Manchester City expulsion from the Premier League would once have sounded almost unthinkable, but the club’s long-running financial case has reached a point where English football may have to consider its most severe sporting sanction.
StuartArmour.co.uk understands that City have been found guilty in all but one category of the charges brought against them. That differs slightly from the shorthand dominating coverage on Friday, with several reports describing the verdict as guilty findings on all but one of the widely quoted 115 charges.
The numbers surrounding the case have always been more complicated than that headline figure suggests. The charges announced by the Premier League in February 2023 were commonly totalled at 115, although subsequent reporting has suggested the true number of individual alleged breaches, once duplicated seasonal references were properly counted, was closer to 130. BBC Sport previously reported that the case could be separated into five broad categories covering accurate financial information, player and manager remuneration, UEFA financial regulations, Premier League profitability and sustainability rules, and co-operation with the league’s investigation.
The independent commission’s complete judgment has not yet been made public. Reuters reported on Friday that City had been found guilty on all but one of the commonly cited 115 charges and that an appeal is expected, while the club has maintained that the process remains ongoing.
That distinction is important. There is still a legal process to complete and Manchester City are entitled to pursue the avenues of appeal available to them. But if findings on this scale ultimately stand, the conversation about punishment has to move well beyond whether City should lose 10, 20 or even 30 points. For me, expulsion from the Premier League has to be seriously considered.
Why Manchester City expulsion must be considered
Points deductions have become an established sanction in English football’s recent financial cases. Everton and Nottingham Forest both suffered sporting penalties after breaching profitability and sustainability regulations, but those were much narrower cases than the one brought against Manchester City.
City’s case stretches across years and multiple areas of regulation. The allegations concerning accurate financial information cover the period from 2009-10 to 2017-18, while separate allegations concerned remuneration, UEFA rules, Premier League financial regulations and the club’s co-operation with the investigation.
If findings across the overwhelming majority of that case are ultimately upheld, a conventional deduction would feel inadequate. A club capable of accumulating the points totals City have produced throughout the modern era could conceivably absorb even a substantial penalty and treat it as one lost season before beginning again. That would punish Manchester City, but it would not necessarily address the seriousness of what had been established.
The Premier League’s disciplinary framework allows for severe sporting sanctions, with expulsion among the options that can arise in the most serious circumstances. The case for Manchester City expulsion becomes considerably stronger if findings across almost the entirety of the league’s case survive the appeals process. If a case of this scale does not warrant serious consideration of that ultimate sanction, it is difficult to imagine what would.
My preference would be for City to be removed from the Premier League and required to restart as far down the English pyramid as the relevant authorities can legitimately place them. The Premier League cannot simply decide by itself that Manchester City will play in the National League because membership of competitions further down the pyramid is governed separately, but the principle should be straightforward: the punishment should be substantial enough that the club has to rebuild its sporting position rather than simply endure an uncomfortable season.
What Manchester City expulsion would mean for this season
Expulsion during an active season would create another extraordinary problem: what happens to the matches Manchester City have already played?
City have made a perfect start to the current Premier League campaign and were top of the table following their 5-3 victory over Sunderland last weekend. If they were expelled, I believe those results should be declared null and void.
Awarding every opponent a retrospective 3-0 victory would manufacture results that never happened, while allowing the existing matches to stand would create another imbalance because some clubs would have faced Manchester City while others would not.
Neither solution is perfect, but removing City’s matches from the record would be the least artificial way of reconstructing the competition. There would inevitably be disruption to the league table, television schedules and the financial arrangements surrounding fixtures, but protecting the integrity of the competition should matter more than avoiding administrative inconvenience.
The trophies cannot simply be ignored
Manchester City expulsion would address only the club’s immediate position in English football. It would not resolve the much more difficult question of how the sport should treat the trophies and competitive advantages accumulated during the period concerned.
The most difficult question would come next: if serious financial breaches helped Manchester City establish the platform from which they became one of the most powerful clubs in world football, what happens to everything they subsequently won?
My view is that all major trophies won during the period affected by that advantage should be revisited, including those won after the years directly covered by the central financial allegations.
Manchester City celebrate the 2011–12 Premier League title during their victory parade.
That position will be controversial, but football clubs do not reset their competitive position at the end of each accounting year. Success accumulates. Winning a league title brings prize money, Champions League qualification and international exposure, all of which can strengthen commercial revenues and make a club more attractive to elite players and managers. Success then makes further success more achievable.
