The Case
Last week, prior to the full report being released, I wrote about the need to dish out appropriate punishment to Manchester City for their many, many guilty verdicts, arguing their punishment must necessarily include but not be limited to expulsion from the Premier League and English Football League.
This week, following the release of that full report, I got to put on my oh, I guess I do actually have a law degree hat and picked through the full 40-page document put out by the Disciplinary Commission.
A few caveats:
- The report did not include the Appendices (where it seems a lot of additional evidence was laid out).
- The report has a ton of redacted names, organizations, and etc. which limits our ability to draw complete conclusions about at least parts of it.
- And finally, my law degree is in environmental law. Still, there are worse things I could be doing with an environmental law degree, like being an anti-vaxx nut job whostraps rotting, dead whale heads to the roof of his car for fun and is currently running the US Department of Health and Human Services. Just for an entirely non-specific example.
To cut a long story short, my opinion has not changed after reading through the report. In fact, after seeing it all in black and white, I might’ve not gone far enough regarding what would be fair and appropriate punishment for flagrantly and systematically breaking Premier League rules in order to not just win, but to manufacture an era of dominance approaching Liverpool or Manchester United’s best-ever historical spells.
Manufacture being the operative word here, because the so-called City Era was not built from decades of institutional knowledge and an organically grown, devoted local and international fanbase and fan culture—and with it any real lucrative and sustainable commercial appeal—but from overwhelming the Premier League and Champions League with seemingly unending and limitless financial doping over at least 9 seasons.
Because that is what the report explicitly sets out that they did. So to better understand exactly what City are charged with, as laid out in the Disciplinary Commission’s introduction:
The Club was charged with well over 100 individual breaches of the PL Rules across the course of many seasons.
…The Club denied each of the Charges…
…The Serious wrongdoing alleged by the PL against the Club by each Charge required strong, cogent evidence to prove that individual Charge. As set out below and in the Appendices to this document, with the exception of Charge 4(B) we were satisfied to the requisite standard that there was such evidence.
Well over 100 individual breaches. Although it has been widely reported to be 115, some reports put that number as high as 130. The BBC broke down the charges thusly:
- 54 charges: Failure to provide accurate financial information from 2009/10 to 2017/18
- 14 charges: Failure to provide accurate details for player and manager payments from 2009/10 to 2017/18
- 5 charges: Failure to comply with UEFA’s rules including Financial Fair Play (FFP) from 2013/14 to 2017/18.
- 7 charges: Breaching Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) from 2015/16 to 2017/18.
- 35 charges: Failure to coopoerate with Premier League investigations from December 2018 to February 2024.
The report broadly categorizes the well over 100 individual breaches into four charges, with Charge 1 and Charge 4 each broken down into further 4 sub-charges. Regardless of how you want to classify or number them, it is clear that City broke a fuck ton of rules. According to the Disciplinary Commission. And to the surprise of no one who was paying the slightest attention.
Moreover, after reading the report I am not at all convinced these charges are the full extent of Manchester City’s malfeasance. I do not want to put on a tinfoil hat while waving my arms at a corkboard, replete with pinned red yarn connecting hastily pinned photos of Pep Guardiola’s bald head, but when City have been proven guilty of a vast conspiracy to dominate the league, it’s difficult not to start searching the drawers for more tinfoil, red yarn, and push pins.
In part this is because it has been confirmed that City were actually ramping up the scale of their cheating from 2009/10 to 2017/18, even as they were becoming an actual commercial and footballing behemoth thanks to those early bought results. Given that trajectory and the cut-off date for what the current investigation considered, it is not unreasonable to think that there is a great deal beyond that cut-off date that we do not—and likely never will—fully know.
However, there is a great deal that we do know, and that alone is extremely damning. This is what we know for sure.
The Evidence
In the immediate aftermath of the decision, even before the Premier League publicly released the report, Manchester City was already on the attack, going after the entire process and attempting to muddy the waters in the court of public opinion. That seems likely to save them in an actual court (or rather the appeal hearings).
The Disciplinary Committee went out of their way to highlight the sheer weight of evidence they had at their disposal, perhaps anticipating the public interest and preemptively answering some questions from any skeptical voices:
No stone was left unturned.
…The PL set out its case in a Statement of Charges…and a Statement of Facts. Together those documents (which ran to approximately 500 pages) set out:
a) The 100+ breaches of the PL Rules alleged by the PL to have been committed by the Club, and
b) The facts and matters on which the PL relied to support the Charges…the Statement of Charges recorded that the PL regarded the Club’s conduct as having involved ‘extremely serious, significant, sustained and intentional or reckless breaches of rules critical to the proper and fair operation of the PL’s league competition.‘
And to reiterate this point later in the document:
The proceedings generated an enormous volume of documents and other evidence. By way of illustration: b)…In total the witness statements relied on by the parties ran to well over 700 pages…
d)…By the end of the hearing the index to the hearing bundle ran to more than 750 pages. The Core Bundle of key documents ran to many tens of thousands of pages…
…Transcripts [of the hearing] ran to approximately 7,000 pages.
