How drawn-out saga of Manchester City’s alleged cheating came to this

There is no episode in English football’s history that even resembles a precedent for the epic Manchester City disciplinary drama, which encapsulates the modern game at breaking point. Here was a grand, stoic old club, taken over in 2008 by Abu Dhabi royalty and mega-funded to imperious success, then crowned serial champions by a league simultaneously pursuing charges of monstrous financial cheating.

On Friday sources confirmed that saga, in which Pep Guardiola’s expensively constructed City teams won five Premier League titles and the Champions League during the years since the investigation began in December 2018, culminated in guilty findings on almost all of more than 100 charges.

There is no precedent either for the scale of these charges: that City failed to provide accurate financial information to the league for nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18 inclusive; failed to provide full details of payment in their contracts with manager Roberto Mancini from 2009-10 to 2012-13; failed to include full payment details in player contracts from 2010-11 to 2015-16; that they breached Uefa’s financial fair play regulations from 2013-14 to 2017-18, the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability regulations from 2015-16 to 2017-18 – and that City failed to cooperate with the league’s investigation throughout, from its inception in 2018-19 to the 2022-23 season in which the club was charged, including the duty to provide “documents and information to the Premier League in the utmost good faith”.

Related: The age of asterisk: Manchester City’s glittering era of success is tainted now | Barney Ronay

News of the independent commission’s decision has finally emerged almost two years after the hearing of the charges in late 2024. Those hearings followed a mammoth investigation process, in which the Premier League and its lawyers insistently demanded to see all the documentation it requested, against repeated challenge from the club.

The period of the charges, 2009-10 to 2022-23, runs from the start of all the glittering success attained under the ownership of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, vice president and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. The era of dominance began with FA Cup victory in 2011 after 35 trophy-less years for the club, then the breakthrough 2012 Premier League title won by Mancini through Sergio Agüero’s celebrated 94th-minute winner.

This stunning exposure of the modern Manchester City’s insides was precipitated in November 2018 by the German magazine Der Spiegel sensationally publishing internal City documents, leaked to it from a hack of City’s emails. Most damaging in that exposé were emails and financial documents that appeared to show Sheikh Mansour’s ownership group was paying the bulk of the multimillion-pound sponsorship of the club by the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, which includes bearing the name of the stadium.

The published documents suggested that City’s regime, in its determination to spend the vast money required to attain success in modern football, was circumventing the financial fair play (FFP) rules. Introduced by Uefa in 2011, then similarly by the Premier League in 2013, these rules seek to restrain overspending by clubs, particularly on soaring player wages, by limiting the financial losses that owners can fund. Money must be spent from a club’s earned revenue, including TV and commercial rights, income from supporters and sponsorships – owners cannot use a sponsor as a vehicle for putting more funding in.

Since days after the takeover, City’s board has been chaired by Khaldoon Al Mubarak, a senior Abu Dhabi political and business leader, long-term adviser to Mansour’s brother Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the ruler of the country and president of the UAE. It took the wider football world some time to understand that such powerful intent and expertise, as well as funding, were really here for City, a club which had suffered some famous cock-ups in the Premier League era, including relegation to the third tier of English football as recently as 1998.

But for those paying attention, the serious, total transformation of City’s fortunes had been clear from the start of the takeover. Although the new era began with huge losses sustained buying top players, including the statement signing of Carlos Tevez from Manchester United in the summer of 2009, Mansour promised long-term investment and success that would make City profitable. Within 18 months, Mansour had invested £395m. There was some perception of reckless spending, and scoffing at the corporate-speak when the manager Mansour inherited, Mark Hughes, was sacked for failing to meet “targets that were agreed and set”. Such mockery and doubts were largely blasted away by Agüero and that landmark 2012 Premier League title.

Huge funds have been spent in all areas: expanding the stadium, building the huge academy and “campus”, buying a multi-club football empire. The hierarchy recognised very early that Barcelona had been an ideal model, and the new City was constructed along those lines, even to attract Guardiola, the manager who had brought success to the Catalans, finally recruited to east Manchester in 2016. Al Mubarak understood from the incomparably huge publicity at the outset that owning a Premier League club, and making it successful and attractive, was a showcase for Abu Dhabi. Among the roster of sponsors from the beginning was the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority, advertising the country to the world via the billboards around the pitch. The hierarchy also put work into embracing the importance of the club and its heritage to supporters, and its community presence, winning friends with significant investment in local facilities.

By 2017-18, the structures were mostly in place, Guardiola had won his first title, Mansour’s personal investment was declared at £1.3bn, and the club moved into profit. Der Spiegel’s exposé landed as an explosive challenge to the project, revealing not only alleged financial manipulations but a ruthless approach within the new City at odds with the public image.

