Manchester City’s three-and-a-half-year legal nightmare has finally reached a turning point, and it isn’t the one Etihad Stadium was hoping for.
According to multiple reports that broke late this week, an independent commission has found Manchester City guilty on 114 of the 115 charges the Premier League brought against the club back in February 2023. The story was first broken by David Ornstein of The Athletic, before being picked up and corroborated by Reuters, CNN, and ESPN. As of the time of writing, the Premier League itself has not formally published the ruling, and City has not been handed a sanction, but the scale of the finding is already being described as one of the most consequential moments in the competition’s history.
How We Got Here
To understand why this verdict matters so much, you have to rewind to February 2023, when the Premier League charged Manchester City with breaching its financial rules on 115 separate occasions across a nine-year window stretching from 2009 to 2018. The bulk of the charges, 54 of them, centred on accusations that City failed to provide accurate financial information that gave “a true and fair view” of the club’s financial position, particularly around sponsorship revenue and operating costs. A further batch of charges related to alleged non-cooperation with the league’s investigators between 2018 and 2023.
The case became known, almost inevitably, as English football’s “trial of the century.” City strenuously denied every single allegation, insisting for years that it possessed a “body of irrefutable evidence” that would clear its name once the process ran its course. That process was not quick. The actual hearing, held behind closed doors at London’s International Dispute Resolution Centre, ran for roughly twelve weeks between September and December 2024. Then came the long, tense wait for a written judgment, one that dragged well past the early-2025 timelines some had predicted and stretched all the way into autumn 2026.
The Verdict: 114 Out of 115
Nearly two years after the hearing concluded, word has finally leaked. City has reportedly been found guilty on all but one of the 115 charges, an outcome that, if confirmed in the official published ruling, would represent a near-total defeat for the club in the commission’s eyes. The finding was originally reported by The Athletic and subsequently confirmed by Reuters.
What’s notable is how the news emerged. A source told ESPN that City had actually sought an injunction on the Friday the story broke, in an apparent attempt to block initial reporting of the verdict, a claim the club strongly denied when approached. That alone tells you how high the stakes are being treated behind the scenes.
City’s official response has been carefully worded rather than combative. In a statement, the club did not deny the reported guilty verdicts, saying only that the process “remains ongoing.” The Premier League, for its part, has stayed tight-lipped, telling ESPN it would not comment on what it called a “private and confidential process.”
It’s worth stressing what hasn’t happened yet, because it matters enormously for what comes next: no sanction has been decided, and City is expected to appeal the decision. The full written ruling still needs to be officially released by the Premier League, along with any accompanying sanction, and City’s appeal is expected to follow. In other words, this is a landmark moment in the case, not the final chapter.
What Punishment Could Man City Actually Face?
This is the question every Premier League fan, City supporters included, has been asking for three years, and the honest answer is: nobody outside the commission knows for certain yet. But the range of possible outcomes has been laid out repeatedly by legal experts and reported extensively by outlets like Sky Sports.
Points deduction: This is widely seen as the most likely category of sanction if the guilty finding is confirmed and sanctions follow a similar logic to the cases involving Everton and Nottingham Forest, both of whom lost points for breaching the league’s profit and sustainability rules. Given the scale of City’s case, 114 charges compared to a handful in those other cases, any deduction being discussed in football circles has ranged from significant to potentially season-defining.
Unlimited fine: Unlike the profit-and-sustainability rules that got Everton and Forest docked points, the specific charges against City fall under a different part of the Premier League handbook that in theory allows for an uncapped financial penalty.
Expulsion from the Premier League: Even outright expulsion from the league has been listed among the theoretically available sanctions, according to the Premier League’s own handbook. It’s worth noting that no club has ever suffered this fate in the competition’s history, and most legal analysts consider it a highly unlikely outcome given the practical and financial chaos it would cause.
Other measures: The commission also has scope to order lesser or additional remedies, including ordering the replay of specific matches, demanding compensation, cancelling or refusing player registrations, or ordering City to cover the costs of the proceedings.
Crucially, City retains the right to appeal any ruling, though the case cannot be escalated to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and legal experts have suggested that an appeal alone could take months to resolve, further delaying any actual sanction.
Why This Case Has Gripped English Football
Since Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group completed its takeover of Manchester City in 2008, the club has been transformed from a mid-table also-ran into arguably the most dominant force English football has ever produced: eight Premier League titles, a first Champions League crown in 2023, three FA Cups, six League Cups, and a clutch of other silverware. That astonishing rise is exactly why rival fans, and reportedly some rival executives, have watched this case so closely. Pep Guardiola himself has repeatedly pushed back on the idea that his club is being unfairly targeted, at one point telling reporters that critics wanted City to “disappear off the face of the earth” rather than simply be sanctioned fairly.
Guardiola has, throughout the process, insisted on the basic principle that City is “innocent until proven guilty.” That principle is now being tested in the most public way possible, with a reported guilty finding on 114 separate counts hanging over the club just as a new Premier League season is underway.
For now, the situation remains fluid. The Premier League has not confirmed the reported outcome. City has not denied it, but has also not accepted it, framing the matter as unresolved. No punishment has been announced, and none can be enforced until the commission’s full written judgment is published and any appeal process plays out, a timeline that, going by how long this case has already taken, could easily stretch well into 2027.
What’s certain is that this is no longer a story about accusations and hearings. It’s a story about consequences, and the football world is waiting to find out exactly what those consequences will be.
