Manchester City Won't Admit They Cheated, and the EFL Won't Just Wave Them Through Either

Manchester City have spent three years telling anyone who would listen that the Premier League's case was built on nothing. On Tuesday, an independent commission spent twelve weeks proving otherwise, and City's chief executive still couldn't manage a straight answer when a reporter put it to him in person.

That reporter was Sky News's Rob Harris, who caught up with Ferran Soriano in Copenhagen hours after the verdict landed. Asked whether he owed football fans an apology, Soriano offered "I have nothing to say." Pushed on whether City could really win an appeal, and then asked directly, "Is this a sham club? Are you destroying football?", Soriano's entire defence amounted to "Thank you, thank you," repeated twice while he walked away. For a club that spent its official statement accusing the Premier League of failing to act as an independent regulator, that is not the response of an executive confident in his own case.

Caught, Confirmed, and Nine Years in the Making

The Premier League confirmed that an independent commission found City guilty of serious breaches of its financial rules between 2009 and 2018, along with the majority of the non-cooperation charges. Reports put the final count at 114 guilty findings out of 115, though the commission's own published decision describes it more precisely as every charge proven except one sub-charge.

The commission found City arranged "sham" contracts with commercial partners as part of a scheme to inflate revenue and cut costs by more than £900m, including £830m in artificially boosted commercial income alone. It also found the club filed misstated accounts that concealed its true financial position from auditors and regulators, and significantly breached both Premier League and UEFA spending limits in the process.

Richard Masters called the ruling a vindication of the league's decision to pursue the case, adding that the core decision "details how the club systematically broke Premier League rules for nearly a decade." 

City's Response Reads Like the Verdict Never Happened

Manchester City's official statement opened by saying the club was "disappointed and surprised." It just got more combative from there on.

City insisted it remains innocent, again pointed to a "comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence" supporting its position, and accused the commission's findings of clear errors of law, principle and fact. The club also questioned whether the Premier League had acted as an independent and fair-minded regulator, a bold complaint to make about the process that just spent three years examining its accounts.

CEO Ferran Soriano told staff and players the verdict was the result of a "Premier League conspiracy theory," insisting the entire case rests on "a single false accusation" that ownership funnelled its own money into the club through Abu Dhabi sponsors. That framing might have worked as a talking point in 2023. It's a harder sell now that a commission has spent twelve weeks testing it and rejected it almost entirely.

City has 14 days to appeal, and any appeal goes to a fresh three-person commission. That keeps the door open, and City are entitled to walk through it. It doesn't make Tuesday's findings disappear, and repeating the same denial that didn't survive the hearing won’t be a smart strategy.

Why the Championship Might Not Even Take Them

If City receive a points deduction severe enough to finish in the bottom three, they go down the normal way, and the Championship has to take them. EFL rules explicitly provide for the three relegated Premier League clubs to join at the end of the season.

Expulsion is a different animal entirely. The Premier League can end City's membership of its own competition, but it has no power to decide where City play afterwards, because the Championship isn't the Premier League's to hand out. That decision sits with the EFL, a separate organisation running its own 72-club structure and membership rules.

Those rules don't include an automatic slot for a club thrown out of a different competition. The EFL's own regulations state that any new member joins at League Two, while the standard route into the Championship is promotion from below, not a direct drop from above. Reports suggest the EFL would back the Premier League's position if it comes to that, but its public statements so far have addressed broader governance talks with the Premier League and the Independent Football Regulator, not a specific commitment on City.

A points deduction is simple: City finish bottom three, the Championship takes them, business as usual. Expulsion is not simple at all. It would leave City needing the FA and EFL to agree on their re-entry into English football, with no rulebook currently built for a case this size, and with the EFL under no obligation to slot the country's reigning champions in wherever suits them best.

Manchester City spent years telling everyone to wait for the evidence. That evidence has now been published, tested and ruled on. The Premier League can punish City. It cannot decide where they play if that punishment is expulsion, and that gap is exactly where City's lawyers will aim next.

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