Man City Guilty Verdict: 114 Charges Won't Fix Football

The news broke on Thursday, and football has not stopped arguing about it since. David Ornstein of The Athletic reported the Man City guilty verdict: Manchester City have been found guilty on 114 of the 115 financial charges the Premier League brought against the club, with The Times and Reuters following up with their own reporting. More than three years after the league filed those charges in February 2023, and almost a decade after some of the alleged breaches took place, English football finally has its verdict.

Except it is not quite a verdict anyone can read yet. The independent commission's written findings have not been made public. No sanction has been decided, and City are expected to appeal. The club told CNN on Friday that the process remains ongoing with, in its words, "significant elements to be completed," and that its position is unchanged from February 2023, when it denied the allegations. On Saturday, chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak published an open letter to supporters saying he remains confident the club will ultimately be vindicated, while admitting the strict confidentiality of the legal process stops him from sharing the details he would like to. So the biggest regulatory decision in the league's history has landed with no punishment attached and a legal battle still to come.

This is where the hot take begins: the unpopular part, said out loud. Everyone is treating this like football's day of reckoning, the moment the sport finally proved no club is above the rules. I do not think it proves that at all. A guilty verdict, even one with the full charge sheet behind it, will not fix anything, because the machine that produced this case is still running exactly as it was built to run. The money arrived first. The questions came a decade later. That order of events is not a bug in the system. It is the system.

What the panel reportedly found

The reporting, at least, gives us the shape of the case. According to the breakdowns published since Thursday, the 115 charges covered alleged breaches between 2009 and 2018. Fifty four counts concerned the failure to provide accurate financial information. Thirty five were about failing to cooperate with the league's investigation. Fourteen involved payments to players and managers, seven touched profitability and sustainability rules, and five related to UEFA's financial regulations. The commission heard the case between September and December 2024, and Premier League chief executive Richard Masters had already warned the public the verdict was taking longer than expected because the case was exceptionally complex.

The timeline is the part you should sit with. The league's investigation began after German publication Der Spiegel released leaked club documents in 2018. That is eight years ago. Charges followed in 2023. The hearing closed in 2024. The reported verdict arrived this week, sanctions are still undecided, and an appeal could stretch the whole thing out for years more. By the time Manchester City actually faces a punishment, the era the charges describe will be a chapter in a history book. The executives, the managers, and the squads will have turned over completely. Football is about to punish a club for what a different version of that club did a decade ago, and we are supposed to call that accountability.

The rules punish paperwork, not money

Here is what actually bothers me. Read the charges again and notice what they are about. Inaccurate financial information. Undisclosed payments. Failure to cooperate. The panel reportedly found that City misreported its finances, which is a serious finding about paperwork. But the underlying arrangement was not what the panel was asked to decide: a football club owned by an Abu Dhabi investment group, spending with the weight of state-linked wealth behind it, competing against clubs that fund themselves through tickets, shirts, and broadcast money. Nobody in this process asked whether that is a fair contest. They asked whether the forms were filled in correctly.

That is why I do not think this verdict changes the sport. The league spent years building a case about how sponsorship revenue was reported, while the real competitive distortion sat in plain sight the entire time, fully legal and fully reported. When sanctions finally come, the league will point to them as proof the system works, and then the system will keep doing what it does. Enormous outside money will keep flowing into the sport. The paperwork will get checked eight years later. According to CNN's reporting on the league's rulebook, the available punishments include a points deduction, an unlimited fine, or expulsion. A fine of any size is a rounding error to the kind of wealth behind this club. Expulsion is the option everyone names and few expect to actually see.

City, to be clear, deny all of this. They have denied wrongdoing from the start, they say they hold a comprehensive body of evidence supporting their position, and their chairman says they will be vindicated. They may win on appeal. They may negotiate the punishment down to something the club can absorb. Either way, the lesson the rest of football's owners are taking from this is not the one the league wants them to take. It is not "do not break the rules." It is "hire better lawyers than accountants," because the money already did its work. It bought the players, the titles, the global brand, the decade of dominance. No points deduction in 2027 un-wins any of that. Football wanted this to be the story of justice catching up with money. To me, the Man City guilty verdict reads more like money outlasting justice.