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Manchester City is on the brink.
Last week, the Premier League announced it had found the English club guilty of one of the worst cheating scandals in modern sports history. The league said that years of investigation and tranches of internal documents conclusively showed the team had used ownership money to create “sham” sponsorship deals, then falsely reported the money as revenue.
Under English and European soccer rules, teams are only allowed to spend a certain ratio of their revenues on players, and the Premier League found that City illegally juiced their revenues in order to sign some of the best players in the world.
City dominated the English game during the period in question, and they deny the charges, claiming the money came from other sources and accusing the league of a “conspiracy theory.” But if they lose the case on appeal, the sanctions appear likely to be severe: the fallout from City’s dominance has been enormous, and any major punishment, from a huge points reduction to outright relegation or expulsion, would ripple across the globe. Here are eight unanswered questions as the team and league work through the appeals and sanctions process:
1. What happens to Cavan Sullivan?
This may be the most pressing question for American fans. The Philadelphia Union prodigy—who turned 17 last week and became the youngest USMNT goal-scorer ever against Mexico on Saturday—has an agreement to join Manchester City in 2028 after he turns 18. If City were expelled, relegated, or sold, though, that would seem to call his European future into question.
On Thursday, The Athletic reported that “nothing has changed” in Sullivan’s plans to move to England in a little over a year. In 2024, when the Union signed a deal with Sullivan that included a deal to transfer him to City, the outlet reported that the sides would “send Sullivan to a City Football Group side elsewhere in Europe if his development surpasses MLS before his 18th birthday, sources say.”
As Sullivan suddenly looks like the best American prospect in years—he was named the MLS player of the month for September—that clause may be tested.
2. Will the rest of City Football Group’s holdings be investigated?
That is, of course, if the other parts of Abu Dhabi’s soccer empire aren’t sullied by the Premier League ties. City Football Group—officially 81% owned by Abu Dhabi United Group—also owns a slew of lesser teams across the globe, including teams in the second divisions of Italy and Spain and the top divisions in France and Belgium.
They also own MLS side NYCFC, alongside the Yankees, who own 10% of the club. They are building a $780 million stadium in Queens set to open next summer; NWSL team Gotham City is set to move from New Jersey to play in Etihad Park. A spokesperson for Major League Soccer did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the state of NYCFC.
3. What will Silver Lake do?
The other 18% of Manchester City is owned by U.S. private equity firm Silver Lake. The company bought a $500 million stake in the club in 2019, and steadily bought out other limited partners through 2022, when it increased its stake to the present 18%.
If the club is locked out of Champions League play or worse for years, the value of that stake could plummet, and that’s without accounting for the possibility that the current owners could simply be forced to sell.
4. Did the breaches stop in 2018?
The Premier League’s prosecution and investigation only covers the period from 2009 to 2018. But City kept winning after that, and kept banking enormous revenues that the league now says were artificially inflated by payments from the team’s owners. The team did begin banking more money from merit payments and TV contracts in the last decade, but questions persisted.
In an interview published Sunday, former Leeds (and current Canada) manager Jesse Marsch said that he thought City’s illicit practices were going on in 2022, when he was managing in the Premier League. “I think Man City should be punished severely,” he told the Guardian. “I think they should have to go down, and by the way, everyone knew about it. Everyone knew.”
5. What does this mean for Erling Haaland and the Premier League’s star problem?
The World Cup highlighted an odd dynamic: England has the best league in the world, but very few of the very best players. Among the biggest global megastars, only Erling Haaland plays in the Premier League. And now Haaland is on a team whose future Premier League participation is in question.
Last year, Haaland reportedly signed a nine-year extension keeping him in Manchester that had no release clauses, meaning any departure would have to be negotiated. Any major club would be interested in Haaland if he were available; a European outlet reported this week that if he left, Haaland would prefer a Spanish team over English rival Arsenal. Haaland has led the Premier League in scoring in three of his four full seasons in the league and is leading the league in goals again this year.
6. Could the club face a criminal case?
The team has claimed that the charges are “unsafe” and the product of a “Premier League conspiracy theory.” But at least one member of the U.K. Parliament has asked the government to investigate the tax implications of the Premier League’s findings. The U.K. think tank Tax Policy Associates published an analysis saying that the club likely illegally avoided paying 12 million pounds in taxes with a secret contract for former manager Roberto Mancini, which would come with another 12 million in penalties. The analysis also found that a broader criminal investigation was merited by the Premier League’s findings.
7. What does this mean for the future of state-owned sports teams?
City has always claimed that they are not state-owned. But that may be a distinction without a difference. English media reported this week that City plans to claim on appeal that the “sham” deals with sponsors were not funded by the club’s owners but by…the government of Abu Dhabi, which owns the companies. And the government of Abu Dhabi, a state in the United Arab Emirates, has pretty close ties to Manchester City. Sheik Mansour, the club’s owner, is part of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family, and his brother is the president of the UAE. (Sheik Mansour himself is the deputy prime minister of the country.)
And City’s longstanding claim that they are not state-owned is further undercut by reporting that the UAE has threatened the U.K. that it could pull billions of dollars out of the country depending on how the club is ultimately treated.
It was hard enough for Adam Silver to investigate and punish Steve Ballmer for salary cap circumvention; imagine if the government of a geopolitically critical country owned the Clippers. Where the case goes from here could influence how leagues handle state-tied money going forward.
8. What will the Champions League do?
Before the Premier League case, UEFA tried to bar Manchester City from the Champions League for two years over the same allegations. The ban was overturned at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, though, which found that the charges were either “not established” or fell outside of the Champions League’s statute of limitations. Now, the Premier League may essentially accomplish the same thing—if City is relegated, they’d likely miss qualifying for the Champions League in two straight years. But City is currently playing in the Champions League right now, which raises a question nobody wants to answer: if the club wins the Champions League next spring, will they still automatically qualify for next year?
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