Where is the Premier League v Manchester City decision? A very good question and one nobody seems to be able to answer.

But one person that does know one way or another if it is out is Lord Pannick KC, City’s lead barrister. Last week he was in the Royal Box at Wimbledon without a care in the world. He was not poring over 1,000 pages of a disciplinary panel’s award on City. For what it is worth, my latest information as of a couple weeks ago was that there was still no decision to pore over.

In the search for clues, I stumbled upon Lord Pannick’s House of Lords page. It represents a good overview of when he’s been busy over the last couple of years and when he has had time to be in the Lords and voting.

Between September 2024 and January 2025, he attended a single vote on 22 November 2024 and made no oral contributions at all between 10 September 2024 and 9 December 2024. He was busy on something!

Lord Pannick appears to be spending more and more time on Lords business but he still does select jobs as a barrister including most recently an overnight stint for Southampton in the Spygate saga. He also successfully won an interesting case on issue estoppel in the Supreme Court on 1 July 2026 (heard in February 2026).

Further, Lord Pannick KC’s Register of Interests, updated as recently as last week, tells us something about Manchester City that no panel has yet ruled on (as far as we know).

Since 2021, peers who practise at the Bar must itemise fees from foreign states. Lord Pannick fought the rule, calling it “an intrusion”, and lost. His register currently shows recent results including: £120,000, £245,000, £300,000, £350,000 and £590,000 from the government of Denmark between November 2025 and February 2026, a string of entries for Gibraltar, £141,200 from Hong Kong public bodies, and on 27 March 2026, £500,000 “from a company owned by The People’s Republic of China”.

Between the rules changing in 2021 and today, Pannick has received a single fee of £195,000 from the government or a government official of the United Arab Emirates alongside entries for Ukraine, Mauritius and the Cayman Islands. That single UAE entry cannot be Manchester City because we know Pannick’s fees for acting for the club in the most consequential regulatory proceedings in English football are many times that individual payment and have been recurring since 2023. The fees for Manchester City or City Football Group sit silently under the generic entry “Practising member of the Bar”, where fees from any private client belong.

Paragraph 56 of the Guide to the Code of Conduct requires that fees must be itemised where the client is a foreign government, an official of a foreign state acting in that capacity, or an organisation which “may be thought by a reasonable member of the public to be foreign state-owned or controlled”.

So, the test is not whether the client is in fact state-owned. It is not even what Pannick himself believes. It is whether a reasonable member of the public might think so.

So every time the register updates without a City entry, Pannick renews a considered professional judgment: that no reasonable member of the public could think Manchester City is owned or controlled by the UAE. Not that the claim is wrong, or unproven when Der Spiegel prints it or the Premier League allege it (if they did) - that a reasonable person could not even hold it.

City’s position has always been that City and its parents are the private property of Sheikh Mansour, held personally and not on behalf of the state, and no tribunal has found otherwise. But paragraph 56 sets a deliberately lower bar than City’s representations, and Pannick, of all people, knows precisely where that bar sits. He told the Lords in 2021 that the rule was misconceived but he did not say it was unclear.

The absence of a disclosure in the Register of Interests is a position, restated daily, from England’s top barrister whose reading of it cannot be put down to inattention or lack of understanding. Whether he is right is one of the many questions that will be answered when the long-awaited decision is finally published.

The debate about how Manchester United can fund a new 100,000-seat stadium has produced a great deal of commentary but very little arithmetic. Critics of the bear case point to various funding mechanisms: debt, equity, pre-sold hospitality, naming rights, fan bonds. Nobody has joined those together, applied them to what the stadium actually generates incrementally, and shown whether the debt can realistically be serviced. In response to the recent City AM piece, not one of the very many lovely (sarcasm) responses explained why anything I said in there was wrong.

All numbers here are in current money extrapolated from 2024/25 audited numbers. Revenues will rise with inflation over the construction period but so will costs. The two broadly cancel, so working in today’s money produces a model that is neither optimistic nor pessimistic on that dimension. Where the model is generous, I say so. I assume New Old Trafford opens in summer 2032.

The build cost and the debt

Assuming for the sake of discussion that the construction financing draws in equal monthly tranches over thirty-six months against a £2bn build cost. At 6% on a rolling draw-down with an average outstanding balance of £1bn across the construction period, capitalised interest and fees adds about £180-200m leaving the total required facility at stadium opening of around £2.2bn.

The most conventional structure is the one used for the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Tottenham’s stadium debt, as per the accounts for the year ended 30 June 2025, consists of £847.7m of long-term fixed-rate bonds issued to US investors through private placements, supplemented by a small Bank of America facility. The package carries a weighted average coupon of 3.16% and an average remaining maturity of 17.6 years, including a 30-year tranche with bullet repayment in 2051. There is no meaningful amortisation (repayment of the principal amount) anywhere in the structure. The balloon repayments sit decades out and are a future refinancing question, not an immediate cash drag.

Assuming United achieve the same bullet structure, annual debt service on the stadium will be interest only. On £2.2bn at 6%, that is £132m per annum. They will worry about repayment in the 2060s.

Six per cent is a conservative estimate

Tottenham closed its private placement tranche in September 2019 at a weighted average coupon of 3.30%. At that point the Bank of England base rate was 0.75% and twenty-year gilt yields were approximately 0.9%. The credit spread Tottenham achieved was approximately 230-240 basis points over the relevant gilt. Apply that same credit spread to today’s twenty-year gilt yield of approximately 5.0-5.2% and equivalent long-term stadium bonds price at approximately 7.2-7.5%. Tottenham locked in a generational rate at the bottom of a cycle that ended in 2022 and has not reopened. United will be financing in a world where long-dated gilts yield approximately 5% and the credit spread for stadium project debt sits at approximately 250 basis points. That is the rate backdrop against which this project has to be built.

The CFG construction facility for the new NYCFC stadium, agreed in November 2024 by a syndicate led by JP Morgan and structured at SOFR (Secured Overnight Financing Rate) plus 250 basis points, confirms the same picture at the shorter end of the market. At inception, with SOFR at 4.5%, the all-in rate was approximately 7%. That facility matures in five years and will itself need refinancing into permanent bonds once the stadium opens, adding another layer of refinancing risk to any comparable structure.

Six percent therefore sits at the bottom of the plausible range for long-term bonds. Every 100 basis points above it adds £22m per year to the annual burden on £2.2bn. At 7%, annual interest is £154m. At 7.5%, it is £165m. This model uses 6% throughout to give the project its best reasonable chance of working.

The revenue and incremental operating surplus

The best comparable matchday and stadium commercial benchmark is Real Madrid’s renovated Bernabeu, which holds 84,000. It generated approximately £196m in stadium revenues in 2024/25 on Deloitte’s Money League measure, which attempts to create comparable numbers across clubs. Bluntly extrapolated to 100,000 seats, the figure reaches approximately £233m. It is very hard to see how a new United stadium generates materially more than that, even accounting for United’s global commercial platform. Call it £230m as the ceiling. United currently generate approximately £160m from equivalent revenue streams at Old Trafford. The incremental revenue from a new stadium in today’s money is therefore approximately £70m per year. I am going to assume that the £230m excludes non-MUFC events and that the £70m additional matchday revenue is very high margin with no associated costs. Both are generous assumptions.

On events, the most useful public data comes from the Wembley National Stadium Limited accounts for the year ended July 2025. Wembley is a reliable proxy with a similar concert/event capacity of 75,000 to 90,000 depending on stage set up. Wembley hosted forty-two major events in 2024/25, including fifteen concerts, up from ten in the prior year. The accounts break turnover into distinct categories. Experiences by Wembley, which is the pre-sold corporate hospitality and box membership product, generated £39.8m. Events revenue from all forty-two occasions generated £74m on top. Sponsorship added £7.3m, with total turnover of £127.3m.

Wembley note that five additional concerts in 2024/25 generated £22.8m of incremental events revenue, £4.4m per concert. That is the real-world benchmark for a large premium outdoor stadium in the UK for a major touring act. A new United stadium in Manchester can target, perhaps, eight concerts per year at run-rate, fewer than Wembley’s fifteen. Eight concerts at £4.4m gross generates £35.2m revenue. Other major stadium events add another £10m gross with total gross incremental events revenue of approximately £45m.

Non-MUFC events are naturally far less profitable as the club effectively becomes a facility to rent. Applying a blended 65% cost ratio, covering stewarding, security, cleaning, event-day operations and logistics, leaves a 35% margin and a net events contribution at run-rate of approximately £16m per year.

The full Wembley picture is worth exploring because it frames what a major stadium events business actually delivers in practice. Wembley generated just £127.3m of total turnover from forty-two events including the FA Cup final, an NFL game, England home internationals, fifteen concerts and other major occasions. Cost of sales was £64.4m. After administrative expenses including ninety-two staff costing £11m, Wembley produced an operating loss. The only national venue of its type in England, with a mature calendar that United cannot replicate for years after opening, still made an operating loss. The cost base of running a major stadium as a 365-day events and hospitality business is heavier than most people think, and anyone projecting events contributions from gross revenue figures without working through the cost structure is not reading the accounts.

Old Trafford earns nothing from naming rights today and, putting aside the challenges Spurs have found in securing a deal, naming rights at £25m net per annum would be wholly incremental.

Don’t forget the costs

Running a 100,000-seat stadium with all of these additional revenue lines is going to cost a substantial incremental amount. As United themselves describe them: “Operating expenses generally include certain variable costs such as Matchday catering, policing, security stewarding and cleaning, visitor gateshare for domestic cups, and costs related to the delivery on media and commercial sponsorship contracts. Other operating expenses also include certain fixed costs, such as property costs, maintenance, human resources, training and developments costs, and professional fees.” I assume operating expenses of approximately £20m more (an uplift of around 10%) per year than Old Trafford.

So that leaves a matchday and stadium commercial increment of £70m, events net contribution of £16m, net naming rights of £25m less additional operating costs of £20m. That is a total incremental annual operating surplus of approximately £91m. Allowing for the model’s intentional conservatism throughout, call it £100m.

A note on terminology is worth inserting here. What this model produces is an incremental operating surplus before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation: effectively an incremental EBITDA contribution. It is not free cash flow in the proper sense of that term. Free cash flow, as lenders actually compute it in a debt service coverage ratio, is the cash available for debt service after corporation tax and after maintenance capital expenditure on the stadium asset. Allowing for no corporation tax (most clubs find a way not to pay corporation tax) but maintenance capex of approximately £20m per year, the true cash available for debt service is approximately £80m, not £100m. The remainder of this piece uses £100m as the pre-tax operating surplus to give the project the most favourable framing. The reader should bear in mind that the lender modelling the debt service coverage ratio covenant, as CFG’s credit agreement explicitly requires following completion, would use the £80m figure.

What £100m buys

At 6% interest with a bullet structure, £100m of pre-tax operating surplus services approximately £1.67bn of debt before tax and maintenance capex are considered. Once those deductions are made, the true cash available for debt service of approximately £80m services approximately £1.33bn of debt at 6%. The modelled facility at opening is £2.2bn with an annual interest cost of £132m.

On the pre-tax operating surplus basis, the shortfall is £32m per year at 6%, £54m at 7% and £65m at 7.5%.

On a true cash available for debt service basis, the shortfall against the £132m annual coupon is £52m at 6%, £74m at 7% and £85m at 7.5%. At the rate implied by today’s gilt yields and Tottenham’s historical credit spread, approximately 7.2-7.5%, the true cash available for debt service covers approximately 50% of the annual interest.

The combined debt picture makes the position harder still. United’s existing financial debt, the $550m of senior secured notes refinanced in June 2026 at 5.36%, the $225m term loan and drawdown on the revolving credit facility, runs to approximately £700-800m in sterling terms. That does not retire when a new stadium opens. It sits alongside the stadium facility on the same consolidated balance sheet.

That leaves total financial debt with a new stadium of approximately £2.9-3bn. Annual interest at a blended 6% across the combined debt stack is approximately £175-180m per year. United should be able to achieve £200m Adjusted EBITDA in the Champions League at Old Trafford. Adding £100m incremental EBITDA still leaves total debt of a staggering 10x EBITDA. The total annual interest bill on club and stadium debt, at the most generous rate assumption, exceeds what United currently generates in operating cash flow before squad investment, transfer obligations or capital expenditure.

The pre-sale caveat

Various analyses propose that fan debentures and hospitality pre-sales reduce the debt quantum by raising upfront cash from season ticket holders and corporate buyers. The arithmetic is correct as far as it goes. The cost and longer-term impact is less frequently stated.

Pre-selling hospitality and fan bonds raises cash now against future revenues. That cash reduces the construction debt and therefore the annual interest bill. But those revenues are then not available as annual operating surplus once the stadium opens, because the seats and boxes are already committed at pre-sale, discounted prices. If you sell five years of hospitality at 50% upfront with a discount to secure the commitment, you save interest during construction but surrender that portion of the annual hospitality contribution for five years post-opening. It is not free money, and any model that counts pre-sales as reducing debt without also reducing future operating surplus is double-counting.

Mind the gap

The gap between what the new stadium can truly service and what it costs to build sits between approximately £870m at 6% and approximately £1.1bn at market rates. Tottenham found cheap financing because they refinanced at the bottom of a rate cycle. United will not get that opportunity, and no amount of structural creativity around SPVs or pre-sales changes the underlying arithmetic.

The equity requirement looks to be around £1bn. Even in a generous business case, United will need some big gifts from their owners to help pay for the stadium, whether from the Glazers, Ineos or a new shareholder because the cash flows simply aren’t enough.

Burnley’s £35m win rightly scared every club that has breached the Premier League and EFL Rules. However, the law that underpinned the decision was familiar to all breach of contract litigators. That one team could be liable to another for its losses is, contrary to the impression given, not news. Everton themselves, Sheffield United, Middlesbrough, Wycombe and others have ended up settling similar disputes in the past. Those settlements happened because the outcome was too uncertain a bet to take to a hearing. Burnley took the bet and so far it has paid off.

More surprisingly, that causation had to be proved at all was not inevitable. Burnley’s original position was that a Premier League Rule W compensation claim was a discretionary exercise, not requiring conventional proof of causation - Burnley sought compensation as a further sanction and not as established losses. Everton applied to have that issue determined as a preliminary matter. At the Construction Issue hearing on 20 September 2024 (Attachment 5 to the decision), the Commission ruled against Burnley, concluding that a Rule W claim is a contractual claim requiring conventional causation principles. An opposite ruling to that really would have been a game changer for Premier League disputes. But the irony is that winning it may have cost Everton far more than losing it. Had the sanction framing survived, the Commission would have been asked to exercise its broad discretion in awarding something to Burnley (and potentially others) without the need for highly complex and contentious probabilistic modelling.

At some point, Burnley decided that their case was strong enough to put it on a balance of probabilities basis, i.e., that it was more likely than not that but for its PSR breach Everton would have won 4 or more fewer points and been relegated instead of Burnley in 2021/22. Burnley’s experts Wilson/Daniels’ 12-year Scenario 1 showed a 69.54% to 29.39% relegation probability split in Burnley’s favour. That figure presumably gave Burnley confidence to go binary. The Commission’s eventual retreat to Scenario 4 narrowed that split to 50.51% against 47.59% on the inflation-adjusted figures: fine margins, as the Commission itself acknowledged.

Once the case was established on a balance of probabilities, Burnley was deemed to have survived, Everton to have been relegated and Burnley were entitled to recover damages in full - subject to appeal.

There are a number of arguments Everton will try at appeal. Some will try to be knockout points (see my other pieces on the 30 June argument) and others will be an attempt to move the probabilities just far enough below 50% to stymie Burnley.

In rejecting running an alternative loss of chance claim, Burnley turned down the opportunity to vastly improve their odds of coming away with something. In English law, a party can claim damages for the loss of an opportunity to achieve a beneficial outcome. So, had Burnley run a loss of chance claim, even if it had failed to prove that it would have avoided relegation absent Everton’s rule breach, it could have established that it lost the chance to stay up and that that chance had tangible value. Tribunals can assess the probability of a missed outcome and award damages proportionate to that likelihood. For example, if it had been determined that Burnley had, hypothetically, only a 25% chance of surviving, they could have recovered a commensurate 25% of the losses.