As for City’s direct response to each of the 100+ breaches, the report stated:
The Club denied each of the Charges in full. Over the course of more than 200 pages the Club’s Answer set out the numerous individual bases underlying each of its denials. The Club’s Answer was also supplemented by Further Information.
In the immediate aftermath of the news breaking, City released an official statement that they had “a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” of their innocence. It is a bit hard to square that circle when the report cites tens of thousands of pages worth of evidence. City had their chance to present irrefutable evidence, and nowhere in the millions of documents searched (see below), nor in the tens of thousands of pages presented, did they proffer such evidence. Indeed, quite the opposite!
As a point of fact, while 200 pages seems like a thorough defense, it pales in comparison to the tens of thousands of pages presented as evidence. It also averages to less than 2 pages of defense per rules breach, which is also pretty damning. It is the legal equivalent of a child’s “nuh-uh” defense. If my daughters accused me of eating the last of the Coco Pops, I could write far more than a 2-page defense to highlight their lack of empiracle evidence or witnesses, attack their character for this biased witch hunt, and raise doubts about their circumstancial evidence. How do I know that they didn’t sneak a midnight snack after I went to bed? And has anyone ascertained the wherabouts of the dog on the night in question? There’s simply no way of knowing. Nuh-uh.
City’s defense, to put it another way, was weak sauce, especially when paying very expensive lawyers by the hour.
It was definitely not “a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence.”
It frankly beggars belief that they would have just sat on irrefutable evidence throughout the hearings, only to present it upon appeal after being found guilty AF. I know that if I were ever accused of anything more serious than eating the last of the Coco Pops, I would probably lead with my best defense and not wait for the guilty verdict to be handed down. But your mileage may vary.
To briefly circle back to the preamble, the Premier League required a high bar in order to prove City’s guilt on each individual charge. Once again, as they put it, “each Charge required strong, cogent evidence to prove that individual Charge.” As such, City did not even have to present irrefutable evidence of their innocence, but merely create enough reasonable doubt to maintain their presumed innocence. They simply could not. And not for a lack of trying!
Moreover, and even more damning, these charges came from the documents the Premier League were actually able to get their hands on. It is clear from the breaches related to a failure to cooperate with the investigation that City made it very difficult (and not unreasonable to assume in some cases, impossible) to know the full extent of their crimes.
There is also an interesting passage that hints there is actually a lot more out there that the Disciplinary Commission did not have access to:
We were told that the process of disclosure resulted in many millions of documents being searched. That exercise led to a vast number of documents being disclosed. The lion’s share of the burden of that search and exercise fell on the Club.
While it seems that the Premier League were able to gain direct access to some of the documents, the “lion’s share” were searched and disclosed by City themselves (after being unable to obstruct and delay any further, it seems). This is all to say, that it seems as if City had the ability to present themselves in the best possible light, and still couldn’t produce the evidence necessary to avoid being guilty on nearly every single breach.
The Disciplinary Commission also laments missing witnesses and missing documents, concluding that:
Despite the vast number of documents that were available, and the extensive factual evidence that was given by the witnesses who did appear at the hearing, the evidential picture available to us was therefore not as complete as it might have been.
Regardless of the incomplete picture, and the high bar in order to prove their guilt on each charge, the Disciplinary Commission still found City guilty on nearly every single charge.
The Cheating
The report takes its time by first establishing the background of City’s history, prior to being bought out by Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG). Ten years before the new ownership, they spent a season in the third division before working their way back up to the Premier League in 2001/2002. Between 2001-2008, City finished between 8th and 15th. They were at best a mid-table club, and at worst in a relegation fight.
Then the money came.
And with it, the cheating.
The Club recognised that funding ambitions solely via the provision of was not a sustainable model. The Club needed to grow its commercial operations and increase – very substantially – its commercial revenues. At the time of ADUG’s acquisition the Club’s commercial revenue was a fraction of the revenue being generated by the top clubs in the PL and more widely.
…While the Club’s commercial revenue increased during 2009, by Q3/Q4 2009 the contemporaneous documents show that the Club
a) Had not been able to generate the levels of commercial revenue for which it had budgeted. ‘Doing deals’ (both generally and with AD Sponsors in particular) had proved more challenging than the Club had anticipated
b) Was anticipating that it would suffer very significant losses in the 2009/10 financial year and in future financial years
c) Recognised that the only way to fund its planned levels of expenditure in the coming months and years would be by ADUG continuing to provide very significant sums by way of equity contribution.
According to the report, City’s ownership almost immediately saw both short and long-term concerns with their financial position, especially due to their inability to raise funds through legitimate commercial partnerships, or “do deals,” that would allow them to compete at the top end of the Premier League. They were facing an immediate budget shortfall, which would’ve exceeded Chelsea’s record single-season financial loss of £140 million. Longer term, they were aware of the FFP rules that UEFA was going to be implementing, and how they would certainly run afoul of those rules with the heavy losses for which they were planning.
