Questions over 'sham' contracts shadow Pep Guardiola's Manchester City era

Pep Guardiola was in the Wembley press room an hour after Manchester City's 6-0 win over Watford in May 2019 when Rob Harris of the Associated Press asked whether Roberto Mancini had received a second salary from Abu Dhabi and whether Guardiola himself had ever done so. A recently circulated clip also shows Harris, now with Sky News, approaching Ferran Soriano with the question: “The Premier League maintains you cheated for nearly a decade … is all this success, as the Premier League says, based on sham contracts?” and Guardiola issued a Wednesday statement that included “We will get through this together.”

The 2019 exchange began when Harris raised published information suggesting Mancini had been paid by Abu Dhabi while City manager; City’s press officer interrupted with “We’re not going here, we’re really just not going there.” Rather than answer, Guardiola responded with what the original account called a long, painful pause and a stare described in the piece as a “mad-dog stare.” That moment came at the end of a season in which City had just completed a major domestic triumph.

In the newer clip of Harris and Soriano, Soriano is shown muttering “Thank you, thank you,” and making a hasty exit after the question about sham contracts. The article records the exchange and the visible discomfort in Soriano’s reaction, describing his expression as one of a man “caught shoplifting a Twix at the local primary school fete.”

The reporting traces the emergence of the allegations to media scrutiny and the efforts of the hacker Rui Pinto, and highlights the work of Nick Harris, aka Sporting Intelligence, who the piece says “has kept going at this story relentlessly despite an unusual degree of abuse, harassment and threats.” The account frames those investigations as the sources that first brought the concerns into public view.

The legal and regulatory history is referenced through City’s two-year ban from the Champions League, which was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport; Guardiola’s post-appeal comment is quoted in full: “We didn’t break the rules. We played the same rules as all the clubs in the Premier League.” The article also records Guardiola’s more recent line that “We will get through this together,” and says City supporters now have urgent questions about what they were told and the club’s presentation of an “irrefutable body of evidence.”

Financial details cited in the piece include Transfermarkt figures saying City’s net spend during the period embraced by the charges was almost £400m more than Manchester United in second place and five times as much as Liverpool and Arsenal. The account says that from 2016 to 2018 City massively outspent every other team, after which they won the league on the final day or by a single point three times, and notes individual transactions such as digging out an extra £25m for Kevin De Bruyne.

Ferran Soriano’s own emails, as published in the leaks cited, are quoted: “We will need to fight this,” Soriano writes in one leaked memo, “and do it in a way that is not visible.” The piece adds for the record that Soriano was at Barcelona during the period of the alleged, unproved, time‑barred refereeing scandal but was not implicated or punished, and that he was at Air Spain when it collapsed but was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Others who, the article says, must now enter the matrix of who knew what include Soriano and the owner, Sheikh Mansour, and the reporting frames those forthcoming questions as touching on the wider issue of fitness to run a football club. Is this a good time?