Burnley would have had to show that there was a “real and substantial” chance (not merely speculative) that Everton would have gained 4 (or more) fewer points had they not overspent. Given the Commission found for Burnley, the “real and substantial” hurdle would not have been a challenge.

The Commission would then have applied a percentage to the figure claimed to reflect its assessment of the likelihood that the event would have happened. An appeal would also be less likely to be binary. A loss of chance approach would have given the Appeal Board a percentage to adjust rather than a threshold to cross.

Even if Burnley do win their appeal and keep the £35m, the ultimate decision was clearly finely decided even with a relatively simple counterfactual. As such, I suspect it will greatly encourage claimant clubs to go for a safer loss of chance claim in the future. This is especially so in more nuanced factual situations.

Take 2022/23 for example. Nottingham Forest, Everton, and Leicester City all breached PSR limits in the same season. All were in a relegation battle with Leeds United and Southampton, who were both relegated. The obvious claim is that, but for the three clubs’ collective breaches, one or both would have survived. But the binary causation question has to be answered club by club. A claimant directing its claim at any one of the three breaching clubs faces the immediate objection that the other two were also overspending, and that the counterfactual has to account for what the table would have looked like if all three had complied simultaneously. The simulation in Burnley’s case replayed Everton’s 38 matches 100,000 times, holding all other clubs’ positions constant. That may work with one club but add two more and the margin of error compounds across every fixture each of them played. No tribunal will want to have to navigate that complex set of numbers and experts.

Furthermore, some future claims won’t involve relegation at all. A club finishing 14th and arguing that a competitor’s breach cost it a higher finish is making a prize money loss claim. The merit award gradient across Premier League positions is substantial (now at £3m per place). But the probability that the club would have finished in any particular higher position has to be assessed across a distribution of outcomes. There is no binary question, so loss of chance is more appropriate by default.

Burnley’s potential regret is quantifiable. A loss of chance claim maintained alongside it’s principal case would have secured a recovery at any probability above a real and substantial chance. Burnley traded that certainty for a shot at £35m. On these margins, that was a bold bet and one that may not be replicated by other clubs as some commentators have suggested. Meanwhile, Burnley and Everton should probably be discussing a settlement.

Stefan Borson is a lawyer, football finance commentator and Partner and Head of Sport at law firm, McCarthy Denning.

Three of the five clubs in the 2022/23 Premier League relegation battle had PSR breaches (one of them allegedly). The two that had complied with PSR went down - Leeds and Southampton. 2022/23 represents a systemic failure of competitive integrity in which Leeds were the principal victim and, after Burnley’s successful claim, they must be deep in discussion with their lawyers. The Times and now multiple Leeds sources have reported that Leeds are considering legal action vs Leicester. I suspect they are considering more than that. If not, it is surely only because they have already settled.

Start with the 2022/23 table:

Forest admitted a PSR breach of £34.5m above their £61m threshold in FY23. Their net transfer spend in summer 2022 alone was £142.8m. The Commission found that Forest “cannot claim that it had no sporting advantage” from that squad. Forest received a 4-point deduction but it was applied in 2023/24. In the season Leeds went down, Forest paid no regulatory price at all.

Everton's breaches and advantages are well known. Their FY22 breach gave them a squad advantage that also carried directly into 2022/23. Their FY23 breach added a further £16.6m over the threshold in the same season as Leeds’ relegation. The combined sanction, 6 points for FY22 and 2 points for FY23, was also applied in 2023/24. In 2022/23 itself, the season that determined Leeds’ fate, Everton was fielding a squad built on two consecutive years of overspending, with zero points deducted.

The Premier League were satisfied that Leicester also breached PSR in 2022/23 by £19.5m. Due to some clever technical arguments, Leicester just about got away with a formal PSR breach due to a finding that the Premier League did not have jurisdiction. But the underlying sporting advantage could still end up being established in law. Either way, they finished 18th with 34 points and were relegated. So whilst they didn’t fully enjoy the fruits of their overspend, Leicester paid no price at all, regulatory or financial. It could be argued they did receive an additional merit award above where they should have, worth around £2m.

What this means in competitive terms is striking. Every club in the bottom five of the 2022/23 Premier League, except Leeds and Southampton, had substantially exceeded the PSR in that season. All of them were fielding squads their financial position did not entitle them to field. None of them was penalised in the season the competition was decided and the clubs with the cleanest books finished 19th and 20th.

The head-to-head record makes the case stronger. In the six fixtures between Leeds and the three overspending clubs that season, Leeds took just 5 points from 18. Leicester and Everton took 4 points from the Leeds games alone. Forest took 3 points.

Nevertheless, Leeds’ causation challenge (proving that this collection of overspending caused Leeds’ relegation) is real. Leeds were 5 points from safety with an inferior goal difference. The expert counterfactual case Leeds would need to run is more complex than Burnley’s and the gap is larger. But the true counterfactual, one in which all three clubs were compliant, potentially shifts the competitive arithmetic in Leeds’ favour. Morally, it definitely does.

Forest spent £142.8m in a summer the PSR said it could not afford. Everton overspent for two consecutive years without a point deducted in either. Leicester overspent and paid nothing. Leeds had clean accounts and went down.

The 2022/23 relegation battle has now been shown to be a sham. Leeds spent two seasons in the Championship because of it whilst various Commissions heard cases about breaches by other clubs. Leeds are already said to have settled a small claim against Everton for 2021/22. The 2022/23 claim looks far bigger. They just need to work out who owes what.

Stefan Borson is a lawyer, football finance commentator and Partner and Head of Sport at law firm, McCarthy Denning.

Everton were clear in their statement last week that they consider the recent Compensation Commission’s interpretation of the PSRs to be fundamentally flawed and were dumbfounded that a breach was said to have occurred prior to 1 July 2022.

Initially, I called their chances of an appeal on this point an even-money shot, but having gone through the papers again, I think I was too generous. The appeal on this point will be much harder to win given what we know actually happened in 2021/22, Everton’s own actions and their latest admissions.

These are the agreed facts - Burnley were relegated on 22 May 2022, five weeks before Everton’s financial year for 2021/22 closed on 30 June. Everton breached the 2021/22 PSR by £19.5m above the £105m threshold and that PSR breach conferred a sporting advantage on Everton.

The Compensation Commission has now ordered Everton to pay Burnley £35m plus interest at 11.81% a year since 31 July 2025.

The attraction of an argument that says no breach occurred until 1 July 2022 is obvious. Everton say that it kills the claim entirely, rather than trimming it. Everton say that the PSR breach cannot have caused any recoverable loss to Burnley before what Everton say is the cause of action on 1 July 2022.

The Compensation Commission was asked to consider this knockout point first. It did not need to answer this question from scratch because similar arguments were recently run by Leicester City in a PL Rule W.62 appeal. Initially, Leicester were successful but in an appeal to a PL Rule X arbitration the legal point was decided the other way. What was particularly important was that the Rule X decision was delivered by two of the most respected minds on that specific issue - Lord Mance and Lord Neuberger as well as Michael Crane KC. Lord Mance and Lord Neuberger are both former Justices of the UK Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger its President until 2017 and Lord Mance its Deputy President until 2018. Both sat in the Supreme Court that considered each of the main authorities on contract construction.

In the Leicester case, Mance, Neuberger and Crane found a PSR breach is not a single event dated by an accounting reference period, but a state of affairs that develops across the season to which that financial year belongs.

Clearly persuaded by Mance, Neuberger and Crane, the Compensation Commission agreed in Everton’s case.

In fairness, there are a number of persuasive facts and admissions that do suggest even Everton didn’t and don’t believe the 1 July argument.

First, we can see from the appeal that Everton partially won, that they went into 2021/22 season with no margin at all. After losses of more than £110m in the two previous years, the Appeal Board found it needed to break even or better just to stay under £105m, what it called “no headroom.”

The Premier League knew it too, and said so. Under an August 2021 Agreement, Everton needed Premier League approval for every player it bought that season.

Each time the PL approved the purchase but warned Everton that “it was for Everton to ensure that it complied with the PSR.” Everton accepted there were two such warnings.

Then on 31 March 2022, Everton filed its own PSR Calculation, Form 3A, for the year. To stay under £105m it needed around £94m of exclusions: stadium interest, the Player X write-off, Covid costs, the youth transfer levy. Most were later rejected.

In its closing submissions, Everton said it would have sold an additional player to become PSR compliant before its financial year ended. But Farhad Moshiri turned down the only relevant offer in May 2022, a month before that deadline.

And finally, Everton accepted in the Compensation Commission that its PSR breach gave it a sporting advantage - the only question being the extent and impact of that advantage, ie the question of whether sporting advantage caused Burnley’s relegation.

Put together, on the 30 June/1 July point, Everton needs an Appeal Board to find that:

1. for all of the 21/22 season, the League was monitoring a PSR position that, on Everton’s case, did not yet exist;

2. Everton itself was managing a PSR and spending problem it now says had no legal reality or effect until 1 July 2022;

3. it should ignore everything that happened before 1 July 2022 on the pitch;

4. the Compensation Commission got its analysis wrong even with the benefit of the Leicester cases; and

5. the two former Supreme Court justices who decided a very similar point in the Leicester case and are responsible for most of the law on the matter got it wrong.

Everton’s own response to the compensation ruling calls it “a dangerous and unworkable precedent”, built on the idea that a club can be in breach of the rules at any point in a financial year.

The problem is Everton’s 2021/22 season was one monitored closely by the Premier League, in which Everton were repeatedly warned as to its compliance, filed forecasts of a breach in March 2022, and in which it now accepts it had a sporting advantage of some sort.

Everton are right that the Compensation Commission have set a precedent that a club can be in breach of PSR at any point in a financial year. The problem is that Everton’s own actions in respect of the 2021/22 season appear to agree. An Appeal Board now has to disagree with both.

Before Everton lost the Burnley compensation case, they tried to lose the judges. We learnt about that 2024 battle yesterday as part of the package of documents in the Commission’s decision. Everton had argued the panel could not give them a fair hearing. That panel has just sent them a bill for £35m.

The background is the part of the Everton saga everyone remembers. In November 2023, the Independent Commission of David Phillips KC, His Honour Alan Greenwood and Nick Igoe ACA hit Everton with a 10 point deduction for its admitted £19.5m 21/22 PSR breach. Everton appealed on nine grounds and won on two. The Appeal Board found in February 2024 that the Commission had wrongly held Everton to be “less than frank” and in breach of the Rule B.15 duty of utmost good faith, findings the Premier League had never pleaded, never put to witnesses and never argued. It also found the Commission had failed to consider the sanctioning benchmarks Everton had relied on, most obviously the EFL guidelines. The sanction came down from 10 points to 6.

Days later, Burnley revived its compensation claim, and under Rule W the claim goes back to the same Commission that determined sanction. Everton’s position, set out in its now published Grounds for Recusal of 12 April 2024 and argued by Laurence Rabinowitz KC at the IDRC on 10 May 2024, was blunt. A panel whose decision had been found to contain errors of that character, including a finding of bad faith reached without the point ever being argued, could not fairly and properly determine a £50m claim arising out of the very same breach. Burnley, through Ruth Byrne KC, said the threshold for a tribunal removing itself is high and nowhere near met.

Everton ran two routes. The first was apparent bias on the Porter v Magill test, whether the fair-minded and informed observer, having considered the facts, would conclude there was a real possibility the tribunal was biased. Rabinowitz pointed to the gravity of the errors combined with the exceptional public interest in the case, and handed up press coverage to prove the scrutiny. The second was an “appropriateness” argument built by analogy with sections 24 and 68 of the Arbitration Act 1996, the provisions for removing an arbitrator and for refusing to remit an award where there has been a serious irregularity causing substantial injustice. The B.15 duty of good faith finding, reached without the point being pleaded or argued, was said to be exactly that kind of irregularity.

There were two quieter points underneath. Phillips had past professional contact with Burnley’s solicitors and had sat on two FA tribunals with Matt Williams of Burnley. And Igoe’s seat on the panel exists because a PSR Commission requires an accountant, a requirement that says nothing about a commercial damages claim, which a fresh tribunal of three lawyers could hear. Everton recognised that this past activity did not of itself constitute a basis for recusal but pointed to such issues in the context of what was a “peculiarly sensitive” case.

Perhaps surprisingly to observers, the very same Commission was constituted to consider the Grounds for Recusal essentially asking itself if it was biased and unfit to continue.

Less surprisingly, the Commission dismissed the application on 22 May 2024. It refused to accept that appointment under the Premier League Rules differs from judicial or arbitral appointment: once appointed, the panel is under a duty to sit, and that a judge must resist the temptation to recuse simply because it would be more comfortable, otherwise litigants select their judges by criticising the ones they do not want.

On apparent bias, the Commission said the informed observer would read both decisions, see that seven of nine grounds failed, that the breach finding itself was never appealed (given the PSR breach was admitted by Everton it is hard to see how this was a relevant point), and that the injustice had already been remedied by the reduction from 10 points to 6.

On the Arbitration Act analogy, it noted the Appeal Board never used the specific words “serious irregularity”, characterising the failures as “legal errors”, and that the Premier League regime is built differently from arbitration. The compensation claim was a separate exercise focused on Burnley’s losses rather than Everton’s conduct, arriving before the panel effectively as a new claim. The panel, it said of itself, comprised senior professionals selected from a specialist panel who could be trusted to decide dispassionately.

So Everton stayed in front of the three men whose findings on frankness and good faith had just been set aside on procedural fairness grounds.

Two years on, that same panel has found against Everton on causation, on the date of breach, on the counterfactual, and on quantum, preferring Burnley’s experts at almost every contested turn, and Everton’s club statement calls the decision fundamentally flawed in both law and fact. None of that proves the recusal application was right. Tribunals decide against parties who challenged them without that being evidence of anything, and the Commission accepted several of Everton’s quantum points along the way, cutting Burnley’s £51.7m claim to £26m before interest.

Nevertheless, it is worth standing back and thinking about how Premier League Rule W works. Rule W routes a compensation claim of an unlimited size back to the very panel that sanctioned the original breach, with no mechanism at all for removing a Commission member, with limited impact of any Appeal Board disagreement and with the panel ruling on its own impartiality.

This Commission decided, about itself, that a fair-minded and informed observer would conclude that it could be trusted. Everton, another £35m lighter, are entitled to wonder what that observer would say now.

Stefan Borson is a lawyer, football finance commentator and Partner and Head of Sport at law firm, McCarthy Denning.

Burnley have won big, for now. The same Independent Commission that hit Everton with a 10 point deduction in 2023 has assessed compensation to one club at £35m, including pre-award interest to 31 July 2025, and the meter is still running at 11.81% a year. A causation finding was made on the balance of probabilities, not loss of a chance, which means no percentage discount was applied to the quantum. Everton will now appeal and in writing this short piece I moved my assessment of their chances of success upwards.

Most of the appeal is hard going. The Commission preferred Professor Rob Wilson and William Daniels to Derek Holt on causation, and it made a long series of line-by-line quantum adjustments between Richard Boulton KC FCA and Louis Dudney CPA. An appeal board does not reopen that kind of finding, and it will not re-run the 100,000 (one hundred thousand) simulations that Wilson and Daniels built to see whether it likes the answer better the second time. Those grounds are there to be argued but they are unlikely to be won.

One ground is different. It is a clean point of law, and it is the only point that kills the claim outright rather than shaving the figure. It is about 30 June.

The two dates are not in dispute. Burnley were relegated on 22 May 2022 and Everton’s financial year ended on 30 June 2022, and from that gap Everton builds a single proposition. There can be no PSR breach until the year end, because that is the first moment the accounts exist and the PSR calculation can be done, and until then a club can still cure an incipient overspend by selling players or other assets. So the breach crystallised no earlier than 1 July 2022, by which time Burnley were already down and the loss had come before the cause. Everton cites McGregor on Damages (35th edition) for the point that you cannot recover for a loss suffered before the cause of action arose, a proposition the textbook says is hardly controverted.

It is a good argument, and the Commission said so.

