Manchester City’s On-Field Collapse Deepens With Charges Looming

Manchester City had little to celebrate on Boxing Day, drawing 1–1 to middling Everton as its stunning collapse continued. The Citizens have won a single Premier League game since October, an unthinkable stretch for a team that has dominated England over the last eight years.

City has won the last four league titles and six of the last seven. With the calendar flipping to 2025, they now sit seventh in the league table, behind teams like Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest. That would be their worst finish since the 2008–09 season, when the Emiratis finalized their purchase of the team. Though the club is performing well financially, a seventh-place finish would leave them outside of Champions League and Europa League qualifying. 

A year ago, the team was in fifth place in the Premier League, but Erling Haaland and Kevin De Bruyne were about to return from injuries. This time around, the fixes are far less obvious. There is the January transfer window, but Ballon D’Or winner Rodri is not returning after blowing out his knee in September.

“We have a lot [of injuries] and this is a problem,” City coach Pep Guardiola said of the transfer window Wednesday. “It’s about bringing a player for the next four or five years and we’ll have to see. Sometimes it is not easy. We have to try because this is sustained for a long time.”

The once-unthinkable prospect of missing out on European qualifying would be costly.

The club has appeared in the Champions League every year since 2011 and would miss out on $3.7 million by qualifying and $11 million for advancing out of the group stage. The winner nets roughly $28 million. While less prestigious, Europa League pays almost $4 million for qualifying and roughly $9.4 million to the winner with the total purse netting almost $25 million if a team manages to win all its group matches on its way to winning the competition. 

The club recently reported $901.7 million in annual revenue for the fiscal year, which ended June 30, which was a 0.3% increase year-over-year. Net profits fell roughly 8% to $93 million, but are still part of a decade-long streak of reported profits, outside of the pandemic season.

Looming over everything, obviously, are the 115 charges the Premier League levied against City in a trial that concluded earlier this fall. The league alleges City cooked its books, including disguising ownership payments as sponsorship revenue. The club claims it is facing  “discrimination” from the league, going as far as to assert it has been held back by existing rules as “a tyranny of the majority.” (Narrow rulings in other cases have gone in City’s favor.)  Given the severity of the league’s allegations, any number of punishments—from point deductions to forced relegation—are possible, with appeals likely. In August, one Premier League owner told Front Office Sports, “I think they will be relegated.” 

On the pitch, City has just eight wins in 18 matches in the PL, and 11 in 27 across all competitions. Their nine losses in their last 13 matches were as many as they had lost in the 106 before that.

“Football is about winning, scoring goals, and not conceding, and we’ve always done it until the last month and a half,” Guardiola said. “Now we’re not able to do it.”