30 September 2026

This Manchester City scandal is the biggest in British sporting history

And the club’s fanbase is in denial that they have ever done anything wrong

Manchester City have been headline news since the early afternoon of 25 September, when it was first reported that the football club had been found guilty by an independent panel of more than 100 charges of breaching Premier League financial regulations since 2009.

If you don’t follow football: this is a big deal. It’s arguably the biggest scandal in UK sport, ever. City have been owned since 2008 by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the billionaire Emirati royal and vice-president of the United Arab Emirates, a key geopolitical ally of the UK. The club have been the dominant force in English football since he took over: since 2009 they have won the Premier League eight times, the FA Cup four times, the League Cup seven times and the Champions League – the most prestigious club tournament in world football – in 2023.

But the revelations that they have broken so many financial rules leaves that success in tatters. On 29 September, the Premier League announced that City were found to have used a “disguised funding scheme”, to the tune of £830m over a nine-year period. At the time of writing, details about the sanctions had not yet been decided.

Manchester City have a track record of playing fast and loose with regulations in the Sheikh Mansour era. I know that first-hand, having covered various wrongdoing and irregular activity by City in the last 15 years. I did this as an investigative journalist for the Independent, then the Sunday Times, the Mail on Sunday, and for my own website, “Sporting Intelligence”, on Substack.

I’ll be frank: that afternoon wasn’t the ideal time for me for this story to break. The evening before, our family vet called to say our dog would need to be put down – which happened at 11am on Friday. I’m also in the process of selling the family home, where my late wife Helen and I raised our two daughters over the past 20 years. The first viewings started just as the City “guilty verdict” dropped.

Be assured that I’m not looking for sympathy here: I’ve been a reporter covering sports politics, ethics, corruption, doping, financial malfeasance and all shades of malpractice for 30 years. Collateral damage to your life is routine, not least via attacks on social media, when you uncover and report on wrongdoing. I’ve got a thick skin. I can take it. But the City case has been something else. For more than a decade, my reporting has been received with vitriol and hatred from a section of the club’s partisan fanbase, which is in denial that Manchester City have ever done anything wrong.

There are so many examples I can’t cite them all here. Death threats have been routine. My home address was published on Twitter by a City fan, encouraging fellow supporters to attack me. A brick came through the window. When Helen died in 2020 from brain cancer, in a locked-down hospice during Covid, where I spent every afternoon outside her window, I had messages saying: “It’s what you deserve after writing about our club.” I could say “so far, so normal” because we live in an age of toxicity.

But let’s get back to Manchester City’s alleged cheating. It always seemed as if the club would fall foul of the Financial Fair Play regulations introduced in the early 2010s by football’s European governing body, Uefa, to limit overspending. I predicted this, correctly and in great detail, in late 2011. By 2014, City were indeed charged with breaching Uefa rules and were handed a €60m fine, later commuted to “only” €20m. In 2020, they were banned by Uefa from the Champions League for “overstating its sponsorship revenue in its accounts”, though this was overturned on appeal and the club escaped with a fine of “only” €10m for non-cooperation.

In late 2018, the Premier League started investigating huge and sustained alleged financial wrongdoing by City between 2009 and 2018. This was in the wake of the publication of a tranche of City’s internal emails by the German magazine Der Spiegel. It had obtained the emails from Rui Pinto, a Portuguese hacker/whistleblower (depending on your viewpoint), who had uncovered all kinds of corruption by many football clubs across Europe.

That Premier League investigation lasted from late 2018 until February 2023 and was stymied at every stage by City. In 2021, when most people didn’t even realise the investigation was still ongoing, I reported in the Mail on Sunday that it was – after a High Court judge ruled it was in the public interest to do so. In February 2023, the Premier League charged City with at least 115 breaches of its financial regulations. In late 2024, there was a 12-week, behind-closed-doors tribunal at which a three-person independent commission heard all the evidence against City, and City laid out their defence. There was silence, from all parties, until 25 September.

What happens next? Sanctions could range from a large fine to a points deduction that might see City relegated. There will almost certainly be an appeal from City, and we can speculate on the wider ramifications, including for Sheikh Mansour and UK-UAE relations. No doubt, there will be more abuse for those reporting on this. But that’s the job.

[Further reading: Has Andy Burnham actually broken the triple lock?]