Manchester City Was Found Guilty on 114 of 115 Charges. The Verdict Does Not Say What the Punishment Is.

Manchester City were found guilty on 114 of the 115 charges the Premier League brought against them in 2023, according to ABC News’s 26 September report. That is the number every headline used. It answers one question, whether the club broke the league’s financial rules, and leaves open the one that matters to the club: what happens now. No sanction has been set, City is appealing, and the sequence the case still has to pass through is long enough that the date on which anyone can say City were punished is measured in months, not weeks.

What the Commission found

The charges concern nine seasons, 2009/10 to 2017/18, according to the Premier League’s statement of 29 September. That statement says an independent Commission found City guilty of all the charges relating to the league’s financial rules and of most of the charges for failing to cooperate with the investigation. It says the Commission found the club used sham sponsorship and other contracts to inflate revenue and reduce costs, with its owner, Abu Dhabi United Group, funding much of the arrangement; filed misstated accounts that hid its true position from auditors and regulators; and significantly breached Premier League and UEFA spending limits.

PSRwatch, an independent case tracker, quotes the Commission’s core decision as finding City’s income was “hugely overstated by over £830 million” across those nine seasons. Spread evenly, that is about £92 million a season, our arithmetic rather than a figure the Commission published. PSRwatch reports that owner payments booked as sponsorship were treated as a “Disguised Funding Scheme”, and that adding sham image-rights and manager contracts takes the total overstatement of income and understatement of costs past £900 million. These are the tracker’s readings of a decision whose detailed appendices have not been published.

The 114 of 115 count is not fully reconciled

ABC News reported that roughly two-thirds of the charges concerned financial reporting and profit-and-sustainability rules and the remainder concerned non-cooperation. The League’s own statement describes four alleged cooperation breaches, three of them upheld. PSRwatch describes four cooperation charge groups, with one, labelled 4(B), rejected. Without the charge sheet we cannot say how those descriptions map onto 115 individual charges, and PSRwatch notes that the Manchester Evening News disputes the total, putting it nearer 130. What the sources agree on is the shape of the outcome: every financial charge upheld, most cooperation charges upheld, one rejected. Treat 114 of 115 as the widely reported figure rather than an audited one.

Two clocks are now running

The first clock is the sanction. The League says it will be decided at a further hearing before the same independent Commission, held in private. PSRwatch reports the hearing will cover mitigation and aggravation, that there is no fixed tariff, and that the Commission is not bound by the Premier League’s recommendation. ABC News lists the reported range as reprimands, fines, points deductions or expulsion. A range that wide exists because no rule sets a tariff for a case of this kind; it is not a hint about where the Commission will land, and this article does not predict an outcome.

Reports disagree on timing. PSRwatch collects three: The Times says within weeks, BBC Sport says months, and The Guardian says the sanction hearing could run alongside the appeal but that the outcome would not be published until the appeal is decided. The distinction matters. A sanction could exist before anyone outside the case knows about it.

The second clock is the appeal. The League’s statement gave City until Friday 2 October to appeal. PSRwatch reports City lodged it at 7pm on Thursday 1 October, arguing “material errors of law, principle and fact”, and that the Premier League confirmed the appeal the next day. A three-member Appeal Board hears it in private. Under standard directions, PSRwatch says, the hearing should end within 84 days, around 24 December 2026, with a decision within 30 days after that, around 23 January 2027. The tracker cautions that timetables change and this case has overrun before. After the Appeal Board, it reports, only narrow routes remain: arbitration under the league’s Rule X, then a possible High Court challenge within 28 days, with no route to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The timeline nobody adds up

• The conduct ended with the 2017/18 season. The verdict arrived in September 2026, about eight years later.
• The charges were announced in February 2023, so charge to verdict took roughly 43 months.
• PSRwatch dates the private hearing to 16 September to 6 December 2024, about 12 weeks. The verdict came roughly 21 months after the hearing ended. ABC News described the hearing as taking place in 2025, so the date is contested between sources.
• If the appeal followed its standard directions, it would conclude around late January 2027, more than eight years after the conduct and before any Rule X or High Court step.

The 12-week hearing is the shortest segment. Most of the elapsed time is spent waiting for decisions, and the structure guarantees more of it, because a final sanction can only be confirmed once the appeal has run.

What City says

City has always denied wrongdoing. In a statement on Friday 25 September, quoted by ABC News, the club said the process “remains ongoing with significant elements to be completed” and that it had “diligently respected due process for eight years”. Its appeal argues the Commission erred in law, principle and fact, which is the standard language of an appeal and does not itself indicate which findings the club will contest. An Appeal Board can uphold, vary or overturn findings, and the sanction stage could look different depending on what survives. That is the strongest reason not to treat the guilty verdict as the end of the case.

Who else is waiting

PSRwatch reports that the FA said on 2 October the findings have “significant implications for the integrity of the game” and that it will act where appropriate, reportedly after the appeal finishes. It cites Sky reporting on 6 October that UEFA is monitoring the case and will not decide on action while the appeal is unresolved, and an Independent report from 25 September that Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham have reserved the right to claim compensation. These are secondary reports through a tracker; none of those bodies has taken a formal step that we could confirm.

What the evidence does not establish

There is no sanction, so claims about relegation, points or titles are speculation. The Commission’s appendices, which hold the detailed figures, are unpublished, so season-by-season numbers in circulation come from secondary compilations. The charge counts are not reconciled across outlets. And the appeal can change the findings that any sanction would rest on. The defensible summary is narrower than the headline: an independent Commission found against City on nearly every charge, the club is contesting it, and the consequences are undecided.