It conceded the force of the simplicity and accepted that McGregor needs no authority, then took the argument apart at the one joint holding it together. The whole thing depends on the premise that the breach cannot predate 30 June, and remove that premise and the argument collapses. The Commission removed it on construction. Everton’s reading is literal, and a literal reading does not reflect a regime that ties every financial year to a playing season and treats the breach as a state of affairs that develops across the year rather than a single event on a fixed date. Everton was on a path to a £19.5m overspend for months and did not make the sales it could have made. In 2023, Everton and its Commission had in mind the disposal of players to cure a breach during the financial year.

But since the Commission wrote its original decision in 2023, first Chelsea and then Villa, Newcastle and Everton themselves have been permitted to use other transactions to cure breaches.

The 2023 tribunal framed Everton’s escape route as selling players, the obvious lever, and then held it against the club that it did not pull it. But the menu is now wider - Chelsea sold its hotels and then its women’s team to itself before its year end to book a profit for PSR purposes. In doing so, some would argue, it consigned PSR to the dustbin as it confirmed PSR was nothing to do with on-field compliance or sustainability. Villa, Newcastle and Everton have followed.

A club no longer needs to touch its playing squad to come back within the threshold by 30 June. It can sell a building on 29 June - to itself. The more routine that manoeuvre becomes, the harder it is to say the breach was fixed and irreversible a month earlier, in May, while Burnley were being relegated, and the literal construction feeds on exactly that contingency. Everton do still have the issue that their management team didn’t do any of these things at the time.

The Leicester saga shows Everton are not running a hopeless appeal. The Leicester Disciplinary Commission went purposive; the Appeal Board went literal and overturned it, accepting precisely the kind of construction Everton now advances; and the Leicester Rule X tribunal then went purposive again and overturned the Appeal Board. Everton is going to run an argument that beat the Premier League in front of the Leicester Appeal Board.

Everton also has a distinction worth making. Leicester was about whether the League could charge a relegated club at all, which is a membership question, whereas Burnley is about the timing of an admitted breach for the purpose of a rival’s damages claim. Everton can say the rules were drafted to protect the League’s power to prosecute, not to date a breach early enough to fund someone else’s compensation, and McGregor gives that distinction orthodox backing.

None of that is necessarily fatal to Burnley. Burnley will also say the cure argument proves too much, because if every projected overspend stays contingent until 30 June then the PSR bites on nobody during the season it is built to police.

I now make this an even-money appeal on this point. I started much more sceptical that Everton could win but I struggle with a purposive approach when intra-group sales have been deemed acceptable routes to a PSR cure.

The 30 June argument is Everton’s best appeal ground by a distance and it is the only one that wins the whole case rather than a slice of it. It still asks the appeal board to prefer the Leicester Appeal Board’s overturned literal reading to the Leicester Rule X tribunal’s purposive one. But the appeal board will be looking at a PSR regime in which a club can now manufacture compliance using a totally unrelated property sale on 29 June. And that makes Everton’s case that the breach had not yet crystallised in May 2022 a good deal less artificial than it reads on the page.

It was previously established that Everton spent £19.5m to avoid relegation in May 2022 largely due to Farhad Moshiri’s own evidence. Everton now seek to argue it had not yet broken the rules when Burnley went down in May 2022. Both things cannot comfortably be true, but the appeal board may decide they do not have to be.

Stefan Borson is a lawyer, football finance commentator and Partner and Head of Sport at law firm, McCarthy Denning. He is available to advise all football club claimants and defendants on matters of compensation.

On 28 May 2026, the Financial Reporting Council (“FRC”) fined Manchester City’s auditors BDO £1.33 million for audit failures that the regulator described as "numerous and pervasive" in respect of NMCN PLC (“NMCN”). The career of NMCN’s former audit partner is effectively over.

The FRC published its fifty-page findings and for those cynical about what comfort audits give, it was potentially viewed as vindication. In fact, in the context of Manchester City and the 115 charges, it proves the opposite.

If a Manchester City audit was a rubber stamp before 2023, it was much more after

When the Premier League filed its charges against Manchester City in February 2023, the immediate conversation was legal. Lawyers, timelines, the composition of the independent commission, the evidentiary threshold. But what did those charges oblige Manchester City’s auditors, BDO, to do from that moment forward even if they hadn’t before.

Before getting to 2023, it is worth remembering the wider timeline. The allegations did not arrive suddenly. UEFA investigated and settled with City in 2014. Der Spiegel published the Football Leaks documents in November 2018. The Premier League began its own investigation in December 2018. UEFA banned the club in February 2020 before CAS overturned it in July 2020. Each of those events was, on any reasonable reading, information that a statutory auditor was required to assess under the accounting rules.

Whether those obligations were met in full in the years before February 2023 is unknown. What is not debatable is that from the moment the Premier League filed 115 specific charges in February 2023 with chapter and verse on which financial years were in issue, which arrangements were challenged, and which individuals were implicated, any residual ambiguity about whether the audit risk environment had materially changed was gone. If the obligations were avoided before then, they became inescapable from that point on.

Those obligations are written into the auditing standards that every statutory auditor in the UK is required to follow. The FRC’s published reprimand of BDO in respect of NMCN, tells us what happens when those obligations are not met.

Manchester City’s 115 charges, like those pursued by UEFA, appear to allege systematic misstatement of financial information across almost a decade, covering sponsorship revenue, player and manager remuneration, and the obstruction of regulatory investigations. Once those allegations were made (be they in 2014, 2018, 2020, 2021 or 2023), the identification of fraud risk requires the auditor to fundamentally reassess their understanding of the entity’s control environment. Under International Standards on Auditing (“ISA”) 240, the fraud-specific standard, the auditor must design procedures specifically responsive to that risk rather than continuing with a standard substantive approach. Under ISA 200, the auditor must plan and perform the entire audit with professional skepticism, which the standard defines as “a questioning mind” and “a critical assessment of audit evidence.”

These are not optional enhancements to audit processes, rather they are the floor.

The FRC report on BDO’s audit of NMCN describes, in admitted detail, what happens when an auditor treats the floor as the ceiling. The findings are worth understanding because they describe what failure and faulty audits look like, which in turn defines what the correct approach is.

BDO audited NMCN, a construction group listed on the London Stock Exchange, for the financial year ended 31 December 2019. The FRC found breaches across ten areas. The audit team’s working papers, the FRC found, “merely reproduced management’s responses at a high level and asserted that documentary evidence had been seen, without properly identifying the contracts tested, describing the procedures performed, or retaining the evidence reviewed.” Cash receipts “were not verified by reference to independent bank statements, relying instead on internally-produced reports.” On a £7.8 million cash forecast variance identified early in the forecast period, the audit file “simply recorded management’s explanation... without showing any independent testing of that claim.”

What BDO produced, in other words, was documentation that had the appearance of scrutiny. The FRC’s finding was that the substance was not there. The opinion said one thing but the evidence behind it was insufficient to support it.

What that means for any auditor of Manchester City

Translate that failure into the post-February 2023 position of any auditor engaged with Manchester City’s accounts and the professional obligations become very clear.

The first obligation is to go around management to primary sources. The FRC’s criticism of BDO on this point is explicit and repeated. BDO relied on “internally-produced reports” rather than independent bank statements. It accepted management’s explanations of variances without independent testing. It recorded what it was told rather than verifying what it was told. When fraud is alleged, management is a compromised source by definition. An auditor who continues to rely on internally-produced information in that environment is not performing an audit. They are performing a compromised transcription service.

For an auditor with Manchester City as a client from 2023 onwards, this means that every significant figure touching the areas covered by the charges requires verification from sources that management does not control. Bank statements, not management cash flow summaries. Third-party confirmations direct from Etihad, Etisalat and other sponsors, not internal schedules. External legal documentation, not management representations. Under ISA 505, external confirmation procedures would be the expected and appropriate approach in this environment. Under ISA 240 paragraph 32, the auditor must incorporate an element of unpredictability into their procedures precisely to counter the risk that management has anticipated and shaped the information trail.

Practically, the auditor also has something that makes this task considerably more directed than a general fraud trawl. The charges themselves, the Premier League’s pleadings, Manchester City’s defence, and the documentary record put to City in the case, constitute a detailed road map for BDO. The auditor knows which years are in issue, which sponsorship arrangements are challenged, which remuneration structures are alleged to have been obscured, and which third parties are said to have been involved. ISA 240 requires the auditor to make inquiries of management and others within the entity about their knowledge of fraud. Management's answers to those inquiries were, from February 2023 at the latest, testable against a specific, detailed set of allegations.

The finance director who says the Etihad arrangements were straightforward arm’s length transactions can be asked to substantiate that against the specific documentary record that has been placed before the independent commission. The auditor is not fishing, they have a map.

The second obligation is to expand the scope of testing to cover what the FRC calls “the residual population”. One of the most damning findings against BDO is that 44% of NMCN’s contract revenue, amounting to £179.6 million, received no substantive testing at all. The FRC described this as “a serious failing” and found that the audit team “disregarded this untested population and gave little or no consideration to the associated risks.”

The professional logic is straightforward. Sophisticated financial misconduct does not confine itself to the areas an auditor is most likely to examine. The whole architecture of what the Premier League alleges, payments routed through third parties, sponsorship figures inflated by equity injections, remuneration structures obscured by intermediaries, is designed to be distributed and therefore harder to see in any single place. An auditor who tests the obvious and leaves the residual population unexamined has produced an opinion that covers the whole and tested only part. Post-charge, that is, again, not a defensible position.

BDO’s own technical and compliance teams will have made this point internally with considerable force. In any major audit firm, a public fraud allegation against a significant client triggers an internal review process that sits alongside the audit itself. The engagement partner does not decide alone what enhanced procedures are required. The firm’s risk and technical functions have their own interest in ensuring the current year audit is defensible, and equally in understanding whether the prior years, across which the allegations run, were adequate. Many years of alleged misstatement means multiple audit cycles to be retrospectively examined. The engagement partner who signs off without documented evidence of that internal challenge process has a personal exposure that the BDO report makes vivid: a severe reprimand, a financial penalty, and a declaration that the audit report they signed did not satisfy the relevant requirements. For a senior partner, that declaration is also a likely end to a career. In NMCN, the FRC found that Geraint Jones, with 26 years of auditing experience and 15 as a BDO partner, bore personal responsibility alongside the firm. The individual cannot shelter behind the institution.

The third obligation is to stress-test every assumption that management provides in areas touched by the allegations. The FRC found that BDO accepted NMCN’s management’s cash flow assumptions “at face value” even when those assumptions were internally contradictory. The FRC found this was a breach of the professional skepticism requirement under ISA 570.

Post-2023, any assumption that City’s management provides about revenue recognition, the valuation of sponsorship arrangements, or the completeness of remuneration disclosures requires independent corroboration. ISA 540 requires the auditor to test the data on which accounting estimates are based and to consider whether management’s assumptions are reasonable. A working paper that records only management’s explanation is not sufficient. The contrary evidence must be identified, the challenge documented and independent testing performed.

BDO’s ultimate power

There is a harder question underneath all of this. What does an auditor do if they put these obligations and processes into practice and find that Manchester City cannot or will not provide what is needed?

The FRC report and the auditing standards together describe a clear escalation path. If an auditor cannot obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence, they cannot issue an clean audit (unmodified) opinion. The options are a modified opinion under ISA 705, which flags the limitation, or resignation from the engagement.

Under section 519 of the Companies Act 2006, an auditor who resigns is required to deposit a statement of circumstances at the company's registered office explaining whether there are circumstances connected with the resignation that should be brought to the attention of the members. Under section 521, the company must send a copy of that statement to the registrar of companies. It goes on the public register at Companies House. If the statement contains “circumstances” and a resignation citing inability to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence plainly would, the company is additionally required under section 520 to circulate it to all members, and under section 522 to send it to the FRC as the appropriate audit authority. Manchester City is not a listed company, so there is no statutory obligation to publish it on a website. But it is a public document and it sits on the register. Everyone can and would read it.

It barely needs saying but a resignation by a major audit firm from a football club facing 115 financially related charges is not a mere administrative event. The resignation itself would be public regardless of what the statement said. The FRC would be informed and the inference drawn by every informed observer from an auditor’s resignation in that context, citing inability to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence, would be unambiguous and devastating.

2025: A new audit partner

The senior audit partner who understands all of this has a very clear personal incentive to obtain the evidence properly. The NMCN report describes what happens to the partner who does not.

In 2025, a new Senior Statutory Auditor, Sakib Isa, took on the City engagement. It is hard to believe that Mr Isa would risk his career and professional standing to protect a football club, knowing what the allegations say and what the evidence presented back to BDO looked like.

A disinfected chalice?

The professional obligations triggered by publicly filed fraud allegations are not dischargeable by recording what management says and moving on. They require independent verification, expanded scope, challenged assumptions, documented skepticism, and an internal process that any reasonable engagement partner knows will itself be scrutinised. The charges, the pleadings and the documentary record gave the auditor everything they needed to ask the right questions.

The FRC's reprimand of BDO in respect of NMCN was reported as a story about a collapsed builder and a firm that fell well short. Read alongside the 115 charges and an independent commission now deliberating its verdict, it is something more. It is a detailed account of what an audit looks like when the difficult questions are not asked.

The professional standards, the firm wide and personal consequences of not doing so, and the road map handed to them by the charges themselves, have made not asking those questions unthinkable. The signature of Mr Isa on Manchester City’s 2025 accounts is not the end of this story.

But it does tell us one thing with certainty - someone looked, someone asked, and someone was prepared to stand behind the answers with his career. And that person is almost certainly not a Manchester City fan.

In September 2024, Ferran Soriano sat down with the Financial Times to explain why Manchester City had spent just €25m in the summer window while the rest of the Premier League dispersed €2.3bn. Putting to one side how poor a decision that quickly became, Soriano explained why. Other clubs changed their manager every two years, he said and life became very difficult because you had to rethink the whole thing. City’s edge was stability. Their financial situation was stable because their football situation was stable. In other words, as the song goes (or rather went), “We’ve got Guardiola.”

He said all this when he must have known that the countdown to when he would have to deal with succession was ticking fast. It arrived barely a year later.

Soriano published his book Goal: The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance: Management Ideas from the World of Football in 2011. Ignoring the awful title, unsurprisingly, the book argues that football success is method rather than fortune. Within it, the book reproduces the document used to guide the succession from Frank Rijkaard to Guardiola in 2008 - the nine criteria Soriano, Txiki Begiristain and Marc Ingla produced when choosing between Pep and Jose Mourinho. Soriano includes it because he believes the process is sound and replicable. Reading Maresca’s appointment through those criteria is perhaps a guide to what Soriano was looking for and what he believes he has found.

Begiristain and Ingla took the document to Lisbon as their interview script with Mourinho. They returned with a single concern. Mourinho’s method generated media conflict almost permanently, making him a potential source of internal tension. The document had a specific criterion on this: the coach acts as one of the club’s permanent weekly representatives, acts cautiously, respects opponents and institutions, avoids manufactured controversy. Against that standard, Mourinho’s track record read as a disqualifier. He had been formidably impressive in Lisbon. On almost every other criterion he was compelling. But criterion six was enough to kill him.

Maresca presents the opposite profile. His tendency at Chelsea was toward restraint, indeed he was occasionally criticised for being too controlled with the press. He generates no controversy of the kind that was disqualifying in 2008. On the media criterion, the appointment is clean.

The first criterion on Soriano’s list requires the Director of Football to hold the power of final decision on signings, renewals, and dismissals, with neither the Director of Football nor board having a say in team selection or match approach. Criterion eight reinforces this with the document’s most emphatic statement, reproduced in capitals: The Board of Directors must NEVER influence technical decisions. Without them, the other criteria cannot produce what they are designed to produce.

Maresca’s time at Chelsea was a direct demonstration of the criterion’s importance. He built a coherent culture at Stamford Bridge, delivered trophies, but left in January 2026 with years remaining on his contract. The relationship(s) with the board and Director(s) of Football failed. The dressing room held strong in their loyalty even to the extent of dooming Rosenoir to failure. So Maresca arrives at City knowing the criterion from the wrong side of its collapse.