So, what did City’s ownership group do? The devised and implemented what the Disciplinary Commission called “The Disguised Funding Scheme.” This would become the largest—though not only!—source of illegal funding for the club.
The plan was simple. Abu Dhabi based sponsors would agree to pay a base sponsorship fee, and ADUG would pay a “Tagged Sum,” i.e. the difference between what the sponsors actually paid, and what was externally reported as commercial revenue.
By adopting the Disguised Funding Scheme the Club would thus be able
a) To give the misleading impression to third parties (including regulators and its auditors) in its financial statements and any required FFP returns that its commercial revenues from AD Sponsorship Agreements (and so its income generally) were far, far greater than was in fact the case, and
b) To conceal from third parties the true extent of the equity contributions in fact being made into the Club by ADUG.
…Use of the Disguised Funding Scheme enabled the Club to represent in its financial statements as commercial income from AD Sponsors a total of £949.94 million in the seasons from 2009/10 to 2017/18. Of that sum
a) Only £119.25 million represented Base Fees for which AD Sponsors were liable and which AD Sponsors in fact paid. That is the sum that should have been recorded in the Club’s financial statements over those financial years as commercial revenue
b) A total of £830.69 million represented Tagged Sums, payable by and paid by ADUG to the Club. The sums making up that totals ought to have been recorded in the Club’s annual financial statements as equity contributions from ADUG:
So, not only did City use this scheme to knowingly give themselves an enormous advantage, they also did so expressely to mislead regulators and auditors to the source of their income. And as we will see below, they didn’t just use this scheme to build a winner, but ramped up their efforts year-on-year. They didn’t want to win; they wanted to dominate.
ADUG was not simply content to use The Disguised Funding Scheme to grow into one of the top clubs in England and Europe. Rather, even after City were winning league titles, lifting other domestic trophies, and regularly advancing into the knock-out rounds of the Champions League, City’s ownership only accelerated this scheme, as shown in the chart below:
City’s ownership group pumped £135 million into the 2017/18 “Centurions” team using this Disguised Funding Scheme, a greater sum than any other year on record. They broke a hundred points for the first and only time in Premier League history, won a League Cup, and would’ve been favorites to win the Champions League had Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool side not had something to say about it.
Of course, we now know that the only thing they were really Centurions of was cheating.
City walked the league that season, defeating Jose Mourinho’s Manchester United by 19 points. At the time Mourinho said:
“If I tell you, for example, that I consider one of the best jobs of my career was to finish second with Man United in the Premier League, you will say, ‘this guy is crazy. He won 25 titles and he is saying that a second position was one of his best achievements?’ I keep saying this because people don’t know what is going on behind the scenes.”
The statement was widely mocked at the time for being yet another outlandish thing by a manager who has made a career out of saying outlandish things. Considering what was going on in Manchester—in both red and sky blue halves—that remark doesn’t seem nearly as crazy now as it did back then. And if anyone knows all about manufacturing a football powerhouse with shady accounting, it’s Mourinho, who oversaw the Premier League’s OG financial doping giant, Chelsea in the mid-2000’s.
The Conclusion
As outlined above, The Disguised Funding Scheme was not the only instrument used to cook the books at Manchester City. In addition to overstating their income by £830 million with that particular scheme, they had other schemes to either overstate income or understate expenses by an additional £90.68 million. That’s over £900 million in total, in just nine seasons.
The report lays it all out in black and white. Even with the redactions, the extent of their cheating is clear for the world to see.
City’s ownership group set out to not only illegally pump nearly a billion pounds that we know about into the club from 2009/10 to 2017/18, but to hide their actions from the public and from any interested third parties. And then they spent the next 5 years attempting to obstruct the Premier League’s investigation, which only came about because of a hack and the subsequent leaked documents.
Do I believe that this is the full extent of their cheating? I do not.
Does it matter? I don’t believe it does.
There was enough evidence to find City guilty of more than 100 breaches of PL rules and regulations. There was enough evidence to show, conclusively, that they broke the rules knowingly and maliciously.
Finally, there was enough evidence—the evidence we all saw, week-in and week-out, from 2009 onward—that their attempts to financially dope the football club, to manufacture the best team their effectively unlimited oil money could buy, worked.
And boy did it ever work. They won 19 domestic trophies, 2 more in Europe, and a FIFA Club World Cup. They exerted a profound and sustained downward pressure on the entire English football pyramid, and while they lifted trophy after trophy, every other club struggled to either keep up or not lose as much ground as the teams immediately around them. While they had their joyous memories—which cannot be taken away—other clubs and their fans suffered from being robbed of victories that will never come.
There is no exoneration coming for Manchester City. The weight of evidence is too substantial to ignore, even if the Premier League took their sweet time getting around to it. And City? They have nothing to offer except promises of irrefutable evidence of their innocence, which will never come because they simply don’t have it.
They deserve to have the harshest possible of punishments levied against them. Failure to do so would be a miscarriage of justice, and only further tarnish this dark era of the Premier League.
