Manchester City found guilty of 114 of the Premier League's 115 financial charges, according to reports — sanctions are undecided, an appeal is expected, and the time limit that saved the club in 2020 does not exist this time

The number that matters in the Manchester City verdict is not 114. It is five. When the Court of Arbitration for Sport cleared City to keep playing in the Champions League in 2020, it did so largely because UEFA's rules stop the clock on breaches more than five years old, and most of what the club was accused of fell outside that window. The Premier League's rules have no such clause. That is why the same leaked emails, put to a different tribunal under different rules, have reportedly produced the opposite result.

According to The Athletic's David Ornstein, citing sources briefed on the matter, an independent commission has found City guilty of 114 of the 115 charges the Premier League brought in February 2023. BBC Sport's sources put it as the majority of the charges. Sanctions have not been decided, and the club is expected to appeal. City's spokesperson said the process "remains ongoing, with significant elements to be completed, and subject to strict confidentiality," and that the club's position was "consistent with the club's statement of February 2023," when it promised "a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence" of its innocence.

What the 115 charges are

The figure has been repeated so often it has lost its shape, so it is worth restating. Eighty of the charges concern alleged breaches of the league's rules across nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18: the requirement to provide accurate financial information, in particular about sponsorship revenue and the true source of it; the disclosure of payments to players and, in one strand, to a manager; and compliance with UEFA's financial fair play regime and the league's own profitability and sustainability rules. The remaining 35 charges are about the investigation itself, alleging that between December 2018 and February 2023 the club failed to cooperate with the league's inquiries.

The core allegation, in plain terms, is that money from the club's owner was dressed up as commercial income. Documents published by the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2018, from the Football Leaks cache, purported to show City executives discussing how sponsorship from the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad and the telecoms company Etisalat, both state-linked, was in substance being funded by Sheikh Mansour's Abu Dhabi United Group. Other documents appeared to show payments to the then manager Roberto Mancini routed through a consultancy contract with a club in Abu Dhabi. Owner investment is allowed; owner investment disguised as revenue, to get past spending rules, is not.

City has always said the emails were stolen, taken out of context, and do not show what they are said to show. That defence worked at CAS in 2020, where the panel found most of the alleged sponsorship breaches either not established or time-barred, reduced UEFA's fine and lifted a two-year European ban. The Premier League's case has now been tested on the same documents by a three-person commission that sat for six weeks between September and December 2024, and, by the reports of Friday, the commission was not persuaded.

Why it took 21 months

The hearing closed on December 6, 2024. The verdict is reported on September 25, 2026. Even by the standards of sports arbitration that is an extraordinary gap, and it prompted the league's chief executive, Richard Masters, to concede publicly that the process was taking "longer than anyone expected." The likeliest explanation is the one built into the structure of the case: 115 charges, nine seasons, thousands of documents, two sets of expensive lawyers and a commission whose written reasons will have to survive an appeal by one of the best-resourced litigants in world sport.

The delay has had a cost of its own. City won the Premier League in 2023 and 2024 with the charges hanging over them, the Champions League in 2023, and have signed and sold players for hundreds of millions while their competitors did not know whether the club they were competing against would still be in the division. Everton and Nottingham Forest, meanwhile, were each charged, heard and punished for single breaches of the spending rules inside a single season.

The club have diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League board and executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence.

That sentence, from City's statement on Friday, is the club's argument in miniature. It does not engage with the finding; it questions the finder. The reference to eight years dates the grievance to the Der Spiegel publication in November 2018, and the phrase "partisan influence" is aimed at a league whose other 19 members voted for the rules City is accused of breaking and stand to benefit if it is punished.

What the sanctions could be

The commission decides the penalty in a separate phase, and nothing has been announced. The range is wide. The precedents for single breaches are modest: Everton were docked 10 points in November 2023, reduced to six on appeal, and a further two in April 2024; Forest lost four points in March 2024. Those were one charge each, for exceeding a loss threshold. A finding of 114 proven charges spanning nine seasons, including alleged concealment and non-cooperation, is not in the same category, and the league's rules permit fines, points deductions, the stripping of titles and, at the extreme, expulsion from the competition.

Each option has a different set of victims. A fine is meaningless to a club of City's wealth. A points deduction punishes the current squad and manager for conduct that largely predates them; the last season covered by the charges ended before Erling Haaland had turned 18. Stripping titles rewrites eight seasons of results and invites claims from the clubs that finished second. Expulsion would cost the league its most successful team of the era and would be fought, the club has made clear, all the way.

The claims are the part that outlasts the headline. Al Jazeera noted on Friday that other clubs could pursue compensation if City is found to have gained an advantage by prohibited means. The clubs that finished second to City in the seasons in question, and the clubs relegated by a single place in those years, have lawyers too.

The appeal, and why 2020 is not a guide

City will appeal, and the appeal is the reason to hold every number in this piece loosely. But the route is different from the one the club took six years ago. UEFA's decisions can be taken to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, an external body with its own procedures and, crucially, UEFA's five-year limitation rule to apply. The Premier League's disciplinary rules provide for an appeal board convened under the league's own framework. There is no limitation clause to invoke and no Swiss tribunal at the end of the road.

That is the structural point missed in most of the commentary comparing the two cases. City did not win at CAS because the evidence was found to be false. The panel found much of it time-barred and the rest insufficiently proven to the standard required; the fine it left in place was for non-cooperation. The Premier League commission has reportedly reached a different view on the same material with no clock to stop.

The counter-argument

There is a serious case, made by the club and by some independent lawyers, that a nine-season prosecution decided 21 months after its hearing is not a process that should end careers and titles. The evidence is old, the documents were stolen, several of the executives involved have left, and the league is both the rule-maker and the prosecutor. A commission finding is not a court judgment, and City has the resources to test every line of it. Until the appeal board has ruled, 114 is a report, not a result.

Against that stands the arithmetic of the last 15 seasons. Since the 2008 takeover City has won eight of its 10 league titles and its only Champions League, and became the dominant force in English football during precisely the years the charges cover. If the commission is right, that dominance was built in part on money the rules did not allow. If the commission is wrong, the most successful club in the country has spent eight years under a cloud that a properly run regulator should have dispersed far sooner. Either way, the league's credibility is now tied to how it handles the sanction, and it has given itself no precedent to follow.

The durable point is that the question was never whether the emails were real. It was whether anyone with the power to act on them would do so without a time limit to hide behind. On Friday, by the accounts of The Athletic and BBC Sport, a Premier League commission did. What follows will take months, and the club has already told the league what it thinks of its impartiality. But the clause that saved City in 2020 is not in this rulebook, and nothing the club has said on Friday changes that.

This report is based on reporting by The Athletic's David Ornstein and BBC Sport, both citing anonymous sources briefed on the commission's findings; the Manchester City statement of Friday, September 25, 2026; the Premier League's February 2023 charge sheet as summarised by Al Jazeera, Reuters and AFP; the published 2020 award of the Court of Arbitration for Sport; and the recorded sanctions against Everton and Nottingham Forest in the 2023-24 season. Neither the Premier League nor the commission has published the findings, the specific charge not proven has not been identified, and no sanction has been decided. All figures describing the verdict are as reported and may be revised when the written reasons are released.