Manchester City have been found guilty of 114 of the 115 charges levelled at them by the Premier League in February 2023. The club maintain their innocence, deny breaching financial rules and have confirmed they will appeal before Friday's deadline.
The 40-page document, produced on Tuesday, has sent shockwaves around world football. Fans are now sifting through the lengthy findings, which describe a nine-year 'sham' operation to inflate revenue and reduce costs by £900million, misstate accounts and conceal the club's true finances.
The hearing and Project Longbow
The all-important hearing spanned 42 days between September and December 2024. It included oral testimony from 27 factual and expert witnesses, while millions of pages of documents, expert reports and roughly 7,000 pages of verbatim transcripts were examined.
In 2012, the year of City's first Premier League title win under Roberto Mancini, the club launched Project Longbow, a 'multi-strand project' designed to boost revenues and reduce losses. The panel's ruling said that 'many of the strands of Project Longbow were genuine, legitimate attempts to achieve those aims. One was not'.
That was the 'Fordham arrangement', where a third-party company was used as a 'front' for trading player image rights to disguise Abu Dhabi money pumped into the club, removing an expense from the club's outgoings.
Disguised funding and secret payments
The commission found that City feared exceeding Chelsea's then-record annual loss of £140m during the 2009-10 season, one year after Sheikh Mansour's takeover. It was 'against that background' that Project Longbow was devised to disguise shareholder funding as commercial revenue.
The Premier League panel confirmed that City used a 'Disguised Funding Scheme' between 2009 and 2018 to improperly declare £949.94m as commercial sponsorship revenue. Just £119.25m of that was proven to be legitimate base fee payments from Abu Dhabi sponsors. The remaining £830.69m was, the panel said, direct funding provided by Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), which legally should have been recorded as equity contributions rather than sponsorship income.
This raises further questions over whether City are a state-owned club and will be an immediate dilemma for the new Independent Football Regulator. One punishment mooted is forcing Sheikh Mansour to sell the club. The last owner forcibly removed from the Premier League was Roman Abramovich at Chelsea in 2022.
Revenue overstatement and dishonest witnesses
City's revenue overstatement of £854.5m between the 2009-10 and 2017-18 seasons was more than the total revenues during that period of all but eight English clubs - the other 'Big Six' teams alongside Everton, West Ham and Newcastle. The £854.5m in misstated revenue made up 30 per cent of City's total revenue in that time. Everton, by comparison, were deducted eight points for breaching Profit and Sustainability Rules by £25m.
A crucial aspect of charge 1 (b) involved alleged secondary or secret payments made to a redacted employee beyond his primary employment contract. The commission evaluated contracts linked to Abu Dhabi-based entities to determine if the employee's total compensation was improperly disguised or omitted from official filings.
One of the most shocking parts of the report outlined that City's witnesses gave evidence 'that they knew to be untrue and so had been dishonest'. The list of key witnesses, lawyers and other names were redacted in the commission's ruling.
Final ruling and appeal
City were found not guilty of just one of the 115 charges - charge 4 (b), a minor charge to do with co-operating with the Premier League over finances.
In a case riddled with long delays and legal argument, there was even an appeal from one of the two sides over when to publish the independent commission's judgement. The Premier League statement confirms this happened before it could release the 'final award' ruling.
