Nine-year sham, £830m in hidden funding and a possible forced sale: the biggest revelations from Man City's guilty verdict

Manchester City have been found guilty of 114 of 115 financial charges brought against them by the Premier League, with an independent commission’s 40-page report laying out the scale of what it describes as a nine-year scheme to inflate revenues, misstate accounts and conceal the club’s true finances by approximately £900m. The club deny the findings and have confirmed they will lodge an appeal before Friday’s deadline.

The hearing itself

The proceedings were extensive by any measure. The commission sat for 42 days between September and December 2024, hearing oral testimony from 27 factual and expert witnesses and examining millions of pages of documents, expert reports and roughly 7,000 pages of verbatim transcripts.

Project Longbow and the Fordham arrangement

The report traces the scheme back to 2012 — the year of City’s first Premier League title under Roberto Mancini — when the club launched what it internally called Project Longbow, described as a multi-strand project designed to boost revenues and reduce losses. The commission found that most strands were legitimate, but one was not: the so-called Fordham arrangement, in which a third-party company was used as a front to trade player image rights and disguise Abu Dhabi money flowing into the club, effectively removing a shareholder expense from the books.

Fear of Chelsea’s loss record

The commission found that City’s motivation partly stemmed from a fear of exceeding Chelsea’s then-record annual loss of £140m during the 2009-10 season, just one year after Sheikh Mansour’s takeover. It was against that backdrop, the panel concluded, that the disguised funding scheme was devised.

£830m in hidden funding

The most striking financial finding concerns what the panel calls a Disguised Funding Scheme operating between 2009 and 2018. During that period, City improperly declared £949.94m as commercial sponsorship revenue. Of that total, only £119.25m was found to be legitimate base-fee payments from Abu Dhabi sponsors. The remaining £830.69m was direct funding from Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) that should legally have been recorded as equity contributions rather than sponsorship income.

The finding raises immediate questions about whether City should be classified as a state-owned club — a dilemma that will land squarely with the newly established Independent Football Regulator — and whether the Premier League’s fit-and-proper owners test needs to be revisited in City’s case.

The possibility of a forced sale

Among the punishments being discussed is a requirement for Sheikh Mansour to sell the club. Such a sanction would be without modern Premier League precedent and would represent the most severe outcome available to the governing body.

What happens next

City’s appeal means the process is far from over. The club continue to maintain their innocence, and the appeal panel will need to work through the same vast body of evidence before any final sanction is determined. Until that process concludes, the 114 guilty findings — and the questions they raise about the club’s ownership structure and financial history — will hang over English football’s most decorated club of the past decade.