Is Manchester City Headed for a Fall From Grace?

Another season, another year of dynastic dominance: That is what Manchester City is dead set on as it begins competition with this season’s English Premier League kickoff. 

The club has won the title in six of the past seven seasons—the 2023–2024 campaign sealing an unprecedented fourth in a row—and is a year removed from winning the Champions League. With some of the deepest pockets in sports, and a practically unrivaled penchant for spending sprees, it is widely regarded as, at very worst, the second-best team in the world. And it is once again the favorite to win both the Premier League and Champions League.

Yet for as well positioned as Manchester City is to continue its reign, it’s also brought with it a cloud that hangs heavy over the biggest European soccer league. With a legal scandal following the team for more than a year, Manchester City’s years of dominance could be effectively wiped away by the Premier League, triggering the giant’s historic fall from grace. 

Front Office Sports spoke to multiple English soccer club owners, executives, and lawyers in the sport, who say any result is on the table—including, in one source’s estimation, a true possibility of relegation. But Manchester City has dug in its heels for an epic fight.

In February 2023, as Manchester City was well into yet another title-bearing season, the club was charged with 115 breaches of the Premier League’s PSR (profit and sustainability rules). 

With infractions beginning in 2009, it allegedly failed to provide accurate financial information, including player and manager payments. It’s also accused of veiling owner equity payments as sponsorship revenue. The Premier League argues this enabled the club to gain an unfair advantage on the pitch by assembling a stronger squad than its finances would otherwise have allowed. And of the 115 charges, 35 relate to Manchester City’s failure to work with the Premier League between 2018 and February 2023. 

Yet 18 months later—a period that has dragged out so long, it has included a title win for the club—a battle is still raging. Manchester City’s legions of lawyers have waged war against the Premier League: It has gone far beyond pleading innocence; in a 165-page document, its legal team alleges the club is the victim of “discrimination,” going as far as to assert it has been held back by existing rules as “a tyranny of the majority.”

Its legal team has already proved its firepower. In 2020, UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, banned Manchester City from European competitions for two years for “serious breaches” of its Financial Fair Play regulations. But City’s legal army fought the ban, and it was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport five months later. The club’s lawyers were also largely uncooperative; Manchester City was heavily fined for severely “obstructing” the investigation, including refusing to provide unredacted versions of email conversations and access to key executives for interviews.

Seeing City’s legal team overturn UEFA’s judgment is why the Premier League has spent the past year and a half trying to ensure its case is watertight. 

Finally, there’s some progress. The Times reported on Aug. 12 that proceedings will begin in September, with a verdict expected early in 2025. And while we now, finally, have a better idea of when a judgment may be handed down, the punishment Manchester City would face for such an uncharted volume of offenses remains incredibly difficult to forecast.

Owners of English soccer clubs can only guess—and even then, their predictions wildly vary. “I think they will be relegated,” one Premier League owner tells FOS. He thinks the league would feel a need to show it could stand up to its richest constituents. An owner of an EFL club felt the Premier League would more likely settle with Manchester City on a record fine and points deduction, but in a way that would allow it to admit no fault. 

Several lawyers who work in soccer and spoke to FOS on the condition of anonymity agreed everything is on the table in terms of potential sanctions. “On the severe end, relegation and league titles stripped are on the table, but no one knows how likely that is.” 

The source references sanctions handed down to Everton and Nottingham Forest, who in the intervening year and a half since the Premier League charged Manchester City, both received points deductions for breaking the league’s financial rules. Yet he says “the Forest and Everton cases and sanctions aren’t a great comparison, given that their breaches were not at all like City’s alleged breaches,” and that the clubs provided full and detailed access to their accounts for the league to decide. It is in stark contrast to City’s approach.

Although the thought of one of the world’s top clubs receiving a demotion for breaking the rules seems unbelievable, it’s not unprecedented. French champion Olympique de Marseille was stripped of its 1992–1993 title and relegated on bribery charges; Italian giants Juventus was relegated and had its 2004–2005 Serie A championship taken off in the wake of the Calciopoli scandal. 

Should Manchester City be proved guilty and suffer the same fate, it would send an earthquake not only through English soccer but also the rest of Europe. And given City Football Group now owns 12 clubs across four continents, the entire soccer world would feel the aftershocks. 

As much as owners disagree on what might happen, there is one consensus among them: Many aren’t sure whether the league has the teeth or the legal team to make any massive punishment stick. 

What happens next is anyone’s guess, especially as the club begins another campaign with title hopes and expectations. Already, last year’s season left a strange taste in many fans’ mouths, with legions wondering whether Manchester City’s championship win would remain in the history books with so many of its others under question. This one may feel similar. 

Now, with so much uncertainty surrounding one of its biggest clubs, the Premier League is under pressure to provide some concrete answers—and some justice.