In one of the emails, City’s in-house lawyer, Simon Cliff, wrote that Mubarak was resisting a financial sanction from a previous Uefa investigation, into City’s massive losses of 2012 and 2013, that ultimately led to a settlement. Cliff wrote: “He would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue [Uefa] for the next 10 years.”

City have always denied any wrongdoing, and the hierarchy met the Der Spiegel coverage with a response that became familiar as the saga developed: outrage and indignation.

“We will not be providing any comment on out-of-context materials purportedly hacked or stolen,” City said in a statement. “The attempt to damage the club’s reputation is organised and clear.”

However, the internal body within Uefa responsible for upholding FFP launched an investigation into the allegations of financial cheating and misleading. City always denied any wrongdoing. The Premier League announced in March 2019 that it too was investigating, but given City’s rollercoaster battle unfolding publicly with Uefa, it garnered little attention and seemed for some time almost theoretical.

In February 2020, Uefa’s adjudicatory chamber concluded that City were guilty of deception over the sponsorships by the club’s main commercial partner, the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, and the UAE telecoms company Etisalat, and imposed a two-year ban from the Champions League. City appealed to the court of arbitration for Sport, which in July 2020 overturned the findings and the ban, but found that the club had failed to cooperate with the Uefa investigation and imposed a €10m fine.

City then won their third Premier League title under Guardiola, the project approached its dominant peak, and nothing much was heard of any investigation. But then in July 2021 a British court judgment was published, revealing that the Premier League process had been continuing – and that City and their lawyers had been trying to block it at every step.

The judgment revealed that the Premier League had started its investigation into possible rule-breaking in December 2018, in response to Der Spiegel’s coverage that “disclosed details of confidential information obtained from a hack of the club’s email servers”.

Uefa had been criticised in some quarters for not pursuing City for further documents than those published by Der Spiegel, and the court judgment showed that the Premier League was doing so, and insisting on its right to be given more details. City refused to supply information and documents requested by the league, which in August 2019 issued a disciplinary complaint. A commission was set up to decide on that, but City challenged the disciplinary system and commission, as not sufficiently independent or impartial. The Premier League suggested a different way of appointing a commission, but City objected to that too.

Related: We Manchester City fans fear relegation and losing trophies … but club are bang to rights

The Premier League then brought a legal arbitration process against the club, seeking to force it to provide the documents, and a tribunal of three senior lawyers was appointed to decide that process. City then challenged that, arguing that the league had no power to bring the arbitration and that the tribunal did not appear to be impartial. The tribunal rejected that challenge and on 2 November 2020 ordered City to provide the documents and information to the Premier League. City had appealed to the high court to strike the tribunal down, and finally in March 2021 a judge, Mrs Justice Moulder, decided the issue, ruling against the club.

Moulder also ruled that her judgment should be published, and that exposed the process, showing that the new Manchester City, rebooted into supreme excellence in every department, had spent two and a half years through its lawyers resisting providing information to its own league.

That was about the sum of public knowledge until February 2023, when the Premier League suddenly, solemnly, unveiled the staggering charges against City, alleging widespread, constant financial rule-breaking across almost the whole first decade of the Mansour project.

The headline charges of failing to provide accurate financial information, “in the utmost good faith” that “gives a true and fair view of the club’s financial position, in particular with respect to its revenue (including sponsorship revenue)”, went back to 2009-10, and ran through without a break until 2017-18.

Given the light the court judgment had shone on City’s resistance, perhaps the least surprising section in the list was that the league had charged City with failing to cooperate throughout all five football seasons of the investigation.

Three months after those monumental charges were announced, City won the Premier League again. Then in June 2023 Sheikh Mansour and Sheikh Mohamed were in the stands in Istanbul when the project finally reached the pinnacle, the Champions League trophy. In 2023-24, City won the league again: the record-breaking four in a row, Guardiola’s sixth. The Premier League dutifully crowned the gleeful club its champions again, even as its accusations were finally shunting towards a hearing.

Finally now, sources say, this saga has reached a verdict, after six years in which a reconstructed club secured the greatest triumphs in football, in parallel with extraordinary accusations of cheating, misleading and bad faith. Given the way the news has leaked out, with no official confirmation from the Premier League or City, or full judgment from the panel, there is still some way to run. City said the process “remains ongoing, with significant elements to be completed, and subject to strict confidentiality”.

The question hanging over the club and the game for so long, whether City could be stripped of their titles and how extreme any sanctions could be, remains to be answered, and City can apparently appeal against these findings. Whatever unfolds ultimately, an extreme picture, without precedent, has been produced, of English football inside and out, and the times we are in.