City's 2023 Champions League title questioned as Premier League guilty verdict deepens crisis

Manchester City’s 2023 Champions League triumph has been called into question in the wake of the club being found guilty of serious financial rule breaches by the Premier League, with an Italian journalist arguing that Inter Milan were effectively wronged in that season’s final.

A Premier League panel ruled this week that City had arranged ‘sham’ contracts and concealed the true state of their finances from auditors and football regulators. The club now face heavy sanctions in English football, but the fallout has extended beyond domestic competition to their greatest night in Europe.

Italian journalist Sandro Sabatini, speaking in a radio interview relayed by FCInter1908 and Sport Witness, drew a direct line between the financial misconduct and City’s 1-0 victory over Inter Milan in the 2023 Istanbul final. “If you commit an offence by buying a player in 2018 and that player also plays in 2023, when there’s the final against Inter, hold on,” Sabatini said. “2023 isn’t part of the investigation, but you played with players with whom you broke the rules. The Manchester City situation is enormous.”

Sabatini acknowledged that the 2023 final falls outside the scope of the Premier League’s investigation, but suggested that if sanctions are applied retroactively and the principle holds that an offence was committed through rule-breaking, the implications could be far-reaching.

City’s 2022-23 season saw them become only the second English club to complete a domestic and European Treble, matching Manchester United’s achievement in 1999. Their Champions League victory was also notable in a broader context: City became only the second so-called ‘newly rich’ club — after Chelsea and before Paris Saint-Germain — to win the competition in the 21st century, underlining how difficult it has been for clubs built on recent investment to break through Europe’s established elite.

This is not the first time City’s European standing has faced scrutiny. UEFA handed the club a two-year ban from European competition in February 2020 after ruling they had committed serious breaches of Financial Fair Play regulations between 2012 and 2016. City successfully appealed that decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and the ban was overturned.

The Premier League’s guilty verdict this week relates to a separate and wider-ranging set of charges. The precise sanctions City will face have yet to be determined.