At City, the relationship with Hugo Viana will be critical. Begiristain had Soriano’s backing and a relationship with Guardiola built across two clubs and considerable shared history. The axis was almost certain to work. Viana arrived eighteen months ago and he and Maresca are constructing their working relationship now, in an initial transfer window, under post-Pep scrutiny. The book’s analysis of management team development is direct - capable, ambitious people who do not yet know each other under pressure will compete over decisions before they settle. At Barcelona in 2003, Soriano says the board took eighteen months to reach its working rhythm, almost exactly how long Maresca got at Chelsea before both parties pulled the plug. Soriano’s patience will surely be longer.

On playing style, the document requires continuous balance between attractive football and efficiency, built on a 4-3-3 base. There is a requirement to build on the predecessor’s legacy and football concepts. Guardiola was not asked to demolish what Rijkaard had established but to refine and extend it. Maresca’s appointment carries exactly the same instruction. From EDS head coach at City to treble assistant in 2022-23, Championship title at Leicester and Conference League and Club World Cup at Chelsea, his career has been built on possession-based football the City system recognises at every level.

Soriano’s list also required experience but with a deliberate qualifier: highly qualified personally if not very experienced. The clause was essential in 2008 when Guardiola had no meaningful head coaching record. By 2026, Maresca has a Championship title, a Conference League win, a top-four Premier League finish and a Club World Cup. Guardiola said of him what he had said watching Arteta, that he would become an extraordinary manager. Perhaps the qualifier barely applies now. Or perhaps there are so few experienced and decorated managers that needs must.

The dressing room management criterion demands careful managing of star players and a meritocratic captain model that generates real leadership from within the group. At Barcelona, Guardiola’s response was immediate and he moved Ronaldinho and Deco on quickly and kept Eto’o despite pressure to sell him, because he had read each player’s commitment correctly before he arrived. Viana and Maresca’s challenge is different. The level of ego at City is relatively low and only Dias, Ake, Foden, Rodri and Haaland remain from the Treble, with Grealish still a likely departee. Two seasons without the Premier League and a raft of new players limit the need for squad surgery of the type required at Barcelona in 2008.

Criterion nine settled the 2008 choice and perhaps it did so again in 2026. Soriano was insistent on the importance of knowledge of the club and its surroundings, cutting down the learning curve by arriving already familiar with what you are stepping into. In 2008, Mourinho had no recent knowledge (he had been Bobby Robson's and Louis Van Gaal’s assistant but had left in 2000) whilst Guardiola had spent his formative years inside that Barcelona dressing room and from 2007 managed the Barcelona B team.

Maresca passes criterion nine better than any other available candidate in 2026. He knows the staff, the culture, and the philosophy from the inside. He is not Vincent Kompany but Kompany is busy elsewhere.

Soriano writes in the book about the La Masia model with a formulation that applies directly to what he has built at City. The CFG model was designed to make coaching succession survivable by embedding the philosophy so completely that the next coach arrives already speaking the language. Maresca appears to fit that.

So against the nine criteria, the appointment holds on most dimensions.

Soriano said stability was the thing. He was right. He also wrote the document for when it has to be rebuilt. The 2008 version produced the greatest coach of his generation. The 2026 version has produced someone who was there for the treble, understands the system from the inside, and was identified years ago as a potential candidate to protect it. Whether the document holds across a different era is next season’s central question.

Soriano would say he always does it by the book. In more ways than one, we will know soon enough if that is the case.

Watching one long-serving figure after another say goodbye at the Etihad, it was hard not to feel that Manchester City were losing something larger than personnel.

Pep’s fixer. Pep’s fitness coach. Pep’s lieutenant. Pep’s former captain. Pep’s former former captain. Pep’s favourite goalkeeper. Pep himself.

On and on it went. Not just departures, but relationships. Years of shared experiences, habits, instinct and mutual confidence walking out of the building at the same time.

That is what makes the next phase at City so fascinating and challenging. This is not simply a football problem. It is an organisational succession problem.

All you need is trust

Stephen Covey, in The Speed of Trust, argued that high-trust relationships reduce what he called transaction costs: the friction, second-guessing, internal politics and hidden drag that consume organisations operating at lower levels of confidence. In high-trust environments, speed goes up and cost comes down. Decisions take less time because people do not need to re-litigate motives, competence or alignment at every turn.

City under Guardiola, Txiki Begiristain, Ferran Soriano and Khaldoon Al Mubarak, were the football version of that idea.

This week, Guardiola himself kept returning to trust. Asked again about the Premier League charges, he did not reach for legal argument or procedural detail. He reached for relationships. “I trust them,” he said. “I spoke with them and trust how they behave and how they did.” It was a revealing answer because it was not really about the legal case at all. It was about the emotional basis on which he had operated for a decade. Guardiola’s public position has consistently been that he trusted the people above him and would wait for the resolution. Only the tardiness of the three panel members spoiled that plan.

That trust ran through the club in several directions at once. Downwards, from manager to players. Sideways, across Guardiola, Begiristain and Soriano. Upwards, towards Al Mubarak and the ownership. It was not merely that City had good executives or good coaches. It was that the key people believed in one another deeply enough to act with unusual speed and coherence.

The Tast Català story also says something real about trust. Guardiola, Soriano, Begiristain and CFG non-executive director Marty Edelman were among the figures behind the Catalan restaurant in Manchester. It closed in December 2025 after seven years, citing difficult trading conditions and rising costs but also giving an early symbolic nod to what ended yesterday. The restaurant was not important in itself but reinforces just how close these relationships have been.

Harvard professor John Kotter's work on leading change identifies the “guiding coalition” as the critical mechanism of transformation: the group of people with sufficient authority, credibility and mutual trust to sustain direction together. At City, that coalition of Al Mubarak, Soriano, Begiristain and Guardiola is now substantially dismantled along with a number of the support acts such as Buenaventura, Estiarte, and Mancisidor off the pitch and Bernardo, Gundogan and De Bruyne on it. What remains is Al Mubarak, Soriano for now, a new director of football in Hugo Viana who has been in post for eighteen months, and a manager who has not yet taken a session. The trust and guiding coalition has to be rebuilt between people who have not yet been through years of experiences together. That process cannot be accelerated by resource or goodwill alone.

Ferguson, Wenger and the cost of losing trust

United’s decline after Ferguson retired in 2013 is inexplicable when assessed by managerial quality alone. Moyes was experienced and highly regarded. Van Gaal had won titles across three countries. Mourinho had won the Champions League twice. Each failed comprehensively as did the others that followed. The real answer is that Ferguson with David Gill had been the key mechanism of trust at United for so long that the institution had forgotten how to function without them. What United retained when they left was the expectation of winning without the trusting internal relationships that had produced it. Thirteen years on, they have not won the title or even been close.

United did not have a succession in 2013, they had two vacancies. The consequences of confusing them are still visible today even though you can clearly see the attempt to rebuild a guiding and trusted coalition between Omar Barrada, Jason Wilcox and the ownership. Ruben Amorim’s difficulty in joining that coalition led to his rapid demise.

Arsenal’s lesson is different but equally relevant. Arsène Wenger left behind an identity, but that identity was deeply personal. Unai Emery inherited a club whose emotional and cultural habits had been formed over 22 years by one man. When the trust did not transfer, Emery’s authority did not transfer either.

Mikel Arteta’s eventual success is instructive precisely because he did not try to preserve Wengerism and because of the passage of time. He built something different and forced the club to live through the discomfort and the cost of his vision taking shape. The Özil and Aubameyang decisions were not just squad-management calls. They were decisions about trust and authority. Arteta was telling the dressing room that his culture was real and that no individual sat above it. The ownership, in turn, were telling the outside world that they trusted the manager enough to absorb the short-term pain and cost.

That may be the closest available model for City if the first phase after Guardiola is difficult. Not because City are Arsenal, or because Maresca is Arteta, but because genuine succession usually requires more than tactical continuity. It requires an institution to decide what must be preserved, what must be discarded and how much pain it is prepared to tolerate while the new structure forms and some individuals resist.

City are better placed than United were in 2013 and better placed than Arsenal were in 2018. Their infrastructure is real, the squad remains strong and the financial resources are enormous. And the ownership and Khaldoon has shown a level of patience and strategic consistency that is rare in elite football.

But it is still undeniable that a vast amount of the intangible has just left the building. The Premier League will not wait for City to process that loss.

What Maresca must do

Following Guardiola is, therefore, not just an unenviable football task. It is a test of whether City’s internal structures can deal with the loss of the man around whom so much of it was built.

Maresca will need to earn trust downwards, from a dressing room that knows exactly what elite management feels like. He will need to earn it sideways, with Hugo Viana and the technical structure. He will need to earn it upwards, with Soriano, Khaldoon and the ownership.

Maresca should not try and be Guardiola-lite, deploying the vocabulary and mannerisms without the authority or credibility that made it work for Pep. A dressing room shaped by a decade of the real thing will recognise imitation immediately. Guardiola himself made the point in his farewell week saying the next manager cannot simply be “copy and paste”.

Maresca built trust rapidly with those below him in the dressing room at Chelsea but the mutual distrust with his superiors ultimately led to their parting. It is this lesson that may be the most important he learned in West London.

City still have the money, lots of good players, 60,000 seats and world leading infrastructure. What they now have to rebuild is the thing that made all of those advantages move as one for a decade.

Trust.

It is imminent. Again. We have been here before, which is why a caveat is necessary. But let us assume the judgment finally arrives in June 2026. It will be more than six hundred days since the hearing kicked off. It will have been approximately nineteen months between the close of the twelve-week hearing in late 2024 and the delivery of the Independent Commission’s (IC) verdict.

That is not acceptable but the question here is whether it is more than unacceptable. The question is whether a delay of that length renders whatever they have written unsafe.

This is not an abstract question and it is not a new one. The courts have been dealing with the consequences of delayed judgments for decades, and the case law is both clear and uncomfortable reading for anyone hoping the IC’s eventual verdict will be treated as unimpeachable.

The starting point is that judgments should be delivered within three months of the end of a hearing. That rule was stated with force by Sir Geoffrey Vos, then Chancellor of the High Court, in Bank St Petersburg v Arkhangelsky [2020] EWCA Civ 408: “Justice delayed is justice denied. The parties to civil and particularly commercial litigation are entitled to receive their judgments within a reasonably short period of time. That period should not be longer than three months. As has been repeatedly said any other approach will lead to a loss of public and business confidence in our justice system.”

The Court of Appeal endorsed those words expressly in NatWest Markets v Bilta [2021] EWCA Civ 680, a case to which this piece will return in some detail.

In practice, complex cases are rarely decided in three months but it is more than a worthy aim. A judgment given promptly can be assumed to have been prepared with a full recollection of the relevant evidence. Once that assumption can no longer be made, everything that follows is more fragile.

One of the leading authorities on what happens when a judgment is seriously delayed is Goose v Wilson Sandford & Co [1998] TLR 85, where a delay of approximately twenty months led the Court of Appeal to order a retrial because some of the judge’s conclusions were unsafe. The court held that even though the judge had transcripts of the evidence, the delay itself had weakened his advantage: at a distance of twenty months, a fact-finder is denied the opportunity to return to difficult credibility questions and cross-check their written reasoning against the live impressions formed at trial. The court’s language was unsparing. Delay on that scale “weakens public confidence in the whole judicial process” and, left unchecked, would be “ultimately subversive of the rule of law.”

In Bond v Dunster Properties Ltd [2011] EWCA Civ 455, a case of twenty-two months’ delay, the Court of Appeal went further in specifying the test. The question on appeal is not simply whether the judge was plainly wrong. If the reviewing court finds that the judge’s recollection of the evidence was at fault on any material point, it will order a retrial unless it can be satisfied the judge came to the right conclusion. That is a harder test to satisfy than the ordinary appelate standard. Crucially, it shifts the burden so that after a serious delay, the question is not whether the error is obvious but whether the outcome can be confirmed as correct.

Then there is Bilta. In May 2021, the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial following a nineteen-month delay (side eyes emoji) in Mr Justice Snowden’s judgment after a five-week fraud trial. The court was unambiguous. The delay was “plainly inexcusable” and “should not have happened and should not have been allowed to happen, particularly in a case where there were allegations of dishonesty, and the reputations and future employment prospects of the individuals concerned were at stake.”

Nineteen months. The same period, give or take, as the wait in the Manchester City case. And a case, like this one, where the most serious allegations go directly to honesty and where the reputations of individuals and an institution are at stake.

How Bilta actually works

The mechanism by which the delay caused the retrial in Bilta is the most important thing to understand, and it is more precise than the general principle about fading recollection.

The judge in Bilta had the benefit of transcripts, extensive written pleadings and had plainly worked hard on the judgment. He was not found to have forgotten what witnesses said. The problem was different and twofold.

First, the Court of Appeal held that certain contemporaneous documents relied upon by the defendants had not been addressed in the judgment at all. In a judgment delivered within a reasonable time, silence on a document is not automatically a defect. A judge is not required to address every point and document, and the omission of evidence can ordinarily be assumed to reflect a considered view that it did not alter the outcome. After a nineteen-month delay, the court held, that assumption is unavailable. As it put it at paragraph 96: “A judgment given in a timely fashion can be assumed to have been prepared with a full recollection of the relevant evidence. However, the 19-month delay means we cannot make that assumption.” Every gap in the reasoning becomes a potential appeal point rather than a presumed deliberate choice.

Second, and more subtly, the court found that even a judge who had “meticulously re-read all the transcripts” and “did not forget or omit consideration of any material parts of the evidence” might still have been “less able to deal with findings made in the round, perhaps because the findings on one part of the case were made at such a remove [sic] in time from other findings.”

This is the compartmentalisation problem. In a complex multi-issue case, the risk is not simply that individual credibility assessments become unreliable. It is that the judgment loses internal coherence and findings on one set of issues drafted at one point in time become disconnected from findings on related issues drafted months later, and the panel fails to stand back and consider the effects and implications of everything it has found taken together.

For a case involving three judges, 115 charges spanning nine seasons across multiple regulatory frameworks, this second point is the more significant one. The IC’s judgment will need to address financial reporting charges for the early seasons, contract and remuneration disclosure charges for a further period, PSR charges for the later seasons, and cooperation failures running across years of investigation. Demonstrating that those findings are internally coherent and that the treatment of conduct in, say, 2010 has been properly weighed against the regulatory backdrop of materially changing rules is an extraordinarily demanding drafting task, and one that becomes harder the longer the period between hearing and writing.

Why this is not a simple parallel

The cases above concern the tardiness of High Court judges, not private arbitration or disciplinary panels. The IC is a private disciplinary tribunal and its awards are governed by English law, contract and the Arbitration Act 1996 in particular.

Importantly, the IC has three members rather than one, which provides some mitigation when compared to a single High Court judge. Three arbitrators working collectively, maintaining deliberation across the drafting period, are in a different position from a single judge returning to a transcript after months of other work. The collective deliberation of a panel does not eliminate the compartmentalisation risk but it reduces it compared to the solo scenario the cases describe.

A Premier League Appeal Board is not the Court of Appeal

The Appeal Board operates under its own rules, and those rules matter here in ways that cut in different directions.

The starting point of the approach of the Appeal Board is to deference to the IC. This was set out in the Everton 1 Appeal and the Board must be “very slow to interfere” with the IC’s findings of fact. Deference, it said, is owed because “the Commission heard evidence, at some length from a number of witnesses.” However, that principle or presumption of deference assumes the connection between the hearing and the judgment is intact. After nineteen months, City’s lawyers may argue that the connection cannot simply be assumed and must be demonstrated from the judgment’s own content, and that where it is not demonstrated, the premise for deference falls away and the full range of remedies is in play.

When it comes to remedies, current Rule W.83 (it remains to be seen what arguments are made about the relevant rulebook that should be used) is the critical provision. On hearing an appeal, the Appeal Board may allow or dismiss the appeal, vary any penalty, discharge compensation orders, remit the matter back to a Commission with directions, and, under Rule W.83.8, make such other order as it thinks fit. That final sub-rule is the catch-all, and it is broad enough to encompass a rehearing even where it will be desperate to avoid it.

