Manchester City have been found guilty on all but one of the Premier League’s 115 alleged financial-rule breaches. The club deny wrongdoing, insisting the process remains ongoing and are expected to appeal the ruling. No sanctions have been announced yet, if the reported verdict is upheld, English football faces a test that reaches far beyond one club, one ownership model or one glittering era of success.
This is the point at which the Premier League must decide whether its rules exist to protect competitive integrity or merely window dressing.
For several years, City’s case has hung over English football, delayed by legal complexities, procedural arguments and the formidable resources available to a club whose transformation has remade the domestic game. The original allegations covered seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18 and concerned, among other matters, the accuracy of financial information, the disclosure of player and managerial payments and the club’s co-operation with the league’s investigation.
It is important to state clearly what remains unresolved. The reports are not the final legal word. City are entitled to appeal. The full reasoning of the commission has not been published. The Premier League has not formally confirmed the precise outcome or revealed the sanctions under consideration. But if the finding that City were guilty of 114 charges survives the process, there can be no credible argument for a punishment that amounts to a manageable administrative inconvenience. A fine would be a major cop out from the English Premier League.
It must be a punishment designed for a club that doesn’t fear the loss of money, one whose financial strength bought its domination of the Premier League and establish itself among Europe’s most powerful institutions. For Manchester City, as for the modern superclubs who shape football’s economy, a large fine can be absorbed, accounted for and ultimately outweighed by the value of trophies, Champions League income, commercial growth and global prestige.
The question is not whether City’s players were brilliant. They were. The question is not whether Pep Guardiola built one of the finest teams English football has seen. He did. The question is whether the financial foundations upon which that success was built were honestly presented to the league and whether City were able to compete under conditions unavailable to their rivals.
That distinction matters because financial regulation is sporting regulation. It is not an abstract exercise in accountancy, nor a minor administrative concern to be left to lawyers and auditors. A club’s financial position dictates the players it can recruit, the wages it can pay, the losses it can survive and the risks it can take. It determines whether a club can assemble two elite teams, retain expensive talent through leaner seasons and recover from transfer mistakes that might drag a less wealthy rival into crisis.
If a club gains access to financial capacity that is concealed, inaccurately reported or improperly funded, the consequences are not confined to a spreadsheet. They are felt in league tables, title races, cup finals and European qualification places. They are felt by clubs who finish one position lower, miss out on Champions League revenue, get relegated from the top division, or lose their best player to a rival able to offer wages that are unavailable within the rules.
The Premier League has spent years selling itself as the best and most competitive league in the world. It cannot now pretend that the integrity of that competition is unaffected by prolonged and serious financial breaches, should the reported findings be upheld. A points deduction, potentially a substantial one, would be the minimum starting point for a meaningful punishment. In the most serious circumstances, football authorities must be willing to consider sanctions that affect a club’s place in the division, its ability to trade and the honours attached to the period under scrutiny.
Anything less would establish an ugly principle - that a sufficiently wealthy club can turn sporting regulation into a risk calculation. Spend heavily, win extensively, deny everything, litigate for years and, if the worst happens, pay a fine that makes no meaningful difference to the project.
Scottish football knows what it looks like when the authorities refuse to confront that problem.
The Rangers EBT case remains one of the most corrosive episodes in the modern history of the Scottish game, not simply because of the use of Employee Benefit Trusts but because of the lack of an adequate response from the football authorities once the full significance of their cheating became clear.
Between 2001 and 2010, more than £47m was paid to Rangers players, managers and directors through EBT arrangements. The Supreme Court eventually ruled in favour of HMRC, finding that payments made into the trusts were taxable earnings. The implication was clear, this was not simply an eccentric method of remunerating employees orchestrated by a lawyer-turned-pornstar at the behest of David Murray, but a system through which substantial payments avoided tax that should have applied to ordinary earnings.
Rangers supporters and their loyalists in the Scottish mainstream media have long argued that it is impossible to prove exactly which player would not have signed, exactly which trophy would not have been won, or precisely how each pound saved through the scheme altered an individual match result. That is true, in the narrowest sense. Football cannot be replayed in an alternative history. But that is also beside the point.
No one needs to demonstrate that a particular goal in a particular match was scored because of an EBT. The relevant question is whether Rangers possessed a financial advantage that helped them pay, recruit and retain footballers on terms they may not otherwise have been able to sustain. A club that can offer a player a greater net return, reduce the tax burden attached to remuneration and preserve more cash for wages and transfers is operating with a competitive advantage over rivals who meet their obligations in full - before a ball is even kicked in anger. That advantage does not have to explain every trophy to be real. It only has to alter the financial environment in which competition took place.
