An independent Commission has found Manchester City FC guilty of all charges related to serious breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules over a nine-season period, and the majority of charges in relation to its failure to co-operate with the League’s investigation.
- Manchester City arranged ‘sham’ contracts (which misrepresented the true agreement between the parties) with a number of its commercial partners, as well as relying on ‘sham’ agreements with others, to artificially inflate the club’s revenues and reduce its costs – The club filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from its auditors and football regulators – Manchester City was significantly in breach of both the Premier League’s and UEFA’s spending limits The independent Commission found that Manchester City arranged ‘sham’ commercial deals with a number of its sponsors during the period, which were part of a disguised funding scheme, whereby those companies were only required to pay a portion of the relevant sponsorship fees. The remainder was funded by Abu Dhabi United Group Investment & Development Ltd (ADUG), which owned the club. As part of the scheme, further ‘sham’ arrangements, funded by ADUG, were entered into to enable the club to record lower operating expenses than it actually incurred, as well as a ‘sham’ circular arrangement with Fordham, an entity that purchased the club’s players’ image rights, that was funded by ADUG.
The Commission found that, had all of the relevant agreements been reported accurately in the club’s accounts, it would have been in breach of both the League’s and UEFA’s spending limits by a very substantial amount. In addition, during the course of the four-year investigation conducted by the Premier League, the club committed multiple breaches of its duties of co-operation and utmost good faith towards the League. The Commission concluded that the club had ‘made concerted efforts to stop and frustrate the PL investigation’. It details how the club systematically broke Premier League Rules for nearly a decade.
As a result, Manchester City failed to accurately report its income and expenditure for the purposes of the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules and UEFA’s Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Rules.
Richard Masters, Chief Executive of the Premier League, said: “The core decision establishes the facts of what happened at Manchester City during this period.