The Bilta outcome, a retrial before a different judicial panel, is, therefore, not unavailable to an Appeal Board. If the Appeal Board concluded that the IC’s judgment was so compromised by the delay that no lesser remedy could cure the injustice, ordering a fresh hearing under W.83.8 would be within its powers. Rule W.84’s finality provision means the Appeal Board’s decision cannot itself, in all likelihood and in practice, be appealed within the Premier League framework.

What the lawyers will actually do

If the IC has found Manchester City guilty on any of the serious charges, the appeal team at Clifford Chance, Blackstone, Monckton and Serle Court Chambers will examine the judgment against the Bilta template with considerable care.

They will be looking for credibility findings unsupported by specific reference to the evidence, and for any failure to address contemporaneous documents that were placed before the IC in the course of twelve weeks of evidence. After a nineteen-month delay, each such omission carries weight that it would not carry in a timely judgment. They will also be looking for the compartmentalisation problem - findings on different charges, or different seasons, or different categories of alleged misconduct, that appear internally inconsistent, or where an early finding has not been traced through to its implications for a later conclusion. That is the specific pathology that Bilta identified and it is the one most likely to appear in a document produced over many months by a panel balancing this task against other professional commitments.

Whether any of this is necessary or produces a successful appeal ground remains to be seen. The bar at appeal remains high and it is worth repeating that delay alone has never been enough. The court in Bilta itself was at pains to say that the retrial was ordered not because of the delay per se but because it meant that specific evidentiary omissions could not be treated as deliberate choices.

But the argument will be available and it is a serious one. Before the decision is even out, the IC has given the appeal teams potential grounds that a judgment delivered in a shorter time would not have provided.

The judgment that could write itself out of trouble

There is one route by which the IC can neutralise much of this, and it may be the route it has taken and, ironically, why we are still waiting.

A judgment insulates itself from delay-based challenge by demonstrating, from its own internal content, that the delay has not compromised the analysis. That means detailed, specific engagement with the evidence rather than general summaries of what witnesses said. It means careful attention to particular exchanges, particular documents, particular moments of cross-examination that bore on credibility. It means explicit treatment of the documents relied upon by both sides, including those that cut against the IC’s conclusions. It means showing, in the structure and texture of the reasoning, that findings on different rule books, different charges and different periods have been considered together and not in isolation.

That is an arduous standard to meet across hundreds of pages and 115 charges. It is also, almost certainly, why the judgment has taken as long as it has. A guilty verdict, on charges of this seriousness, against a club that will contest every available point on appeal, would require a document so thoroughly reasoned that the IC hopes no reviewing tribunal can plausibly conclude the delay caused injustice. The IC cannot simply reach the right conclusions. It must show its working in a way that survives the heightened scrutiny a nineteen-month plus wait and global attention demands.

The Bilta compartmentalisation criticism, a failure to consider the whole, is ultimately what the IC must defeat. It must demonstrate not just that each charge was addressed but that the full picture was understood, weighed and decided as a coherent whole. If the document does that, it will be as strong as any judgment produced at this distance from the hearing could be.

Nineteen months may be the price of producing it. If so, the IC will need to show, from every page of what it has written, that the price was worth paying.

If not, we risk being back to square one.

Stefan Borson is Partner and Head of Sport at law firm, McCarthy Denning. He advises clients, clubs, owners, investors and individuals across the full range of sports law, M&A and wider regulation. He can be reached at sborson@mccarthydenning.com.

I wrote on Saturday that my best guess was that Southampton would be deducted six EFL points in their next EFL season and fined £500k-£1m.

I felt, instinctively, that expulsion from such a big game was excessive and disproportionate. However, there are some technical points that would worry me as a Southampton fan. Worse than that, the key ones were considered recently by an EFL Disciplinary Commission in EFL v Swindon (https://images.gc.eflservices.co.uk/f1a33090-1191-11f1-a071-51ac3b681d4e.pdf)

Liability is not the battleground

Liability is unlikely to be seriously contested. Regulation 127.1 prohibits any club from directly or indirectly observing, or attempting to observe, a rival’s training session in the 72 hours before a scheduled fixture between them. The “attempt” formulation means that whether or not Southampton obtained anything useful is irrelevant - the act of trying is enough. Expect an admission, or at minimum a rapid narrowing of issues, with Southampton’s lawyers focussing hard on the proportionality of the sanction rather than fighting the underlying charge. Admitting early is the only realistic way to bank any credit with the Commission.

If there are additional instances of surveillance beyond the specific fixture charged, and reports suggest there may be, those will likely be advanced by the EFL as aggravating factors.

The knockout competition problem

Middlesborough have already argued in their statement that “the only appropriate response is a sporting sanction which would prevent Southampton FC from participating in the EFL Championship play-off final.”

Whilst this is a lawyer drafted statement and obviously tendentious, it is possible that the EFL may adopt the same position at the Commission.

In the Swindon Commission chaired by John Mehrzad KC, the sanctioning principles were set out with clarity. Drawing on Derby v EFL and the Everton Appeal Board decision, it identified four purposes for any sanction: punishment, vindication of compliant clubs, deterrence, and restoring and preserving public confidence in the fairness of EFL competitions. It then identified that last aim as the most important of the four.

During the hearing, there was some focus on the meaning of ‘proportionality’ in this disciplinary context with parties urging the Commission to arrive at a sanction which was ‘balanced’ (as submitted by the Club) or ‘no lesser than would meet the aim’ of a fair competition (as submitted by the EFL).

It did not stop there. The Commission went on to say that a necessary part of restoring public confidence in the fairness of a competition is ensuring the competition is in fact fair. And herein lies a subtle but potentially crucial distinction for Spygate.

The competition here is, arguably, not the League season itself because the Play-Offs are defined separately in Section Nine of the EFL Handbook. The Play-Offs are defined as a distinct knockout competition with its own rules, its own definitions, and its own prize structure - namely, a very valuable place in a different division. There are no points to win, just £200m of broadcast revenue (at least).

The Swindon Commission confronted exactly this structural problem and its conclusion was unambiguous: where a club gains an unfair competitive advantage in a knockout competition, a points deduction is not available and a fine alone does not restore genuine fairness to the competition.

The EFL argued that the key aim or objective of any sanction was the fairness or integrity of the respective competition. If that approach is repeated, a Commission will be asked to focus on sanction in the context only of the Play-Offs as a distinct competition.

Proportionality is relative

My position is that expulsion from the Play-Offs feels excessive given that Southampton finished seven points clear of sixth and nine clear of seventh. That is an intuitive position but it is not one the Swindon framework or the EFL’s argument there supports. The margin by which Southampton qualified is not the relevant question. The relevant question may be whether Southampton obtained a sporting advantage in a specific knockout fixture by prohibited means. If they did, the Commission’s primary concern is the integrity of the Play Off competition from that point forward and not whether Southampton “deserved” to be there in the first place.

The Commission also made clear that a club should not financially benefit from its own misconduct. Southampton’s financial interest in a Play-Off final and potential Premier League promotion dwarfs Swindon’s £40,000 prize money by several orders of magnitude. However, arguably, that context does not reduce the Commission’s appetite for the ultimate sanction. Rather, it increases it.

I stand by my best guess but as a matter of principle, the Swindon case and the EFL’s arguments there suggests the Commission should be reaching for something more.

A nervous 48 hours or so awaits for Southampton fans.

The Football Governance Act 2025 received Royal Assent in July 2025, creating the Independent Football Regulator (IFR), the first statutory body to oversee the men’s professional game in England. The trigger was years of governance failures, the inability of the Premier League and the EFL to agree a financial subsidy, the near-miss of a breakaway European Super League, and a growing consensus that self-regulation had run its course. The IFR covers all 116 clubs across the top five divisions, from the Premier League to the National League, and no club sits outside its reach.

What the IFR does

Three objectives sit at the heart of the Act: protecting and promoting the financial soundness of individual clubs, protecting and promoting the financial resilience of the pyramid as a whole, and safeguarding the heritage of English football. Everything the IFR does is anchored to one or more of those three things.

The central mechanism is licensing. From the 2027-28 season, every club must hold an operating licence to compete. During the Summer 2026 pilot phase a select group of clubs will trial the application process before the official window opens in November 2026. This timeline ensures that all 116 clubs will be operating under at least a provisional license by the start of the 2027/28 season, marking a permanent shift toward mandatory standards for financial sustainability and fan engagement.

Obtaining a licence requires demonstrating compliance with four mandatory conditions:

• Financial sustainability: clubs must show that their financial plans are realistic, stress-tested and backed by credible funding.

• Corporate governance: clubs must comply with a governance code published by the IFR and produce an annual statement evidencing that compliance.

• Fan engagement: clubs must meet minimum thresholds for meaningful supporter consultation, particularly around decisions affecting heritage assets such as the club name, crest, home colours and ground location.

• Diversity, equity and inclusion: DEI standards form part of the governance expectations the IFR applies across the pyramid. Proportionality is built in and a National League club will not face the same expectations as a Premier League operation but the principles apply to everyone.

Initial licences will be provisional and expected to run for approximately three years before converting to permanent licences once the IFR is satisfied that mandatory conditions are being met consistently. Each of the 116 clubs will be assigned a dedicated relationship officer, with the intention of maintaining ongoing dialogue rather than policing compliance from a distance. That said, the annual declaration requirement means licensing is not a one-off exercise. Clubs must confirm continued compliance with all mandatory conditions every year.

On finances, the IFR’s powers are specific. Through discretionary licence conditions, it can require clubs to meet debt management and liquidity standards, restrict overall expenditure, and block funding it reasonably suspects is connected to serious criminal conduct. What it does not do is administer the Premier League’s financial rules. The outgoing PSR regime and the Squad Cost Ratio system are the Premier League’s own rules, and the IFR sits alongside them rather than above them.

The ownership and officer regime is operational now, and since 5 May 2026 it is fully live. No one may become an owner or officer of a regulated club without first obtaining an affirmative suitability determination from the IFR, and clubs and individuals must notify the IFR as soon as there is a reasonable prospect of a change in ownership or senior personnel. Prospective owners are assessed on honesty, integrity and financial soundness, while officers face those tests plus a competence requirement. The IFR has 90 days to reach an initial determination, extendable by up to 60 days in complex cases, giving a maximum window of 150 days. Those who attempt to sidestep the process by taking up a role without a determination in place will face regulatory consequences.

The regime is not confined to newcomers. The IFR can open a review of any incumbent owner or officer where it has grounds for concern about their suitability. If it finds someone unsuitable, it can disqualify them, direct them to divest, or in the most serious cases apply for an ownership removal order - a last-resort power that can compel a forced change in club ownership through the appointment of trustees. It can also appoint its own nominee as a club officer where it considers the club’s effective operation requires it, a power with no real precedent in English football.

The revenue distribution backstop may be the most structurally consequential provision in the Act, even though it is designed never to be used. Where the Premier League and EFL cannot reach agreement on the distribution of broadcasting revenue, either can apply to the IFR to trigger a resolution process. Mediation comes first, and if that fails, the IFR can make a binding distribution order, choosing between the proposals put forward by each league. The existence of that power has already changed the negotiating dynamic between the two bodies, and neither wants to end up in front of the regulator.

Heritage protections are real and enforceable. Since 5 May 2026, clubs cannot dispose of or deal with their home ground without IFR approval, and they cannot appoint an administrator without IFR approval either. Material changes to a crest or home shirt colours require majority fan support, and name changes require Football Association approval. Clubs in insolvency proceedings now have a statutory duty to keep fans informed of developments throughout. These are conditions of the licence and live obligations, not aspirational commitments.

The competition organisers (the Premier League, EFL and National League) also acquired new obligations on 5 May. They must now notify and consult the IFR in specified circumstances, including where they suspect a club has breached a competition rule relevant to the IFR’s functions, and before imposing any penalty or sanction connected to such a breach. This reinforces the IFR’s position as the central oversight body and means the leagues can no longer handle significant governance matters in isolation.

The enforcement picture

The IFR’s Chair has said publicly that its information-gathering powers are “powers that nobody has had before,” and that is not hyperbole. The IFR can compel production of documents, commission independent expert reports on clubs, and conduct dawn raids. It can require individuals, not just clubs, to attend interviews whether or not they are personally under investigation, and the obligation to preserve documents arises the moment a person becomes aware that an investigation is likely, including through press reports or informal contact.

Penalties for non-compliance are serious. Financial penalties can reach 10% of a club’s annual revenue, criminal offences exist for intentional obstruction and falsification of information, and where breaches are persistent or aggravated the IFR can suspend or revoke a licence, which in practical terms means removal from competition. Mid-season protections exist, but they do not insulate a club from the consequences of what happened before.

The posture of this regime is what will most surprise those used to dealing with the FA and the leagues. This is proactive supervision. The IFR is not waiting for evidence of a breach before asking questions. It is building a continuous picture of every regulated club, and it expects cooperation in doing so.

One further risk deserves attention. Information given to the IFR does not stay with the IFR, because the Act creates information-sharing gateways between the regulator and other public bodies. A disclosure that surfaces a potential financial irregularity can find its way to the SFO, HMRC or the FCA. Responses to information requests need to be approached with the same rigour as any regulatory investigation, with privilege reviewed, consistency with prior disclosures checked, and the downstream implications understood before anything is sent.

Where things stand

The ownership regime is fully live. The licensing application window opens in six months. Clubs that have not yet conducted a serious regulatory readiness assessment are already behind. The IFR has signalled a preference for engagement over escalation, but that preference has limits and the enforcement powers exist to be used.

Nobody wants to be the case that defines where those limits are or the extent of its appetite for a battle.

Stefan Borson is Partner and Head of Sport at McCarthy Denning. He advises clubs, owners, investors and individuals across the full range of sports law, M&A and wider regulation. He can be reached at sborson@mccarthydenning.com.

McCarthy Denning advises clubs, owners, officers, investors, and connected parties on the full range of issues the IFR creates. That includes licence applications and ongoing compliance, preparing for and responding to information requests, ownership and officer suitability applications and reviews, heritage approvals, administrator appointment applications, and disputes that arise from IFR decisions. McCarthy Denning also advise on transactions where IFR exposure needs to be understood and priced before the deal is done. If you want to understand your position under the new regime, get in touch.

It is imminent. Again. After more than three years since the Premier League referred 115/129/130/135 charges against Manchester City to an Independent Commission (IC) in February 2023, and following a twelve-week hearing that concluded in late 2024, the liability verdict is finally expected within weeks. Believe it when you see it, because this case has defied every predicted timeline and the timetable anticipated even by the parties’ own barristers, but the signals are now stronger than they have ever been. June 2026 it is (probably).

The wait has been long. The explanation is ordinary.

Before addressing what happens when the decision arrives, there is a prior question that deserves a direct answer: why has this taken so long, and what does the length of the wait tell us about the process itself?

The answer to the first part is the least dramatic one available. The Independent Commission has been writing its judgment. 115 separate charges, spanning alleged conduct across nine seasons from 2009/10 onwards, followed by a twelve-week contested hearing involving an extraordinary volume of witness evidence, financial documentation and legal argument on every individual charge, requires a judgment of corresponding complexity and length. Producing that document correctly takes time, and the members of an arbitration and disciplinary panel, like judges in the High Court, continue working on other matters while doing so.

The conspiracist explanations that have circulated: that the case is being quietly buried; that political pressure from the Abu Dhabi connection has intervened; or that the two sides have been negotiating a settlement in the shadows, have no credible evidential basis and have not, to date, happened.

A settlement (called a Sanction Agreement in the Premier League Rules as we saw with Chelsea), would require City to admit breaches it has consistently and emphatically denied throughout. Under the Premier League Rules, the Board’s power to conclude an agreement expressly involves a club accepting a sanction proposed by the Board and approved by the IC - that is an IC that has already heard the case and has a clear view as to how it has decided (even if it is still finalising its reasoning). In any event, City have shown no inclination toward any such outcome, and the relationship between the two parties is, to put it mildly, not one that lends itself to quiet compromise even where the pragmatic approach was taken to APT Part 2.

A case that was always too big and too complex for its process

What is rather less ordinary is the broader institutional picture this process has revealed. This case was, from the moment of referral in February 2023, too large and too complex for the Premier League’s private disciplinary framework to handle without severe strain. The Premier League Rules were designed for simple football disputes or financial breaches of the kind seen in the Everton and Nottingham Forest cases, where liability was admitted and the hearing was essentially a sanction exercise. They were not designed for a twelve-week contested factual trial involving 115 charges, enormous evidential bundles and legal teams of the calibre assembled on both sides.

