Manchester City found guilty on almost all of more than 100 Premier League charges, sources say
Manchester City were found guilty on almost all of more than 100 charges in a Premier League disciplinary process, sources confirmed on Friday, 26 September 2026. The finding comes after a multi-year investigation that began in December 2018 and a hearing held in late 2024.
The Premier League’s allegations cover conduct across multiple seasons, with charges that City “failed to provide accurate financial information” for nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18; failed to provide full details of payment in manager Roberto Mancini’s contracts from 2009-10 to 2012-13; failed to include full payment details in player contracts from 2010-11 to 2015-16; breached Uefa’s financial fair play regulations from 2013-14 to 2017-18; and breached the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability regulations from 2015-16 to 2017-18. The league also charged City with failing to cooperate throughout the investigation, alleging non-compliance from 2018-19 until the club was charged in 2022-23, including a duty to provide “documents and information to the Premier League in the utmost good faith” that “gives a true and fair view of the club’s financial position, in particular with respect to its revenue (including sponsorship revenue)”. During the years since the probe began, Pep Guardiola’s teams won five Premier League titles and the Champions League.
The public inquiry was triggered by a November 2018 publication in Der Spiegel of internal City documents obtained from a hack of the club’s email servers. Those materials suggested Sheikh Mansour’s ownership group was funding large parts of the club’s sponsorship deals with the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, and the exposé alleged City was circumventing financial fair play rules introduced by Uefa in 2011 and by the Premier League in 2013, which the article said were intended to limit owner-funded losses and require revenue to come from TV, commercial income, supporters and sponsorship.
Uefa’s internal process produced an adjudication in February 2020 that found City guilty of deception over sponsorships and imposed a two-year Champions League ban; the club appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and in July 2020 the ban was overturned while CAS found City had failed to cooperate and imposed a €10m fine. City responded to the Der Spiegel coverage by denying wrongdoing and stating: "We will not be providing any comment on out-of-context materials purportedly hacked or stolen," adding: "The attempt to damage the club's reputation is organised and clear." An internal email quoted in coverage recorded a City in-house lawyer writing: "He would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue [Uefa] for the next 10 years."
The Premier League’s own probe was opened in March 2019 and developed into a legal battle over disclosure. A tribunal of three senior lawyers ordered City on 2 November 2020 to produce documents and information requested by the league; the club sought to challenge that requirement in the high court and in March 2021 Mrs Justice Moulder ruled against City and published her judgment, revealing sustained resistance by the club to providing materials over a two-and-a-half-year period.
The Premier League publicly set out the extensive charges in February 2023. The club continued to record on-field success amid the legal processes: the team won the Premier League three months after the charges were announced, lifted the Champions League in Istanbul in June 2023, and secured the 2023-24 league title to complete a fourth consecutive domestic championship, Guardiola’s sixth. The independent commission’s decision has emerged almost two years after the late-2024 hearing, but the full written judgment has not been released and both the Premier League and City have yet to issue detailed official statements confirming the leaked outcome.
Sources say the disciplinary panel has reached guilty findings, but the process is not finished; City said the matter "remains ongoing, with significant elements to be completed, and subject to strict confidentiality." The question of whether any titles will be stripped or what sanctions might follow remains unresolved, and the club can apparently appeal against the commission’s findings.