This week brought the detail that had been missing for months. The independent commission that found Manchester City guilty of 114 of the 115 charges brought against them published its full written reasons, setting out precisely how the club disguised owner funding as sponsorship income across nine seasons between 2009 and 2018. Now the fallout is gathering pace, with four Premier League clubs reserving the right to pursue City for damages and the club itself facing a Friday deadline to formally lodge its appeal.
The written reasons make for striking reading. The commission concluded that Abu Dhabi United Group effectively guaranteed sponsorship deals that, on paper, were worth £949.94 million. In reality, the sponsors themselves paid only £119.25 million of that figure, with the remaining £830.69 million covered by the City ownership group. That arrangement, the commission said, allowed City to avoid breaching the Premier League’s single season loss limit back in 2009/10, the very first year of Sheikh Mansour’s ownership.
The Fordham Arrangement and a scheme called Project Longbow
A particular focus of the written reasons is what the commission termed the Fordham Arrangement, a third party deal the panel described as “little more than a front” for Abu Dhabi United Group. Through Fordham, City were found to have overstated income by £24.5 million and understated expenses by £49.414 million, as part of a wider scheme the commission referred to internally as Project Longbow, designed to flatter the club’s revenues and shrink its reported losses.
The panel went further still, concluding that City’s financial statements between 2009/10 and 2017/18 did not give “a true and fair view” of the club’s position, and that three separate remuneration arrangements worth close to £17 million were omitted from the accounts entirely. Having heard from 27 witnesses across 42 days of hearings and worked through tens of thousands of pages of documents, the commission found that City had attempted to obstruct its investigation and that some witnesses had given evidence it judged to be knowingly false. Its conclusion was blunt: City had “clearly intended to circumvent” rules it considered essential to fair competition.
City have rejected all of it. In a statement issued after the verdict, the club said it held “irrefutable evidence” of its innocence and would be “relentless, and where necessary proactive, in any and all appropriate regulatory and legal forums,” arguing the commission’s opinion “contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe.” Chief executive Ferran Soriano has been even more direct with staff, telling them the entire case rests on “a single false accusation” that owner money was secretly funnelled through sponsors. City’s central argument in their appeal will be that it was an Abu Dhabi government body, the Crown Prince Court, rather than Sheikh Mansour personally, that supported sponsors in meeting their obligations. The original commission considered and rejected that explanation, finding City had “concocted” it after the fact. The club must lodge its formal appeal before Friday’s deadline, with a new three person panel then set to hear the case.
Rival clubs reserve the right to claim
While City fight the verdict itself, several of their Premier League rivals are quietly preparing a second front. Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham have all served notice of possible compensation claims, reserving their legal position should the guilty finding survive City’s appeal. Tottenham’s case looks the strongest on paper. Spurs finished second to City in the Premier League in 2010/11 and missed out on Champions League qualification as a result, a near miss that cost them financially in ways football finance expert Kieran Maguire has tried to quantify. He estimates Spurs could pursue a claim in the region of £43 million, covering lost prize money, reduced gate receipts from hosting less glamorous European opposition, and smaller sponsor bonuses. “Some clubs who finished fifth will be looking at a minimum of £42.96m claim for loss of prize money,” Maguire said, adding that instead of hosting a club like Bayern Munich or Real Madrid on a European night, Spurs “ended up hosting the second best team in Denmark on a Thursday night” instead. There is already a precedent for this kind of claim, with Burnley having received £35 million from Everton after a separate Premier League financial breach case.
A sense of what was lost
Beyond the legal wrangling, the verdict has prompted some reflective reaction from figures who managed through the years in question. Mauricio Pochettino, who built Tottenham into regular Champions League contenders on comparatively modest spending during this exact period, did not hide his disappointment. Speaking ahead of a USA friendly against Chile, he said, “if it’s true that the 114 rules were broken, then we lived through a period of deception,” adding that “a lot of damage has been done” and that there could be no “sporting justice” after the fact. “It’s sad. It’s deeply sad,” he said. “We’ve entered into a situation where what was celebrated wasn’t really what we thought it was.”
Jurgen Klopp, whose Liverpool side spent years chasing City at the top of the table, struck a calmer note. Asked about his old promise to throw a parade if City were ever stripped of their titles, he played it down, saying “it doesn’t feel like that now” and that he could “stay totally relaxed” rather than celebrate. He was careful to separate the football from the findings, insisting his respect for Pep Guardiola and the City teams he competed against remains “much too high” to let the verdict change how he views those contests.
What happens next is genuinely unresolved. The same commission that delivered the guilty verdict will decide sanctions at a separate, private hearing, with punishment ranging from a fine to a points deduction or, at the extreme end, expulsion. The timing of that hearing relative to City’s appeal is itself a live issue, since sanctioning the club before an appeal concludes risks punishing them for a verdict that could yet be overturned, while waiting risks leaving this season’s table in limbo. For now, the only certainty is Friday’s deadline, and a growing queue of clubs and lawyers waiting to see what comes next.
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