The Premier League’s own published accounts show that its external legal expenditure in the past two accounting periods has approached £100 million in aggregate, a figure that speaks for itself about the scale of what this process has consumed. Whatever the outcome of the liability verdict, that institutional cost, and the reputational cost of a case that has now cast a shadow over multiple seasons, will be part of the legacy of a disciplinary mechanism that was never fit for the dispute it was asked to resolve.

What the judgment will and will not say

The liability verdict, when it lands, addresses one question only: did Manchester City breach the Premier League Rules, and if so, on which charges? It says nothing about punishment. This case was, we believe, structured as a split trial from the outset because there was no workable alternative. A single hearing attempting to address both liability and sanction across 115 charges would have been practically unmanageable, and the IC was right to structure it as it did.

The comparison to Everton and Nottingham Forest, which continues to be made with some frequency, is not a useful one on this point. Both clubs admitted their breaches before any hearing began, which meant those proceedings were effectively sanction exercises from the start considering only mitigation and aggravating factors in respect of punishment. There was no contested liability phase. The structural and substantive differences between those cases and the City proceedings are so significant that timeline comparisons between them are close to meaningless.

Under the Premier League Rules, unless the parties otherwise agree, the Commission is required to give reasons for its decision. Where the panel has reached a majority rather than unanimous conclusion on any charge, the rules are explicit that: “no minority or dissenting opinion shall be produced or published.”

This matters because it means the published judgment will present a single, unified set of reasons, regardless of any internal disagreements among the three members on individual charges, and neither City nor the Premier League will have access to the dissenting reasoning it might otherwise have sought to exploit on appeal.

Publication and the question of redaction

The judgment will be delivered to the parties before it is published, with the rules requiring that “reasonable prior notice of the date of publication of any award (and its contents)” be provided to both sides. That notice period exists to allow either party to make an application regarding the contents prior to publication.

Under the rules, all clubs and persons bound by them are deemed to have given “their full and irrevocable consent to publication of the details, awards and Sanction Agreements” and indeed “details of any submissions, oral or written statements or other evidence adduced in the proceedings.” The only grounds stated on which a party may apply for redaction are that the information is either medically sensitive or confidential in relation to safeguarding. There is no express carve-out for commercially sensitive material, financial data, or anything else that falls outside those two categories.

In theory, then, the judgment should be published in full. In practice, the picture is less clear and it is probable that all of those commercial carve-outs will apply.

An appeal is not immediate or a re-trial

Scheduling any subsequent hearing or appeal is not a simple exercise. An appeal hearing itself would not be listed for at least three to six months after the appeal is filed. The wait for the Appeal Board’s award would then follow - again likely to be many months after that appeal hearing ends.

The KCs alone on both sides, Lord Pannick KC and Paul Harris KC for City, Adam Lewis KC and Andrew Hunter KC for the Premier League, have some of the busiest practices at the English Bar, and the members of the constituted Appeal Board also have active professional lives outside this case. None of those individuals have kept chunks of 2026 or 2027 blocked out of their diaries just in case this matter goes a certain way. Finding hearing dates with adequate preparation time for all parties (Appeal Board included) could take a number of months following the liability verdict.

Under the PL Rules, such appeals are determined by an Appeal Board of three independent members appointed by the Chair of the Judicial Panel, with the Chair of the Appeal Board likely being one of The Rt. Hon. Sir Gary Hickinbottom (current Chair of the Judicial Panel), The Rt Hon Lord Dyson, The Rt Hon Sir Stanley Burnton or The Rt Hon Sir Maurice Kay.

What an Appeal Board is actually empowered to do is considerably more constrained than most think.

Critically, the rules provide that the appeal proceeds “by way of a review of the evidence adduced before the Commission,” not a re-trial from scratch. New evidence is available only where it could not have been obtained with reasonable diligence at the original hearing, a threshold that is unlikely to be met in this case.

The Everton 1 Appeal Board stated the parameters of appeals plainly: “An Appeal Board cannot change the Commission’s decision just because the [Appeal] Board would have taken a different view on the facts.” The Appeal Board must, however, set aside an IC decision if it has made a material error of law that may have affected the outcome, or if it acted in a way that was procedurally unfair. Errors of law for these purposes include an error in approach, taking into account something that should not have been taken into account, and failing to take into account something that should have been.

The deference owed to the IC’s findings is not uniform across all types of conclusion. It varies depending on what is being challenged, and the Everton 1 Appeal Board was careful to draw the distinction. On findings of primary fact that turned on witness evidence, the deference is substantial, because “the Commission heard evidence, at some length from a number of witnesses.” An Appeal Board reading a transcript of the original hearing is at an obvious disadvantage compared to an IC that spent twelve weeks observing and assessing those witnesses in person. On questions of legal approach or errors of law, by contrast, deference plays no part at all.

The practical implications for the City case are significant. If liability is established across a number of the more serious charges, any appeal will need to identify not merely that the IC reached a conclusion City or the PL disagrees with, but that the IC made an identifiable error in its legal approach, or failed to take into account a factor it was required to consider, or reached a conclusion genuinely outside the range of reasonable responses available to it. With a twelve-week hearing and a judgment that will run to several hundred pages, every line of the IC’s reasoning will be scrutinised with that framework in mind. A gap in logic or a finding made on a basis not properly put to the parties would each potentially provide grounds. Finding such errors across a judgment of that scale and complexity is not impossible. It is, however, a different exercise from simply relitigating the factual disputes that occupied the original hearing.

The sequencing problem

There is ambiguity in the PL Rules about whether City could appeal the liability verdict before any sanction hearing takes place, effectively stalling the sanction process pending the outcome of that appeal. This is not clearly provided for but where the most serious charges are proven, there is a rational commercial argument for both parties to agree on precisely that sequencing, since it would avoid the position of a significant sanction being imposed and then immediately challenged in a further appeal proceeding. Whether that agreement is reached, and whether it is something the IC and an Appeal Board has any role in facilitating, remains an open question.

The decision, when it comes, will be one of the most significant documents in the history of English football.

It will also, with near certainty, not be the last word.

While attention is focussed on the Premier League relegation battle and which 62,000 capacity stadium will host Championship games next season, an even more financially precarious situation is also live.

Aston Villa may yet save a team finishing 6th but they can’t save Chelsea. Champions League football in 2026/27 has gone. On a plausible reading of the numbers in the UEFA settlement agreement Chelsea signed last June, the starting gun on a UEFA ban has been fired without finding a new way to raise profits.

On 27 June 2025, Chelsea signed a four-year settlement with the UEFA Club Financial Control Body due to its breach of the Football Earnings test - effectively a harsher PSR with all of Chelsea’s loopholes closed. No hotel profits, no Women’s sale profits, no player swap profits. Chelsea were fined €20m payable come what may with another €60m contingent on hitting targets - effectively a € for € luxury tax over their agreed targets for the next 3 seasons. Chelsea also have a mild sporting restriction that prevents any new player being added to the club’s UEFA List A unless the transfer balance is positive.

Source: UEFA

The limits are stark and ratchet up over time. First the good news. Chelsea were surely within the 2025 Target as it is defined in the agreement - essentially, a test of whether they hit the target they themselves told UEFA for the year ended 30 June 2025 i.e. the accounts just published. It would have been a little ridiculous to have breached a limit they themselves negotiated in June 2025. So far, so good.

The 2026 Target

Things get more challenging for the year ending soon on 30 June 2026 (defined as the 2026 Target) which will be evaluated in Spring 2027 with any consequences announced after the end of next season.

This reporting period carries a maximum Football Earnings deficit of just €5m which is fortunately extendable to €60m if the overshoot is covered by equity or shareholder contribution. This is inevitable in any scenario, so Chelsea’s 2026 Target is to lose less than €60m after UEFA allowances which include the usual good spending like Youth, Community spend and non-player depreciation. Every € lost over €60m leads to a € fine up to €20m. At €80m+, Chelsea are banned from Europe for one season (2027/2028 season).

Source: UEFA

The structural problem

Chelsea have told journalists in the past few days they are a) now operationally profitable b) turnover will be approximately £700m for the year ending 30 June 2026. It is hard to see how either of these are true unless operating profit in this definition excludes all player amortisation (around £260m for FY26). Turnover of £700m for FY26 even with £65m of Club World Cup proceeds and £80m of Champions League prize money looks impossible. It would imply a staggering £390-400m of Matchday revenue (£86.8m in FY25 off 28 home games) and Commercial revenue (£201m in FY25 although UEFA recognised a lower number of £185m).

FY26 Matchday has 27 home games but does include 5 Champions League homes and a Carabao semi final vs Arsenal. £100m looks achievable. Aggregated with the Broadcast monies, FY26 will be £400-410m. Given the front of shirt fiasco, Commercial revenues are unlikely to have exceeded £210m which leads to forecast total revenue of £600-620m. No doubt, Chelsea will include the non-recurring £14m of loan income for Nicolas Jackson as revenue, but I can only think they mean €700m.

A better way to look at this from a financial planning perspective is to understand that Chelsea’s current core revenue run rate as a Champions League team is around £550m with the £65m of CWC proceeds and the Jackson loan treated as exceptional to FY26 only. However, given Chelsea’s cost base, £550m is not enough for UEFA Football Earnings tests either on the €60m over 3 year rolling basis or on the far more generous settlement agreement terms.

This is because Chelsea’s applicable core recurring costs are simply too high. Contrary to the much discussed revolutionary wage structure, Chelsea continues to be one of the biggest payers in World football. FY25 totalled £370m according to the UEFA measure (£360m in Chelsea’s accounts) - 6th in the World. And remember this was a UEFA Conference League season.

Source: UEFA European Club Finance and Investment Landscape Report 2026

FY26 is very likely to be approaching £400m with Champions League wage uplifts and CWC winning bonuses. Unlike the Squad Cost rules, the Football Earnings test takes all the wages into account.

The next highest cost category is player amortisation (FY25 - £212m) which given the pre and post CWC spending likely added a net £50m taking it to in excess of £260m for FY26.

So, without even adding anything for other operating expenses (£151m in FY25), interest and exceptional costs, Chelsea are operating a £100m run rate deficit. Yes, in the specifics of FY26, we can fairly add back the £65m of CWC prize money but this is offset by bonuses and the £10m+ for the removal of Maresca and his team. When you then deduct operating costs even without a chunk for Youth and Community costs, coming in under €80m looks impossible. Which leaves player trading profits as the sole way Chelsea can hit their 2026 Target for FY26.

To date in FY26, Chelsea only generated around £32m from the disposal of fifteen players up to October 2025 but also then took a book loss of around £10m on Raheem Sterling plus paid another £10-20m of compensation to the player in January.

The 2026 Target (FY26 tested by UEFA in Spring 2027)

• Revenue - £620m PLUS

• Jackson loan - £15m PLUS

• Player trading profit before June sales - £20m

LESS costs of £785m:

• Wages £400m

• Player amortisation £260m

• Net other expenses adjusted for UEFA allowances £100m

• Exceptionals (Maresca and Sterling) £25m

• Interest £10m

This gives a FY26, UEFA Football Earnings DEFICIT of £140m (€160m) before any June sales vs a UEFA target of €80m.

On these numbers, Chelsea need player trading PROFIT of €80m in June 2026 alone. And the 2026 Target is the relatively easy one to hit.

The 2027 Target (FY27 tested by UEFA in Spring 2028)

This target loss is €ZERO. As in zero euros of permitted deficit and it is not extendable if Chelsea use the €55m extra headroom for the 2026 Target which they inevitably will as detailed above.

The circuit breaker, the point at which the CFCB tears up the whole settlement agreement and the club is handed exclusion from the next UEFA competition it would otherwise qualify for, is a €20m overshoot. In other words, lose more than €20m in FY27 and Chelsea will receive a ban for 2028/2029 UEFA competition.

2027 Target (assuming Chelsea are in the Europa League final in 26/27 and finish 5th)

• Revenue £525m PLUS

• Player trading profit

LESS costs of £735m:

• Wages £360m (assumes £40m no CL wage reduction)

• Player amortisation £260m

• Net other expenses adjusted for UEFA allowances £100m

• Interest £15m

This gives a FY27, UEFA Football Earnings DEFICIT of £210m (€245m) before any player sales vs an upper limit of just €20m. This is challenging enough and this is a pretty generous Europa final financial case.

Chelsea’s Champions League Round of 16 exit this season was still worth around £80m plus whatever the club generated from 5 big home games. Even winning the Europa League would only be worth half. Chelsea have no way under UEFA rules to bridge a further £40-50m deficit without finding more player sale profits. Given substantial player sale profits (and not swaps or deals with Strasbourg) are clearly required for all of the forthcoming seasons, finding another £40m of profits on top will not be doable.

So what is the plan when Chelsea finish seventh (or lower) this season? On the face of it, without player sales (at profit) there is severe risk to their compliance for the the 2027 Target and the Final Targets.

Chelsea have repeatedly kicked the can down the road but UEFA’s rules are far less forgiving than the Premier League’s and whilst the sanctions have been lenient to date, UEFA punishes repeated breaches.

Chelsea is the relegation story nobody is talking about. Not from the Premier League but from Europe entirely.

When Chelsea owner 22 Holdco sold a minority stake in Chelsea FC Women to 776 Chaos Fund last year, the headline number was eye-catching. A 4.86% stake for £11.5m implied a total valuation for the women’s operation of around £237m apparently validating the £200m intragroup valuation Chelsea had placed on the women’s club days earlier. Football’s women’s game, we were invited to conclude, had arrived as a serious asset class.

Then 776 came back for more. On 30 July 2025, after the financial year had closed, they acquired a further 3.8% for £7m, bringing their total stake to 7.6%. The investor is Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder and one of the most prominent voices arguing that women’s football is a seriously undervalued asset.

But these are not the most interesting numbers in these accounts.

Buried in Chelsea FC Holdings Limited’s (CFCH) related party note for the year ended 30 June 2025 is an interesting line. Chelsea Football Club Women Limited (CFCW) paid the CFCH group £22.6m during the year. For reference, we know that CFCW’s entire revenue for 24/25 was £21.3m. In other words, CFCW paid CFCH more than 100% of its revenue in the year.

It is obvious but worth spelling out that unlike the transactions with RSC Strasbourg, a not insignificant £15.8m, the CFCW transactions can’t include players.

In fairness, CFCH paid CFCW £11.3m back which may also explain the £9.8m increase in CFCW revenue in the first year of its “independence”. According to Deloitte’s Money League 2026, the vast majority of this (£8.9m) was from increased commercial revenue because, as yet, the women’s game is not materially growing its broadcast or matchday revenue lines.

So net, the women’s operation sent approximately £11.3m to the men’s club. Gross, the flows in both directions are substantial and entirely new given that in prior years, CFCW was a subsidiary of CFCH.

So what is the £22.6m? Since the original article, we do now have CFCW accounts. They show the following breakdown:

We also know that the sale of Kingsmeadow or rather the Kingsmeadow football stadium previously held in the Chelsea Football Club Limited (CFCL) - the mens entity - represents £12.1m of the £17.7m expenditure with CFCL.

The notes to the various accounts appear to show that CFCL literally sold the football stadium - not the land (it only had a lease). The accounts suggest the disposal was from the freehold and fixtures columns but we know freehold is held by the Council. That points to a sale of the physical bricks and mortar.

Either way, it accounts for around half. For the rest, Chelsea appear to have confirmed some form of cross charging arrangement although again we do not know what precisely.

CFCW operates under the Chelsea brand, benefits from Chelsea’s commercial partnerships, uses Chelsea’s infrastructure, plays at Stamford Bridge for some games and receives central services from across the group. A commercial rights licence and management services agreement between the men’s operation and the women’s club is the most credible explanation. In short, it appears Chelsea Women pays the men’s club a very substantial licence fee to use Chelsea’s intellectual and other property.

