I have enjoyed watching Manchester City play football. At their best, they have been inventive, disciplined and almost impossible to contain. Whatever happens in the Premier League’s financial case, the players still had to win matches. Money can assemble a squad; it cannot make eleven people play like a team.
Manchester United offer a useful reminder. They have had considerable financial resources without producing anything like City’s sustained league success of the past decade. Coaching, recruitment, organisation and commitment matter. To dismiss City’s football as something simply bought would be unfair to the people who produced it.
Yet admiration for the football cannot settle the question of how the club financed its rise.
In February 2023, the Premier League referred alleged breaches of its rules by Manchester City to an independent commission. The principal allegations concern financial information supplied across nine seasons, from 2009/10 through 2017/18. They include the reporting of sponsorship revenue, operating costs, manager and player remuneration, compliance with UEFA financial rules, and Premier League profitability rules. The League also alleges failures to cooperate with its investigation from December 2018 onward. These are allegations, not findings. City disputes them and says it has evidence supporting its position. In a statement dated 25 September 2026, the club said the process remained ongoing.
What did City win during the nine seasons at the centre of the financial allegations? Three Premier League titles (2011/12, 2013/14 and 2017/18), one FA Cup (2010/11) and three League Cups (2013/14, 2015/16 and 2017/18). They also won the 2012 Community Shield. The 2022/23 Champions League and treble came after that principal period, although the separate cooperation allegations extend into later years. That distinction matters when people call for every City trophy to be taken away.
So what penalty would be just?
First, the commission must establish what happened. The number of alleged breaches is no substitute for findings on each issue. Nor can UEFA’s earlier case answer the Premier League’s questions for it: the Court of Arbitration for Sport found insufficient conclusive evidence for some UEFA conclusions, while many alleged breaches were time-barred under UEFA’s rules. The Premier League case must be judged on its own evidence and rules.
I am unconvinced by the idea of retrospectively stripping titles as the main response. You can remove a name from a record book, but you cannot replay a season. Giving a trophy to the club that finished second would recognise what that club lost, yet it would not restore the matches, opportunities or decisions shaped by the original competition.
The experience of Rangers in Scotland suggests a more meaningful sporting consequence. Following the liquidation of the old company in 2012, Scottish Premier League clubs rejected the new company’s application to join the top division. Scottish Football League clubs then admitted it to the Third Division, the fourth tier. Rangers had to earn their way back through the leagues. It was not a straightforward relegation imposed for a financial rules breach, so it cannot simply be copied and pasted into City’s case. But the sporting principle appeals to me.
The club kept playing. Its supporters still had a team to follow. Its place at the top had to be earned again.
There was also an effect beyond Rangers. Smaller clubs gained fixtures against a famous opponent that many would rarely have expected to host. East Fife, for example, sold out Rangers’ first visit to its Bayview Stadium in 2013 and expected more than double its previous attendance record there. That does not mean every lower-league club would benefit equally, but it shows how such a journey can bring attention and income beyond the club being sanctioned.
If City were found to have gained a serious, sustained competitive advantage through deliberate financial misreporting, I would favour removing them from the Premier League and requiring them to earn promotion back from a lower division under independently verified financial controls. I would prefer that to leaving them in place after a fine they could afford or trying to rewrite nine years of football results.
There is an important practical limit. Premier League rules allow a commission to recommend expulsion, but the Premier League cannot, by itself, assign a club a place in League Two. The English Football League and the relevant football authorities would have to deal with admission and the consequences for other clubs. Any decision must respect their rules and the promotion places other teams have earned. It cannot create a second injustice while trying to remedy the first.
I would also make the conditions for return clear: audited accounts, transparent treatment of related-party revenue, and continuing oversight of the club’s finances. A journey through the divisions would mean little if the same problems could continue along the way.
That is a severe proposal, and it should have a high threshold. If the commission proves only narrower reporting or cooperation breaches, a proportionate fine, points deduction or other sanction may be appropriate. If it proves no breaches, City should face no penalty. The strength of the sanction must follow the strength and seriousness of the findings. Everton and Nottingham Forest have received points deductions for admitted profitability breaches, but those cases do not establish what should happen in City’s wider, disputed case.
There is another uncomfortable question here. Even if every allegation against City were dismissed, would we be satisfied with the structure of the competition?
The Premier League is open to every club in theory. In practice, revenue, worldwide support and commercial reach give established clubs a much greater ability to recruit and retain talent. The “big six” do not occupy the same six places every year, and exceptional challengers do emerge. But they begin most seasons with options unavailable to much of the league. Financial rules tied primarily to a club’s own revenue can protect clubs from reckless losses while also allowing those already rich to spend the most. The League’s new squad cost rules, introduced for 2026/27, limit spending as a proportion of football revenue; a proposed league-wide spending anchor did not gain sufficient support.
I do not want clubs forbidden from succeeding because they are well run, popular or ambitious. I do want a competition in which a smaller club can build something excellent without finding that the ladder has been pulled up above it. That requires honest financial reporting, timely enforcement, sensible limits on spending, and a serious examination of how revenue and opportunity are shared throughout football.
City’s case deserves a fair hearing and a clear decision. City’s players and coaches deserve recognition for the football they produced. Their opponents deserve rules that mean what they say.
If the most serious allegations are proved, I would ask City to do what sport asks of every competitor: accept the consequence, put its affairs in order, and win its way back. That seems more meaningful to me than changing the engraving on trophies already presented.
The question reaches beyond one club: how much of a sporting contest can be decided by financial power before we begin to lose the point of sport itself?
For the sake of disclosure, I am a Leeds United fan, but I look at this issue as a sport professional rather than a member of a parochial fan base.
