An independent commission has delivered its judgement after a process that stretched over 1,331 days, outlasted three U.K. Prime Ministers and kept the Premier League waiting for a conclusion. Manchester City have been found guilty, and the 40 partially redacted pages behind that verdict provide the clearest picture yet of how the case was understood.<\/p>\n
The commission made clear that the delay was regrettable, but it also stressed that the evidence had already been extensively examined. Its message was plain enough: there was no reason to expect a retrial unless something genuinely new emerged.<\/p>\n
At the centre of the report is the scale of the sponsorship structure under review. In 2011, City agreed a 10-year Etihad Airways deal worth \u00a3400 million, and the suggestion from the outset was that the numbers did not tell the full story. The Premier League now describes those arrangements as \u201csham commercial deals,\u201d while the commission used the phrase \u201cDisguised Funding Scheme\u201d to describe the mechanism.<\/p>\n
The figures are stark. Between 2009 and 2018, City accumulated almost \u00a3950 million in sponsorship fees, but only 13% was paid by the named sponsors. The remaining \u00a3830 million came from Abu Dhabi United Group Investment & Development Ltd (ADUG), the club\u2019s owner. The report shows how the sums grew year by year, with the sharpest rise arriving in 2011-12, the same season UEFA\u2019s financial fair play rules were introduced.<\/p>\n
One example captured the improvised nature of the operation. On May 25, 2013, City were said to be \u201c\u00a39.9 million \u2018short\u2019 of complying with UEFA FFP for that season.\u201d The commission said modified agreements were then created, including bonuses for events that had already happened and funding for a U.S. tour, allowing the shortfall to be \u201cplugged.\u201d<\/p>\n
The report also states that City adjusted the operation to \u201creduce the likelihood of difficult questions\u201d from regulators and maintain \u201ccontinued concealment.\u201d Their defence, that \u201cno part of any recorded sponsorship fee had been paid by ADUG or from or using ADUG funds,\u201d was rejected as \u201cuntrue\u201d and built \u201cvery late in the day.\u201d<\/p>\n
The commission further said some witnesses gave evidence \u201cthat they knew to be untrue.\u201d Perhaps the most striking detail of all was what readers did not get to see: the names of the three commission members were redacted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The report sets out Manchester City\u2019s hidden funding structure and the findings behind a guilty verdict.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20879,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[238],"tags":[59],"class_list":["post-20880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-manchester-city","tag-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}