This matters when you look at what happened to Chelsea’s commercial revenue in FY25. Across the whole Blueco group, commercial revenue fell from £251.6m to £224.6m, a drop of £27m, attributed in the strategic report to reduced sponsorship income. But that group figure eliminates the intragroup recharge. At CFCH level, the non-Kingsmeadow related revenue from CFCW is sitting predominantly inside the commercial revenue number, papering over what is in reality an even steeper decline in genuine third-party commercial income. From the French league’s financial review, we know RSC Strasbourg also suffered a significant decline in Commercial revenue but even allowing for this, Chelsea men’s underlying commercial performance appears to be £8-10m lower than reported due to the revenue received from CFCW.

For the Premier League’s PSR purposes the position is intriguing. Chelsea will need to (or have) demonstrated that £22.6m represents fair market value for whatever assets, rights and services are provided to CFCW. As ever, that will be, or will have been, an interesting conversation.

What it means for the approved women’s valuation is equally uncomfortable. If CFCW is permanently paying millions a year to the men’s club in royalties, the women’s business is structurally more loss-making than its headline figures suggest. CFCW’s £17.1m pre-tax loss reported at group level would be materially different once you understand the full cost base. But this also goes to the valuation that was approved to fix Chelsea’s 23/24 PSR problem (and, therefore, its 24/25 one).

Yes, the valuation was validated by third party investment but that came after the intra group £200m sale. When the original associated party deal was tabled in front of the Premier League, was the Premier League told that not only was this an extraordinary valuation but that it also included a licence back to Chelsea? We will never know but it surely should have impacted valuation significantly.

Including the Kingsmeadow stadium sale, Chelsea mens received more than £20m from the women’s team it sold to itself just a year ago for £200m. Chelsea may be struggling on the pitch but it is undeniable that they have taken PSR apart with creativity and clinical efficiency.

Martyn Ziegler reported in The Times this morning that Everton’s owners have not put in place a blind trust should the club qualify for the same European competition as Roma. Instead, The Friedkin Group believes it has a “structural solution” that will allow both clubs to pass UEFA’s multi-club ownership test. Once you understand what the legal landscape actually looks like right now, however, the word “solution” deserves at very least a question or two. If Friedkin has tried to be clever rather than engage with UEFA, it is Everton and their fans who will likely pay the price.

1 March 2026 deadline confirmed

To understand what is at stake, you have to start not with this morning’s Times, but with a letter signed by UEFA General Secretary Theodore Theodoridis on 8 December 2025.

That letter went to every UEFA member association. It carried a simple message: the UEFA Executive Committee had met on 3 December 2025 and confirmed, in terms that left no room for interpretation, that the 1 March compliance deadline for multi-club ownership would continue to apply for the 2026/27 season. No softening, no new exceptions, no transitional arrangements. The circular explicitly acknowledged three separate Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) awards from 2025 that had established the deadline as a strict requirement, and confirmed that no substantial changes to Article 5 of the club competition regulations would be made.

As I noted at the time, MCOs simply could not wait and see without inviting risk of a ban or competition “relegation.”

That circular landed on the desks of the most senior officials of every national association in European football. The Friedkin Group, owners of both Everton and Roma, have no basis to claim ignorance or that they were unaware. The letter was not a suggestion - it was a restatement of settled UEFA law, backed by three arbitral awards and confirmed by the governing body’s highest executive committee. Every multi-club ownership group in Europe was on notice that 1 March 2026 was the hard deadline by which compliance with Article 5 had to be established.

That date has now passed.

What the rule requires and why Friedkin’s position is exposed

Article 5 of the UEFA Club Competition Regulations prohibits clubs under common ownership, control or decisive influence from competing in the same UEFA competition. The test is not whether the owner has actually interfered in sporting decisions. It is whether the capacity for “decisive influence” exists. The rule operates at the level of structure, not conduct.

Although it is possible changes have occurred but are not yet publicly confirmed, we understand that The Friedkin Group holds 99.5% of Everton and 95.97% of AS Roma through their centralised vehicle, Pursuit Sports.

Combined investment across both clubs runs to around €1.6 billion. The governance picture is a pressing problem. Dan Friedkin serves as Chairman of Everton and President of Roma. Marc Watts is Executive Chairman of Everton and sits on Roma’s Executive Committee. That is a 50% overlap at the most senior decision-making level of both clubs. Article 5.01(b) targets precisely this configuration, and three CAS panels last year confirmed that the CFCB is entitled to look through formal corporate structures to the practical reality of who controls what.

According to Ziegler’s reporting, insiders claim TFG did not set up a blind trust before 1 March 2026, instead relying on what they describe as an alternative “structural solution”. What that solution actually consists of has not been publicly disclosed, which in itself raises questions the clubs should be able to answer.

What the CAS awards actually established

To appreciate how significant the December circular was, it is worth understanding what the three 2025 CAS awards actually decided, because Friedkin’s lawyers will know this territory intimately.

In the FK DAC 1904 case, the club’s legal team ran nine separate arguments before CAS challenging the validity and enforceability of the 1 March deadline. They argued it was retrospective in effect, disproportionate, contrary to Swiss law, inconsistent with UEFA’s own prior conduct, and in breach of EU competition law under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The CAS panel rejected every single argument. It found the deadline had been validly adopted by the UEFA Executive Committee in September 2024, properly communicated to all member associations, and was enforceable as written. On the EU competition law point, the panel applied the Meca-Medina test and found the rule pursued a legitimate objective, was inherent in achieving it, and was proportionate. The panel also noted the scale of UEFA’s task - 258 clubs had to be assessed in the 2025/26 cycle. The June deadline was administratively unworkable. The March deadline was not.

In the Crystal Palace/Olympique Lyonnais case, the CFCB and CAS demonstrated that the analysis goes beyond formal ownership charts. The panel examined player transfer flows between sister clubs, shared services, the degree of operational integration, and whether individuals who held positions across multiple clubs could in practice exercise control over sporting decisions. Formal legal separation that does not reflect operational reality is not compliance.

The December 2025 circular was UEFA’s explicit acknowledgment of all three decisions. It was a clean statement that the framework had been tested, validated, and would be applied unchanged.

What a compliant solution looks like

A genuine blind trust, established before 1 March 2026, with independent lawyers/parties holding legal control of Everton’s governance and no operational overlap with Roma’s management would likely satisfy UEFA. Manchester City and Girona used this model for the Champions League in 2024/25. INEOS used a comparable arrangement for Nice and Manchester United. Although it creates friction and short-term inconvenience on an integrated group, UEFA accepts it, or has historically. It is not clear what other structure does work or what a “structural solution” even is.

The Friedkin Group elected not to take the blind trust route, at least not through the standard mechanism. Perhaps they received legal advice that their “structural solution” is genuinely equivalent. Perhaps they have engineered something that achieves real separation without the administrative disruption of a formal trust. If so, the CFCB will need to be satisfied of that on the evidence, against the backdrop of three CAS awards that have made the threshold for compliance demonstrably high.

What Everton stand to lose

The stakes are not abstract. Roma are sixth in Serie A but three points off fourth (a Champions League place). Everton are eighth in the Premier League but three points off fifth, with the same competition within reach. Under UEFA’s rules, if both clubs qualify for the same competition and the ownership structure is found non-compliant, only one can participate. The tiebreaker is domestic ranking. In all scenarios, it is likely that Everton would be the loser there. The closeness of the chasing pack in both leagues, from Italy’s fourth to seventh and England’s fifth to eighth, means there will be intrigue until the final day.

Everton is a club that has endured years of financial chaos, and that has finally, under Friedkin’s ownership and with a Bramley-Moore Dock home now open, begun to look like a stable football operation with genuine forward momentum. Qualifying for European football on merit and then losing that place to a compliance failure by their own owners would represent a serious and entirely avoidable failing.

Benefit of the doubt but...

Friedkin may have got this right and under control. The “structural solution” may be substantive, independently verified, and sufficient to satisfy the CFCB. There is no basis yet to conclude otherwise, and they deserve the benefit of the doubt until the assessment process reaches a conclusion.

The history of multi-club ownership enforcement over the last twelve months is, however, a history of owners who concluded they had found the sophisticated route, only to discover the CFCB and CAS were more rigorous than anticipated. FK DAC discovered this in June 2025. Crystal Palace spent months in procedural uncertainty before a share sale resolved the position but not before a competition relegation. Nottingham Forest and Chelsea probably would have faced issues had they clashed with Olympiakos and Strasbourg respectively. Notably we’ve also seen nothing from those potential conflicts but there is little risk of overlap this season.

UEFA gave the industry an unambiguous signal in December. Three CAS panels gave the industry unambiguous signals before that. The framework rewards simple compliance by the stated dates. It has not, so far, rewarded convoluted arguments after the event.

Everton’s fans need to know their club’s European future is not hostage to Roma’s performance on the field and a corporate structure their owners have not publicly explained. Either way, what have the clubs and UEFA got to hide - there is no reason not to explain the MCO fix to the general population of clubs and fans.

Until then, the question is whether Friedkin’s lawyers have genuinely solved the problem, or whether they have found an arrangement that looks like a solution without being one.

In this regulatory environment, those are not the same thing.

It is now undeniable. West Ham United and Tottenham Hotspur are in a relegation fight and probably against each other. Their two homes are six miles apart door to door and both hold 62,000 fans. But in many ways the similarities end there.

One club has spent the last decade building the most commercially ambitious stadium in English football, carrying nearly £1 billion of debt to do it. The other pays a peppercorn rent for a stadium it does not own and couldn’t afford to buy. One now has revenues (or rather the opportunity to generate in a Champions League season) over £600 million a season; the other generates less than half although both made it to the Deloitte Money League Top 20 for 2024/25. West Ham had the 16th highest wage bill in the World in 24/25 and Spurs spent more than Atletico, Inter, AC Milan, Juventus and Borussia Dortmund.

These are the sort of clubs that were meant to be too good (and too big) to go down in a post Super League world.

So, how serious is relegation these days for these clubs?

West Ham: trending down to going down?

In the context of relegation risk, West Ham’s 2024/25 accounts make for uncomfortable reading. Revenue fell from a club record £270 million to £230 million as UEFA competition disappeared and the league finish worsened. Operating losses hit £105 million - the worst in the club’s history - driven by reduced player trading profits of just £20 million and a wage bill that has risen to another record of £175 million. Debt, which had been almost entirely eliminated by 2023, has climbed back to over £100 million following a £125 million facility with Rights and Media Funding Ltd (RMF) at interest rates likely in the order of 8-10% per annum.

So, whilst West Ham may not yet be relegated, the finances have already drifted into the “red zone”. The Going Concern statement states: “…under both the base case and severe but plausible case forecasts, mitigating actions are required in order to have sufficient liquidity for the Group to meet its liabilities over the going concern period.” In other words, even in the base case, West Ham still need to sell footballers.

The club attempted to reassure the reader of the accounts with this statement: “It is a feature of football clubs’ income streams that a significant element is known in advance because of its long-term contractual nature. Centrally negotiated broadcast and sponsorship deals are presently in place to at least the end of the 2027-28 season. The Group’s own major sponsorship and partnership agreements are also in place until the end of seasons 2025-26 and 2026-27 respectively. Season Ticket sales (including corporate sales) are made at the start of each season and represent the bulk of the Group’s match day revenue. Therefore, in the region of 75% of the Group’s annual turnover will be guaranteed, and in many cases received, by 31st July each year.”

However, this is only true in a Premier League year. West Ham have never played in the Championship in the cavernous London Stadium. The demand and timing of the purchase of season tickets and corporate hospitality are an unknown for a forthcoming season in the lower league. They have never tested whether you can sell 62,000 Championship seats nor at what price point. The central broadcast and sponsorship arrangements are indeed pre-sold. But relegated clubs receive around £75m less (at best) in the Championship even including the parachute payment in Year 1. So even if 75% of turnover may be known by the Summer (and there is a good chance it won’t be this time), it certainly does not mean it is 75% of West Ham’s recent historic income.

Relegated clubs have typically seen a 10-25% fall in Commercial revenue and more than a halving of Broadcast revenue. Most teams have maintained Matchday revenue but none of those teams have 62,000 seats to fill.

We can estimate that should West Ham finish 18th and be relegated, revenue will be around £240m for 2025/26 - Matchday £45m; Broadcast £135m; and Commercial £60m. Broadcast would fall to around £55m with a fire fight to maintain the other £100m. Likely total revenue would be £145m at best - a record for the Championship - but a challenge when set against the current cost base. The RMF loan obligations (probably £10m+ per annum in interest alone) do not pause for the Championship.

There are, however, some mitigating factors.

West Ham’s arrangement with the London Legacy Development Corporation for the London Stadium is unusual. They pay a token fee and that fee is understood to halve in the event of relegation. The wage bill would have to be restructured quickly and dramatically. At £180 million, it is approximately £140 million more than the Championship average. Relegation clauses in contracts will reduce that figure to some extent automatically and the club would look to move on players like Summerville, Mavropanos and Fernandes joining the Winter sale of Paqueta. What that means for the side if then promoted straight back to the Premier League is another matter.

Tottenham: snatching relegation from the jaws of a new era

When the Lewis family chased Daniel Levy out of N17 in September 2025, this was not the plan. The general idea was to loosen the purse strings. However, the relegation risk was underestimated in January and the club only bought and sold one first team player. On the face of it, none of the new regime’s decisions have worked.

They had inherited revenues of £565 million in 2024/25, the ninth highest in world football according to Deloitte’s Money League. That figure included £125 million in matchday revenue - higher than both Liverpool and Manchester City - and £275 million in commercial income, exceeded in England only by City, Liverpool and Manchester United. Ironically, the combination of Champions League football and the carefully managed vestiges of Levy on the wages and other costs side, will mean that whatever happens from here, Spurs will record an impressive set of financial results for the current 2025/26 season and accounting period with revenue topping £600 million for the first time.

But that revenue base is now at severe risk.

The broadcasting position is straightforward and mirrors West Ham. Tottenham would receive a year-one parachute payment of around £50 million and £5 million from the EFL, a drop of approximately £75 million. UEFA broadcast and prize money would drop another £70 million - the amount received for this season’s R16 Champions League exit. £200 million would become £55 million in the Championship.

The commercial position is more complex and in some ways more frightening. Spurs will have closed in on a total of £300 million for this season. Their shirt deal with AIA, worth approximately £40 million per year, is understood to contain relegation clauses and, anyway, it is up for replacement negotiations for 2027/28 during next season - AIA have already said they won’t be renewing.

Their Nike kit deal, worth around £40 million annually and running to 2033, would face pressure though likely a smaller absolute reduction given its long-term nature. The corporate hospitality business will struggle to sustain Premier League revenues for the 23 Championship home games that will include Lincoln City.

When Levy dreamed of the financial stability of hosting non-football events at the stadium it would certainly not have been about creating relegation-proof revenue streams. Yet here we are. The financial scale of up to 30 non football events is substantial and thankfully NFL fixtures, major concerts and boxing events are not contingent on Premier League status. That income stream estimated at tens of millions annually would persist through a Championship season and represents a meaningful structural advantage but it remains only mitigation. The commercial dip could be £50-75 million and even that assumes a strong season at the top of the Championship.

Despite having a similar capacity to West Ham, Spurs’ matchday revenue was around 3x that of West Ham in 2024/25 but probably nearer 4x this season (around £140 million). Whether Spurs could maintain anything over £100 million in the Championship would no doubt again depend on a winning and entertaining team and long domestic cup runs. In any scenario, the double whammy of no Premier League and no UEFA competition will be painful.

Alongside that revenue collapse would sit a massive debt pile. Tottenham now carry £850 million in financial debt, the highest in the Premier League, plus over £350 million in transfer debt - outstanding instalments owed to selling clubs for players already registered. Total debt of £1.2 billion, at interest payments that hit a club record of more than £30 million in 2024/25, does not obviously become more manageable when revenues fall by more than a quarter of a billion pounds in a single year. And there will likely be covenant breaches to deal with and associated costs.

Thankfully, Levy’s biggest achievement of his whole tenure was arguably one for the geeks. The long-term nature of most of the stadium financing with repayments stretching to 2051 at low fixed interest rates (typically less than 3.5%) means there is no short-term refinancing pressure.

