Manchester City booked £950m in sponsorship, and the commission says £831m of it came from their owners

Between the 2009-10 and 2017-18 seasons, Manchester City booked £949.94m in sponsorship income. According to the independent commission’s ruling, published by the Premier League on Tuesday, only £119.25m of that came from the sponsors. The other £830.69m was paid by the club’s owners and passed off as commercial revenue.

That is the number at the centre of the redacted report, which confirms City have been found guilty of all the charges relating to breaches of the league’s financial rules across those nine seasons. The leak last week said “the majority”. The published ruling goes further: the only count City were cleared on was one of the charges about failing to co-operate with the investigation.

How the scheme worked

The commission calls it the “disguised funding scheme”. Sponsorship deals were split in two: a base fee paid by the sponsor, and a “tagged sum” paid by Abu Dhabi United Group, the club’s owners since 2008. In the accounts, both halves looked like sponsorship.

The ruling says City went down this road because they knew losses for 2009-10 would break the record for a Premier League club, which at the time was Chelsea’s £140m from 2006. The owners did not want that record. Uefa and the Premier League were also about to bring in financial fair play rules.

One example in the report is May 2013. With the financial year about to close, City found an unexpected shortfall against Uefa’s rules. Within days, amended sponsor agreements appeared that recorded extra Abu Dhabi sponsorship income, and the sponsors were never approached. The gap was closed.

The commission used the word “sham” eight times. It described the sponsorship agreements as “shams, or at minimum did not reflect their economic substance”, and rejected City’s explanation as “untrue”, saying it had been “concocted well after the event”.

Witnesses who lied

The harshest section is about the people. City served witness statements or documents from 24 people. The commission found that some of the club’s important witnesses gave evidence that was “false in a number of key respects”, and that some “knowingly gave untrue and dishonest evidence”. Their names are redacted.

There was more than the sponsorship. The report says City moved player and manager pay off the books through third-party consultancy agreements in three cases, worth £8.866m, £7.4m and £0.5m. An image-rights deal with a company called Fordham, which the ruling calls “little more than a front”, put £24.5m into operating income that should not have been there.

City say they will appeal

The club’s response was blunt. City said they were “disappointed and surprised”, that they are “innocent of the accusations”, and that the ruling “contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe”. They have until Friday, 2 October, to lodge an appeal.

Premier League chief executive Richard Masters said the decision “details how the club systematically broke Premier League Rules for nearly a decade”. David Bernstein, City’s chairman from 1998 to 2003, went further. “If this all stands up and the appeal fails, Manchester City cannot stay in the Premier League,” he told the BBC.

The punishment is still a separate fight

Guilt is settled, at least until the appeal. The sanction is not. The Premier League says it will be decided at a further hearing in front of the independent commission, held in private. Fines, points deductions and expulsion are all possible.

The league has not said when that hearing will take place, and nothing guarantees a penalty lands this season. City won the title three times in the years covered, in 2011-12, 2013-14 and 2017-18, and the commission found that none of the club’s accounts across that stretch gave a true and fair view. A fine alone does not answer that.

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