English Premier League (EPL) outfit Manchester City says it is disappointed and surprised by the independent commission’s verdict, which found the club guilty of 115 charges relating to financial breaches between 2009 and 2018.
The club has vowed to appeal the verdict.
According to ESPN, no punishment has been decided yet.
However, under Premier League rules, the independent commission has wide discretion.
Possible penalties include title stripping, a points deduction, expulsion from the Premier League, a transfer ban and cancellation of player registrations, among others.
“The Premier League process remains ongoing, with significant elements uncompleted. Manchester City FC will now pursue the appeal avenues open to it, on the basis that the opinion contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe,” reads part of a statement released by the club.
Meanwhile, Premier League Chief Executive Officer Richard Masters said the findings show that City “systematically broke Premier League rules for nearly a decade”.
In its verdict, the independent panel found that City arranged “sham” contracts with commercial partners to artificially inflate their commercial earnings, filed “misstated” accounts to conceal the true nature of their finances and “significantly” breached Premier League and UEFA spending limits.
In its statement, the Premier League said City used “disguised funding schemes” to deceive and mislead the league.
The statement said: “The purpose of these schemes was found to have been to artificially inflate the club’s revenues, and reduce its costs, by more than £900 million during the affected period, to appear to comply with financial rules.
“The consequence of this, as the Commission found, was that the club filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from its auditors and football regulators. The Commission concluded that ‘by its conduct the club clearly intended to circumvent the PL Rules.'”
The Premier League referred Manchester City to an independent commission in February 2023 over 115 alleged breaches of its financial rules, covering the period from 2009 to 2018.
The case followed years of scrutiny over the club’s finances, including a separate UEFA Financial Fair Play case in which City were initially banned from European competitions in 2020 before the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned the ban.
