feel saddened, I feel angry, I feel a little bit confused.”

Others were colder. Roy Keane called it “cheating” and said that as a player he would be “100 per cent sticking those medals in the bin”. Jamie Carragher argued the titles should be removed from City’s honours list and said City’s own players “will almost feel like a lot of their career is going to have an asterisk”.

What the commission found

The 40-page document, partly redacted to protect three panel members whose names were withheld, sets out what it labels a Disguised Funding Scheme. Between 2009 and 2018 City declared £949.94m in sponsorship revenue from Abu Dhabi-linked companies. The sponsors themselves paid £119.25m in base fees — 13% of the total. The remaining £830.69m was funded by Abu Dhabi United Group, the club’s ownership vehicle.

  • In 2016-17, just 8% of £140.59m in declared sponsorship income came from the sponsors named on the contracts.
  • In 2017-18, around £11m of £145.73m booked came from genuine sponsor payments.
  • On 25 May 2013, a £9.9m compliance shortfall was plugged with backdated “bonuses for events that already happened”.
  • City spent £1.2bn on transfers from the summer 2009 window to January 2018, winning seven major trophies in the period.

The commission found “continued concealment”, said some witnesses gave evidence they “knew to be untrue”, and rejected City’s claim that the arrangements had Abu Dhabi government approval as an argument constructed “very late in the day”. Premier League chief executive Richard Masters said the club had “systematically broke Premier League rules for nearly a decade” in what he called the most significant case in the competition’s history. City chief executive Ferran Soriano has framed the ruling as resting on “a single false accusation”.

No winners, and no quick ending

The legal ground has shifted since 2020, when the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned UEFA’s two-year European ban and cut the fine from €30m to €10m, largely on time-barred and unproven grounds. Those escape routes have now been closed by a domestic panel applying domestic rules.

No Premier League title has ever been stripped. The live precedents are the points deductions handed to Everton and Nottingham Forest in 2023-24 for spending breaches — orders of magnitude smaller than this case. Juventus lost the 2005 and 2006 Serie A titles over Calciopoli, but that concerned match manipulation, not accounts.

Richards, who will watch City visit Liverpool on 11 October with all of this unresolved, framed the likely course of it bleakly: “There are no winners in this. If Man City do the appeal and they get off, it’s still going to be tarnished. This could be something that goes on for years and years and years.”

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