The unhinged Manchester City response that reveals how far their war with the Premier League will go

If you hadn’t got round to reading the independent commission’s 40-page report just yet, here are the headlines. From 2009 to 2018, Manchester City cheated, repeatedly and systematically, cooking the books to the tune of £900m. Abu Dhabi pumped money into the club in the form of “sham” sponsorship agreements to artificially inflate revenues. Club officials disguised payments to hide spending. They submitted false accounts, concealed the truth and lied to investigators. During the nine-year period, City’s revenues swelled from £87m to £500m, an increase of 475%. By comparison, Arsenal’s revenues grew 73% and Manchester United’s grew 112%. It enabled City to transform from the Premier League’s middle reaches to assembling a world-class squad of players paid more than Real Madrid. Sergio Aguero, scorer of perhaps the most famous goal in Premier League history, earned around £16m a year. Evidently, City didn’t much like the rules. They weren’t perfect, but they were agreed by all the clubs not only to align with Uefa but to encourage sensible spending, establish fairer competition, prevent hyperinflation of wages and stop clubs doing exactly what City did when they stripped rivals like Arsenal and Aston Villa of their best players, distorting the game into an even more extreme battle of financial muscle. City signed up to the rules, then deliberately broke them. To use just one example from the commission’s report, take image rights. City set up a company called Fordham Sports Image Rights Ltd, which was “little more than a front for Abu Dhabi United Group”, the private equity company of City owner Sheikh Mansour. Fordham bought image rights from City for £24.5m, a hugely inflated fee against the market, which the club booked as revenue. Incredibly, City also used the Fordham vehicle to buy licences to sell the rights in the first place, so that they could be sold to… Fordham. The commission wrote: “The closed-circle arrangement … was thus a) A further device by which ADUG funds could be paid into the Club in a manner that concealed their true origin, and which enabled the Club to pretend that such funds represented operating income in its financial statements and FFP returns, and b) A device by which ADUG funds were to be used to meet what were in reality Club liabilities, enabling the Club to remove operating expenses from its financial statements and FFP returns.” City CEO Ferran Soriano and chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak (PA) Perhaps just as breathtaking as City’s cheating has been their response. Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak strongly reiterated their innocence in a letter to fans . CEO Ferran Soriano told staff, during a bizarre video in which he didn’t blink for three minutes, that City are the subject of a “conspiracy” and would fight on. “I know this can be a bit of a distraction,” he told them, while Rome burned around him. Statements from the club remain strangely defiant, despite the tranche of evidence and guilty verdicts that have now been made public. The club seems paranoid and unhinged from reality, and if this was someone you knew you’d stage an intervention. Manipulation, lying, lack of remorse, lack of empathy, a grandiose sense of self-worth: these characteristics were famously listed by the Canadian forensic psychologist Dr Robert Hare as the traits of a psychopath. City will now appeal. They still insist they retain “a body of irrefutable evidence”, even though their evidence has been entirely refuted by an independent panel. They will be dogged to the very end, and as if we needed proof, there was even the detail that City tried to stop this report being published and that the commission had to go through an appeal process to do so. In the loaded language there are clear hints as to City’s intentions. Repeatedly calling the report an “opinion”, describing the findings as “unsafe”, even calling the tribunal a “Premier League commission” rather than an independent one: it is all designed to paint a picture of an unfair process that has conspired against them. This is the tactic, to undermine the sense of impartiality, to question legitimacy, to sow seeds of suspicion. There are dark undertones here. Journalists investigating the case have been abused online and harassed at stadiums in recent years. Lawyers doing their jobs at the Premier League have been subjected to threats and feared for their families’ safety. People involved in the case have had their names redacted, presumably for those reasons. City could now stand down, yet on it goes. After years of hard work, those journalists deserve their flowers now. There are many but to take just two examples on these pages, chief football writer Miguel Delaney has been indefatigable in calling out the ills of state ownership in football , and former chief sports writer Ian Herbert was investigating the details of City’s image-rights scandal eight years ago, despite enormous pressure from the club not to do so. The greatest credit, of course, goes to the whistleblowers. Portuguese activist Rui Pinto leaked the documents to Der Spiegel in 2018 and without him, none of this would have come to light. Pinto was convicted and is living under witness protection after sacrificing his freedom for the truth. Portuguese whistleblower and founder of Football Leaks, Rui Pinto (AFP/Getty) City will continue down this warpath regardless. Part of the club’s confidence lies in the fact their lead lawyer, Lord Pannick , is an appeals specialist. They are prepared for the case to go to the High Court and this story will run and run. City have history here, having successfully overturned a Uefa ban in the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2020. But that was won on a technicality, and that will surely not do here. It will not satisfy the football world if City pick faults in Premier League procedure. They have been found guilty of more than 100 charges by an independent panel reviewing thousands of documents of evidence over two years, and it is hard to envisage any way the achievements of a stained era can be allowed to stand. It is a cliche that you will hear a lot over the coming days, but no one wins from this case. Not Manchester City, of course, whose entire identity will be wrapped up in this saga for years to come. Not their rivals, who might enjoy some schadenfreude but have ultimately lost titles, players and prize money over nearly two decades of the City project. Not even the Premier League, where – contrary to belief at the Etihad – there is really no appetite to fight their own clubs, to use up vast energy and resources enforcing regulations. The ramifications for the league will be long lasting and could go far beyond City’s points tally. But if anything is to be salvaged from the wreckage, let it be this. Nation states shouldn’t own football clubs. Neither should oligarchs or other nefarious actors. The Premier League shouldn’t be left exposed to anyone who fancies taking advantage of its cultural power. Clubs are historical artefacts to be preserved and owners are their curators. These values are why the Independent Football Regulator was established; now it must use its statutory powers to protect them.