The verdict landed on Friday and the invoices are already being drafted. Premier League clubs have started taking legal advice on whether they can claim compensation from Manchester City, who were found guilty this week of the vast majority of the 115 breaches of financial rules the league charged them with in February 2023. Sami Mokbel, Dan Roan and Nizaar Kinsella reported for BBC Sport that several sides had begun sounding out lawyers even before the outcome became public.
Nothing about the punishment itself has been settled. A sanctions hearing still has to take place, and it has not been scheduled.
BBC Sport has been told City will appeal. The Premier League has declined to comment and has made no official announcement at all, which leaves nineteen other clubs working from a decision they have read about rather than one they have been handed, in a season already a month old and being played on the assumption that the table means what it says.
What the clubs think they are owed
The argument is simple enough to state and very hard to price. If City spent money they should not have been allowed to spend across nine seasons, then somebody finished a place lower than they otherwise would have, missed a European qualification spot, or went down. One source who held a senior executive role at one Premier League club before moving to another told the BBC he expects clubs to file individual claims. A leading lawyer put a different scenario to them: the league could centralise the whole thing itself rather than let twenty separate actions run in parallel.
There is a template for this, and it is recent. In June, Everton were ordered to pay Burnley £35m after breaching profit and sustainability rules over a three-year period. Burnley's case was that the breach cost them their Premier League place and everything that came with it. Everton have appealed and sources close to the club say they will contest the ruling "robustly and thoroughly", but the ruling exists, and a club looking at City's charge sheet will have read it closely.
The clubs found out by email
The way the news travelled says something about how tightly the league has held this. A select group of club directors were formally told of the independent panel's decision by email, and had to sign a non-disclosure agreement before they were allowed to read the document. A source described that process to the BBC. Nobody outside that circle knows when the decision will be published properly.
City themselves have not denied the verdict or confirmed it. Their statement said the process "remains ongoing with significant elements to be completed, and subject to strict confidentiality", and added that the club had respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League board and executive would act as "an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence". That is not the language of a club preparing to accept a penalty quietly.
Relegation is on the table, and the contracts say so
Being found guilty on the most serious counts opens the door to a points deduction heavy enough to send City down, a very large fine, or expulsion from the competition. It is understood that a number of City players do not have relegation release clauses written into their contracts, which matters more than it sounds. A squad assembled at that cost, contractually bound to a club playing Championship football, would be one of the strangest situations English football has produced.
The timing is its own problem. A sanctions hearing could take months, an appeal would follow, and it is possible the punishment is not made public until that appeal is finished — though it may equally be communicated before. Either way the 2026-27 season is being played under a question mark. City won eight trophies in the period covered by the charges, including three league titles, and the case spans the tenures of Roberto Mancini, Manuel Pellegrini and the first two years of Pep Guardiola, who left in the summer after ten seasons.
Case context: City were charged in February 2023 after a four-year investigation. The independent commission hearing opened in September 2024 and ran around twelve weeks, concluding that December. The charges break down as 54 counts of failing to provide accurate financial information (2009-10 to 2017-18), 14 of failing to provide accurate player and manager payment details over the same span, five relating to Uefa rules including Financial Fair Play (2013-14 to 2017-18), seven Premier League PSR breaches (2015-16 to 2017-18) and 35 of failing to co-operate with the investigation between December 2018 and February 2023. The Athletic reported 114 of the 115 counts were upheld; BBC Sport has been told the majority were. No sanction has been announced. Source: BBC Sport.
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