The Telegraph has already reported that the wage bill (around £270 million for the current season) will fall significantly due to relegation clauses - it is no major surprise that Levy negotiated this but it is a very good job he did. This is the single most important factor in assessing the consequences of a Spurs relegation reducing costs by approximately £100 million compared to the current run rate. On top of this, for the benefit of both player and club, Spurs will no doubt sell a number of the biggest earners.

It isn’t a gap at all. It is an abyss

Both clubs face a version of the same nightmare, but Tottenham's is scarier in almost every dimension - more revenue to lose, more debt to service, more commercial contraction. West Ham's relegation would be painful and operationally chaotic. Spurs' relegation would be historically unprecedented - the largest single-year revenue collapse any English club has ever faced. The mitigating factors from relegation wage clauses to non-football stadium income to parachute payments matter but they do not come close to plugging the gap.

Six miles apart, two clubs, one abyss. The football will decide and the finance guys will deal with the consequences.

On 16 March 2026, the Premier League published its Sanction Agreement with Chelsea. There have been many questions about Sanction Agreements largely because we have not seen the recent significant Premier League cases dealt with using them.

In essence, they are settlement agreements and the Premier League argues they can’t be applied to PSR cases. That’s right, “obvious and deliberate breaches of the rules, [that] involved deception and concealment in relation to financial matters” can be settled co-operatively, but any PSR cases must go to full independent commission hearings. Apparently.

How they work

Under Rule W.6.7, the Premier League Board can conclude a written agreement with a club in which that club accepts a sanction proposed by the Board. That agreement must be ratified by three members of the Independent Disciplinary Panel, whose sole ground for rejection under Rule W.17 is that the proposed sanction is “unduly lenient.” Once ratified, it takes immediate effect. Once executed, it is published. Simple enough.

The 4 month mystery delay

Notably, the Chelsea agreement was ratified on 26 November 2025, broadly Day 1 of Chelsea’s FA charges hearing, but wasn’t executed and published until 16 March 2026. That nearly four-month gap is highly unusual. Were the parties waiting to see how the FA proceedings concluded before pulling the trigger? The document itself gives no answer. I have asked the Premier League if there was any reason.

You can’t appeal a settlement - it is the whole point

Many people have asked why can’t it be appealed despite its apparent leniency. It is because there is no mechanism to do so and it is the whole point in settlement via a Sanction Agreement - to draw a line for all parties. Once those three panellists sign off - here Sioban Healy KC, Dr Leanne O’Leary, and Robert Glancy KC - the agreement is ratified as acceptable. No club, third party, or rival can challenge it.

Contradictions

The Sanction Agreement is candid on one point - the Premier League acknowledges that had Chelsea not co-operated and admitted the breaches, certain aspects of the conduct "may have been difficult to establish, to the relevant standard" before a Commission. The FA who, I am told, have no process akin to a Sanction Agreement, took a different view and went ahead with a full hearing regardless. The Premier League state in the Sanction Agreement that the FA are"likely to impose a significant sanction upon the Club" which must mean the board considered it likely the FA will prove their case or that Chelsea will admit the breaches. In other words, the Premier League did not really believe it's own doubts about its ability to "put to proof" the case against Chelsea.

We also do not know whether this Sanction Agreement is the product of revisions following an initial rejection by the Disciplinary Panel as unduly lenient, or whether it was accepted at the very first review. This is open to a Disciplinary Panel but is not addressed in the document itself.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable other contradiction of the historic approach to PSR and other cases and, in particular, Nottingham Forest. We know more of the background to that case through its costs decision. The Premier League argued there that, under then Rule E.49, a PSR breach had to go to a full Commission and that no Sanction Agreement was available. Forest’s legal team told that same Commission something different: that the rules did allow for a Sanction Agreement even after a breach was established, and that Forest had actively sought to engage in those discussions but the Premier League declined. The point was never decided so remains open.

Without fear or favour almost always

And then there is Richard Masters and his public stance on legal matters. In August 2025, asked by the BBC’s Dan Roan whether the mounting legal costs of enforcement were a concern, the Premier League’s Chief Executive was unequivocal: “There’s no happy alternative to enforcing the rules - it goes to the integrity of the competition...I don’t think that principle should be defrayed in any way by being too difficult, too complex or too costly.”

The principle Masters articulated couldn’t be clearer - cases can’t be settled via a Sanction Agreement just because the circumstances were too difficult or too complex. The Premier League told a Commission while seeking over £1.4 million in costs from Forest, that a Sanction Agreement was impossible even where Forest was happy to engage in co-operation similar to that of Chelsea.

Months later the Premier League has settled a case involving far more serious admitted conduct, with no full hearing and no cross-examination of facts. And they haven’t changed the apparent PSR rule either.

One rule for one...

Between 2011 and 2018, Chelsea Football Club made at least 36 secret payments totalling £47.5 million through offshore entities associated with Roman Abramovich. There may well have been more - those we know about were uncovered by a combination of Boehly/Clearlake due diligence and investigative media coverage.

The payments were made to players, agents and staff, were not disclosed to the Premier League, and were, in the league’s own words, “not only obvious and deliberate breaches of the rules, but also … involved deception and concealment in relation to financial matters.” Over the same period, Chelsea won two Premier League titles, two FA Cups, the Champions League and the Europa League.

The sanction for that wholesale, deliberate, concealed and deceptive conduct? A fine of less than the compensation paid to Graham Potter. And neither the new owners nor Chelsea themselves will even pay that. Ridiculously, it will be a disputed charitable foundation that will effectively pay every penny.

The Premier League’s published Sanction Agreement runs to 28 pages. It is technically coherent but beneath its careful language lies a series of methodological choices that, taken together, produce a result so favourable to Chelsea that it raises serious questions about whether the league’s enforcement framework has been applied consistently or proportionately.

What was admitted, and what was quietly ignored

The facts themselves are not in dispute. Payments were routed through third-party entities to ensure players chose Chelsea over rival clubs. The Times reported last year that Eden Hazard signed for the club after Manchester United refused to make an off-the-books payment of more than £5 million to his representative. The names include many transfer “hits” of that generation: Hazard, Willian, Ramires, David Luiz, André Schürrle, Nemanja Matic, Samuel Eto’o and others. Payments were also made to senior figures including the club’s former director of football Frank Arnesen and scout Piet de Visser.

The Sanction Agreement is notable, however, for a conspicuous omission. Throughout its analysis of aggravating and mitigating factors, the phrase “sporting advantage” does not appear once. This is a remarkable gap in circumstances where secret payments were made specifically to ensure that Chelsea could acquire players that competitors were unwilling or unable to obtain through legitimate means - a sporting advantage. Those players undoubtedly contributed to Chelsea’s success during that period. One of them delivered a near £100m accounting profit when he finally departed in 2019 which, quite apart from helping with Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) for FY2019-2021, also enabled the next tranche of acquisitions that culminated in the 2020/2021 Champions League and led to the club’s qualification into the lucrative Club World Cup.

The Premier League board went to some lengths to model out the counterfactual of whether the payments would have caused a breach of the PSR between 2011 and 2018 had they been properly accounted for. The concealed amounts, it was concluded, would not have pushed Chelsea beyond the permitted rolling three year £105 million loss threshold even if properly disclosed.

That finding then did much of the work that followed, functioning as a kind of absolution that shaped every subsequent step of the analysis. The question of what other competitive benefit was derived does not appear to have received any attention whatsoever. Likewise, nobody seems to have asked why Chelsea and Abramovich would have gone to the trouble of having multiple senior executives and directors conspire to hide almost £50m of payments from auditors, leagues, regulators and fans alike.

Those questions should have sat at the very heart of the matter and a proper sentencing framework would have begun there as it has done in each of the recent cases with Everton, Nottingham Forest and Leicester City.

Moreover, the absence of a PSR breach does not diminish the seriousness of the underlying deception; it merely means the payments served a purpose other than masking PSR losses. Which returns us, inescapably, to the question the league chose not to ask: if not to conceal financial losses, then why? And with what sporting consequence?

A methodology inverted

Standard disciplinary practice, whether in sport, law or professional regulation, follows a recognisable sequence. First, the seriousness of the breaches are established, and a starting-point sanction is identified. Then mitigating and aggravating factors are considered, adjusting that starting point upward or downward as appropriate. The aggravating factors are applied to increase severity. The mitigating factors reduce it. This has been the process of every recent Premier League case.

Notwithstanding that a Sanction Agreement is specifically designed to avoid the normal adversarial independent commission, the Premier League’s approach here departed from that sequence in a manner that deserves scrutiny.

The Premier League board identified the aggravating factors clearly enough: the length of time over which the conduct occurred, spanning what it acknowledged to be an eight-year period; the scale and number of the payments; the fact that they occurred with the knowledge and approval of senior officers and directors; and the deliberate and concealed nature of the deception. The board also stated that it: “considers that the obligation to act in utmost good faith requires Clubs to act honestly and fairly in their dealings with the League, including, in particular, by fully, frankly and accurately disclosing all financial information to the League which is relevant, or likely to be material, to any decisions to be made under the Rules. Failure to do so is not only a breach of Rule B.16 (as it then was) in and of itself, it also aggravates the other breaches of the Rules admitted by the Club”

It is worth remembering that although overturned on appeal in the Everton case, the original independent commission felt that failing to act in good faith and being “less than frank” with the league, was worthy of between 1 and 4 points of additional sanction.

In this case, it should be barely controversial that the aggravating factors applied to any starting point, would suggest a sanction at the serious end of the available range.

The potential mitigating factors were also identified as follows:

• the new owners had voluntarily disclosed the existence of potential breaches;

• Chelsea had provided exceptional cooperation throughout, reviewing in excess of 200,000 documents;

• the conduct had taken place entirely under the previous ownership and was not the responsibility of those now running the club;

• that the unprecedented circumstances of the acquisition, with the former owner subject to government sanctions and the club facing potential insolvency, had materially constrained the time available for due diligence; and

• that a substantial financial penalty of €10 million had already been imposed by UEFA in respect of overlapping conduct and that the FA was likely to impose a further significant sanction in its own proceedings covering some of the same transactions.

What happened next is where the analysis becomes difficult to defend on grounds of internal consistency or simple fairness.

The board concluded that two sporting sanctions were potentially appropriate: a transfer ban and/or a points deduction. It then decided that a points deduction was not appropriate at all, citing mitigating factors. Having removed the most material sanction entirely on the basis of mitigation, it proceeded to apply the same mitigating factors a second time, to reduce the financial penalty by approximately 50 per cent from what it described as the otherwise appropriate level (£20 million). And then, having halved the fine, it applied the same mitigation factors a third time, to suspend the transfer ban rather than impose it unconditionally.

This is not proportionality. These are the same mitigating factors doing three rounds of work on behalf of the same club. In any coherent sentencing framework, mitigation is a discount, not a skeleton key that opens (or closes) every door sequentially. Once exceptional co-operation has been credited to eliminate a points deduction, it has been spent. It cannot then be used again to halve a fine and used again once more to convert a transfer ban into a theoretical future threat.

The Forest comparison

The Premier League’s own conduct in comparable proceedings makes this triple deployment of mitigation particularly hard to square.

In the Nottingham Forest PSR case, the league submitted formally that a 50 per cent discount for cooperation and an early plea would be “disproportionate to the conduct being rewarded” and would “give too much credit for admission and co-operation.” The league went further, arguing before the independent commission that the maximum permissible reduction in sanction for a guilty plea, including by reference to the Sentencing Council’s guidelines, was one third. It argued this with vigour. It won that argument. Forest received a four-point deduction.

In the Chelsea matter, co-operation and voluntary disclosure were used not to discount a starting point sanction by a third, or even a half, but to eliminate the prospect of sporting punishment altogether before being applied again to substantially reduce the financial penalty that remained by half.

No two cases are identical and the Chelsea circumstances do carry genuine mitigating weight. The conduct occurred under previous ownership. The new owners voluntarily disclosed the issues and co-operated throughout a lengthy investigation. These are not trivial considerations.

But it is worth noting that the voluntary disclosure was not entirely without self-interest. The Premier League rules require self reporting. A failure to do so would have been a further breach once discovered in due diligence. Crediting it as exceptional altruism, and then doing so three times over, strains the logic of the mitigating discount.

The Everton “sanction policy”

In the Everton proceedings, we learned that on 10 August 2023 the Premier League board adopted a sanction policy that it considered to be appropriate to breaches of the PSR - a fixed starting point of six points for any breach, with an additional point for every £5 million by which the club had exceeded the £105 million threshold. Whilst in the hearing itself there was some walking back of that position by the Premier League, it remains difficult to reconcile this board view of sanctions for financial matters with where it landed in this Chelsea case.

Everton, whose PSR breaches related to accounting treatment, disputed exceptional circumstances and overspending rather than to deliberate concealment or deception, ultimately lost six points in their first case. In both Forest and Everton, mitigation only trimmed a starting point including, in Forest’s case, where exceptional co-operation and early admission was accepted and endorsed by the Premier League.

Those clubs received sporting consequences that had immediate effects on their final league positions and in Everton’s case, their proximity to relegation. In addition, points deductions also meant financial penalties in the form of lower merit awards.

Who actually pays, and to whom the money flows

When Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital acquired Chelsea for £2.5 billion in May 2022, £150 million was retained from the agreed purchase price specifically to cover the cost of any proceedings arising from the Abramovich era. It is from this fund that the £10.75 million fine will be met. The UEFA fine of €10 million, paid in 2024, has already been drawn from the same reserve. A further sanction from the FA, which has brought its own charges covering overlapping conduct, will draw on whatever remains.

So neither Chelsea nor its new owners are paying anyway. What makes this arrangement particularly striking is its terminal destination. Under the terms of the purchase, whatever sum remains of that £150 million holdback after all proceedings have concluded will be released to Abramovich’s vehicle, Fordstam, in May 2027 and form part of the currently frozen cash pile.

Those frozen assets are reportedly to be transferred to a charitable foundation for the benefit of the victims of the Ukrainian war. So every pound the Premier League collects will reduce the amount that will go to the foundation and ultimately, Ukraine.

What this all means for Manchester City

Manchester City are watching all of this carefully. Their case, involving 115 alleged charges of financial rule breaches spanning a decade, awaits the initial decision from the independent commission 15 months after the hearing concluded. The Sanction Agreement with Chelsea contains a notable passage - absent the cooperation and voluntary disclosure, the board suggests, an appropriate sanction would have been a ban from registering new players for two complete and consecutive transfer windows.

The remarkable implication is that deliberate financial deception, even of the most serious kind, does not in itself automatically warrant a points deduction. City’s legal team will have noted that surprising conclusion with interest especially if, like Chelsea, City can show that any established breaches made no difference to its PSR compliance.

Another two tier system?

None of the above is to say that the Chelsea sanction is straightforwardly wrong in every respect. Co-operation should be rewarded. The conduct of the previous ownership is a genuine distinction from cases where the incumbent club is responsible for the breach. The absence of a PSR consequence is a material fact. And Sanction Agreements (ie settlements) are different from disputed charges being heard in front of an independent commission.

But regulation draws its authority from consistency and credibility, not from the technical defensibility of individual decisions taken in isolation. That is why a Sanction Agreement needs ratification from an independent commission - in this case one including Robert Glancy KC who heard the Premier League’s views on co-operation first hand in the Forest case. When a league simultaneously argues before an independent commission that a 50 per cent co-operation discount is excessive, then later agrees to a sanction in which co-operation eliminates sporting consequences altogether before also halving the financial penalty, it is not applying a single coherent framework. It is applying different starting points to different clubs in different forums, and hoping the contrast is not noticed.

It has been noticed.

When Everton supporters ask why their club lost points, twice, for overspending while Chelsea has faced no sporting consequence for deliberate, concealed and systematic deception, the honest answer is that the rules, as applied, do not produce the same answer for everyone.

And when Richard Masters mistakenly referred to “small clubs” in the DCMS hearing in early 2024, he was forced to clarify that “It would be incorrect to infer from this that there is any unfair treatment based on Club size, as suggested in the Committee’s media statement. Indeed, the point I made was the opposite, in that the Premier League Board applies the Rules consistently, irrespective of the Club in question.”

Never has that question of consistency been more in focus.