Manchester City’s judgement day — or at least the first of many days — has finally arrived. As sources first told ESPN back in August, the long-awaited hearing into the club’s 115 charges for allegedly breaching the Premier League’s financial rules starts on Monday, Sept. 16 and the stakes, for both the league and its reigning champions, are huge.
The reputations of both are on the line. If City, who strongly deny all charges, are found by an independent panel to be guilty of the catalogue of charges, their success since the 2008 takeover by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi will be irrevocably tainted.
City could face unprecedented financial penalties, a massive points deduction and even expulsion from the Premier League if they are found to be multiple offenders in terms of breaching the league’s regulations.
The club have won 21 major honours since 2008 — having only won nine in 128 years before Sheikh Mansour’s arrival — and have broken a series of records under Pep Guardiola since his appointment as manager in 2016. But all of that success is now under the microscope due to the 115 charges.
Yet if City are successful in their attempts to fight the charges and overturn them all — in 2020 the club overturned on appeal a two-year UEFA ban from the Champions League for financial irregularities between 2012-2016 — it will be a humiliation for the Premier League and leave its senior figures, including chief executive Richard Masters, facing immense pressure to relinquish their positions.
Guardiola said on Friday that he is “happy” that City’s fate is now set to be decided by the three-person panel of legal experts. The former Barcelona and Bayern Munich coach has consistently defended his club’s position, but now the ball is about to start rolling in one of the biggest sporting legal cases in history.
“It starts soon and hopefully finishes soon,” Guardiola said. “An independent panel will decide and I am looking forward to the decision. I’m happy it’s starting.
“I know there will be more rumours, new specialists about the sentences. We’re going to see. I know what people are looking forward to, what they expect, I know, what I read for many, many years. Everybody is innocent until guilt is proven. So we’ll see.
“Justice is there in a modern democracy. It’s not more complicated than that. We believe we have not done anything wrong.”
So how have we got here and what happens next?
The charges against City are rooted in a cache of emails unearthed by the Football Leaks website, published by the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2018, which allegedly show communications between senior City executives attempting to disguise the true amount of sponsorship revenue generated by the club. City have consistently rejected the veracity of the leaked emails.
The Football Leaks material formed the basis of UEFA’s action against City, but after finding the club guilty and imposing a two-year Champions League ban, UEFA’s decision was then overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) because the alleged offences were “time-barred” by UEFA’s five-year statute of limitations.
The Premier League has no such time-bar on legal matters and, in February 2023, issued City with multiple charges for breaching its financial regulations between 2009 and 2018. A further 35 charges were issued for failing to cooperate with Premier League investigations over a five-year period between 2018-2023.
In addition to those 35 charges, the full breakdown of the charges are: 54 for failure to provide accurate financial information between 2009-10 to 2017-18; 14 for a failure provide accurate details for player and manager payments from 2009-10 to 2017-18; five for a failure to comply with UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules between 2013-14 to 2017-18; and seven for breaching Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability rules from 2015-16 to 2017-18.
The hearing, which begins on Monday, will be a private affair at an undisclosed location, with both the Premier League and City — who launched a separate legal case against the Premier League’s Associated Party Transaction rules in July — bound by rules of non-disclosure which will prohibit the briefing of any detail of the exchanges between the two parties.
City have enlisted the services of barrister Lord David Pannick KC, whose fees have earned comparisons to City striker Erling Haaland due to him reportedly charging clients up to £10,000 an hour, while the Premier League will be represented by Adam Lewis KC, from the same London-based Blackstone Chambers as Pannick, in what is expected to be a hearing that will last for at least 10 weeks.
Premier League CEO Masters spoke publicly about the City case for the first time last month and said that it is crucial for the league that the matter is finally dealt with.
“It’s been going on for a number of years and I think it’s self-evident that the case needs to be heard and answered,” Masters told the BBC. “We have a big thick rulebook and part of any sporting competition is a commitment to uphold those rules. While it does create difficulties, there is no happy alternative to enforcing rules. It’s important we get those processes correct and people have confidence in them.
“When the case has been heard there will be a decision published and all the questions you would like me to answer will be answered as part of that process.”
Do not expect a swift resolution to the hearing, however. The process allows for both sides to appeal the panel’s initial verdict, although neither is able to take the case to CAS, and sources have told ESPN that the Premier League are determined for the entire process to be played out by the end of the 2024-25 season.
Sources have said that both parties will be bound by non-disclosure pact at the end of the process, although it remains to be seen whether that agreement will hold in the event of the unsuccessful party feeling to have been wronged.
But by the end of this season, Manchester City’s fate is almost certain to be known and with it, the future of the likes of Guardiola — whose contract expires next summer — and their array of star players.
Massive fine; unprecedented points deduction; Premier League expulsion or exoneration. There is no middle ground for City. Everything is on the line and the endgame starts on Monday.