Over the EBT years Rangers won league titles and cups, competed in Europe and secured the income that accompanies continental qualification. That European revenue did not exist in isolation. It helped support the broader football operation, strengthened the club’s commercial standing and fed a cycle in which financial strength could deliver sporting success, which then generated further income and further capacity to compete.
The Scottish authorities failed to deal with Rangers’ cheating and in turn the clubs refused to take action against the Ibrox side or the football authorities for what they lost during those years be it European qualification, relegation, title losses or cup final defeats.
The SPL commission chaired by Lord Nimmo Smith found that Rangers had not properly disclosed side letters related to EBT payments. Yet the punishment imposed was a pitiful £250,000 fine on Rangers, while the commission concluded there had been no unfair competitive advantage and declined to strip titles - a decision that was made before the Supreme Court ruling that found Rangers culpable.
That conclusion was always difficult to reconcile with the practical economics of football. It placed considerable emphasis on whether players had been properly registered and whether the payments themselves made them ineligible. But eligibility is not the only measure of sporting integrity. A player may be eligible to play while the club employing him benefits from a wage structure that has been distorted by undeclared or improperly arranged payments.
The commission’s findings, as mentioned, came before the legal position was concluded. Rangers had initially succeeded at the First-tier Tribunal, but the Court of Session later ruled in HMRC’s favour and the Supreme Court upheld that decision in 2017. By then, the opportunity for Scottish football to make a strong and principled sporting intervention had disappeared. There was no appetite from the football authorities to punish one of Scottish football’s top clubs for fear of damaging their own commercial interests and further angering a rabid fan base that was already targeting rival clubs, blaming everyone but themselves for their club’s demise.
The Scottish football authorities subsequently said no further disciplinary proceedings would be taken after receiving legal advice that the issue could not be reopened. Rangers would not lose titles or trophies. The punishment remained the fine imposed.
There was a clear institutional failure when dealing with Rangers. Scottish football allowed the case to become trapped in the gap between corporate law, tax law and sporting authority. Rangers entered administration in February 2012 amid a cash crisis in the face of the big tax case, and the club was liquidated later that year. The club was reformed under new ownership, while escaping responsibility for the earlier conduct was gone thanks top the impotence of the SPL, the Scottish FA, and their rival football clubs themselves. In fact, Scottish football fans had to take a stand to force their own clubs to block the new Rangers club from being parachuted into the top division and the-then First Division as the SPL, the SFL, and Scottish FA tried to bully clubs into doing what they were told.
The trophies remained in place. The sporting consequences were avoided. The club’s history was bought by Charles Green and Sevco Scotland, while the club that had operated the EBT arrangements under David Murray disappeared into liquidation. Murray himself escaped censure.
Scottish football’s regulators may have believed they were constrained by rules and legal advice, but the outcome left a legacy of grievance and a bitterness that has endured because it treated the protection of Rangers as more important than the protection of sporting fairness and integrity.
The Premier League should look at that history and understand the damage caused by an inadequate response.
Manchester City’s case is not Rangers’ case. The legal frameworks are different, the allegations are different and the financial scale of English football is vastly greater. Yet the underlying issue is the same. When the rules that govern a competition are allegedly breached over a prolonged period, and when those breaches may have affected a club’s ability to spend, recruit and win, the response cannot be detached from football’s actual competitive outcomes.
The Premier League must not hide behind the language of complexity or allow the sheer size of Manchester City to turn enforcement into theatre. The club deserve due process and the right to challenge any verdict. But due process is not a shield against consequences. It is the route by which consequences gain legitimacy.
If the reported findings are confirmed, City must face a sanction that demonstrates financial rules are not optional for the richest clubs. English football cannot ask supporters to believe in fair competition while allowing its most powerful institutions to treat accountability as just another legal problem to be managed. The Premier League clubs during the years under scrutiny have every right to take City through the courts themselves for the damages they sustained whether it was relegation to the Championship, failure to qualify for Europe, and even the loss of a title or trophy.
The lesson from Rangers is that delay, timidity and excuses do not make a scandal disappear. They merely ensure that it becomes part of the sport’s permanent argument about who was protected, who paid the price, and whether the rules actually matter when it involves one of the country’s top clubs.