Manchester City have officially appealed. On October 1, 2026, the club confirmed it had lodged a comprehensive appeal against the opinion of the Premier League commission, which returned guilty verdicts on the vast majority of the financial fair play charges covering 2009 to 2018. The club's position, in its own words: the opinion contains clear material errors of law, principle and fact, it is unsafe, and a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence exists in support of all of its positions. CEO Ferran Soriano told staff and players in a video message that the whole case rests on a single false accusation, that the owner's personal money was secretly funneled into the club through Abu Dhabi sponsors, and that irrefutable evidence including bank statements, money transfers and witnesses shows it did not happen. Manager Enzo Maresca said he trusts the club 100 percent and that the right moment to discuss it is when they win the appeal.
The commission, for its part, found the club used sham contracts to inflate sponsorship revenue and hide owner injections, saving around £900 million, and also found the club guilty of failing to cooperate with the four-year investigation. Potential sanctions range from fines and points deductions to stripped titles or even expulsion, though nothing has been decided and the appeal process is expected to run about 12 weeks. The satirical site NewsThump could not resist the setup: its take has City's lawyers admitting they simply forgot to mention all the irrefutable evidence during the four-year investigation. "My bad," the fictional lawyer says. "We just forgot about all the evidence we had, so it never came up." Satire, obviously. But the real club statement does ask the public to believe that the decisive proof of innocence somehow did not carry the day the first time around. The appeal board will now decide whether the evidence was irrefutable, or merely unavailable until it was needed.
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See the original post on Instagram. Full sourcing lives in the Evidence Locker.