If it is ultimately established that Manchester City obtained part of the platform for that rise in breach of the rules, it becomes extremely difficult to draw a neat line through history and argue that everything won afterwards was completely disconnected from what came before.
There is also an important regulatory distinction. The Premier League could determine what happens to its own competition, but the FA would have to consider the FA Cup, the EFL its League Cup and UEFA its European competitions. Stripping every honour would therefore require different governing bodies to address their own competitions and, in my view, they should.
Reassigning league titles is far more complicated
Removing trophies is one thing; deciding what replaces them is another. Cup competitions offer the most obvious solution because there is a beaten finalist. If a trophy were stripped, awarding it to the team defeated in the final would at least provide a clearly identifiable alternative winner.
Premier League titles are much more complicated. The obvious response would be to give the championship to the side that finished second, and that might ultimately be the fairest available solution, but it would never genuinely recreate the season.
A league campaign is an interconnected competition played over 38 matches. Remove one of its strongest teams and countless things potentially change. Results are different, goal difference changes, managers approach fixtures differently and the pressure surrounding the title race develops in another way.
The consequences spread further than first and second place. Champions League qualification could have changed, as could Europa League qualification. Clubs might have earned additional prize money and subsequently made different transfer decisions, meaning the impact could have continued into future seasons.
Even if a runner-up was retrospectively declared champion, that title would always carry an unavoidable asterisk in the minds of many supporters. Not because the new champion had done anything wrong, but because they were denied the experience that makes winning a championship special in the first place.
You cannot recreate a final day years afterwards or reproduce the moment a stadium realises its team has become champion. Nor can you manufacture the parade and celebrations that should have followed. That is precisely why breaches affecting sporting integrity are so serious: there are consequences that no punishment can completely repair.
Manchester City changed the course of English football
The Guardiola era demonstrates how far those consequences potentially extend. Pep Guardiola left Manchester City this summer after 10 seasons in which he won six Premier League titles, the Champions League and a historic Treble among a remarkable collection of trophies.
There has never been any suggestion that Guardiola personally committed the alleged financial wrongdoing, and his coaching ability cannot reasonably be reduced to an accounting case involving club executives. He remains one of the outstanding managers of his generation, but if the findings against City are upheld, his Manchester City legacy will inevitably exist within a different historical context.
The question is not whether Guardiola could coach those teams, but whether the Manchester City capable of attracting Guardiola in 2016 would have existed in exactly the same form had the club complied with every financial rule throughout its transformation. Perhaps he still joins City; perhaps he chooses Manchester United, Arsenal or another major European club. Nobody can know.
That uncertainty creates one of the great sliding-doors questions in modern football. Had Guardiola gone elsewhere, the consequences could have extended to where City’s players signed, who won championships, which clubs qualified for the Champions League and which managers kept their jobs. The additional revenues generated by different league positions could, in turn, have changed recruitment decisions elsewhere.
Football does not take place in isolation. One club’s success alters the environment in which everybody else operates, which is why the impact of this case potentially extends far beyond Manchester City.
The supporters deserve sympathy
The people easiest to sympathise with are City’s supporters. They did not submit financial accounts or negotiate sponsorship agreements; they supported their football club, bought tickets, travelled around the country and experienced some of the greatest moments a football fan could hope to witness. Any expulsion would punish them too.
The same applies to the current squad. Erling Haaland and the players representing Manchester City today were not responsible for decisions allegedly made years before many of them arrived.
But there is an unavoidable distinction between personal responsibility and institutional punishment. A football club employs players, managers and executives as one organisation, and when that organisation breaks sporting regulations, any meaningful sporting penalty inevitably affects people who were not individually responsible.
There is also a question that cannot easily be answered: would Manchester City have been capable of attracting all of those players from the position they occupy today if the club’s earlier trajectory had been different?
The current squad was assembled by an institution that had already become one of football’s dominant forces. If the foundation of that dominance is ultimately found to have involved serious rule breaches, the advantage cannot simply be separated from the team that exists now.
Expulsion should be accompanied by a registration ban
Expulsion on its own could still leave the authorities with another problem. If City retained their enormous financial resources and were allowed to operate normally in the transfer market, they could potentially overwhelm clubs further down the pyramid and accelerate their return to the top, undermining the purpose of sending them down in the first place.
I would therefore accompany expulsion with a five-year ban on registering new players, covering both first-team recruitment and new academy signings.
Players already registered within City’s structure would remain available. Existing academy footballers could continue their development and be promoted into the senior team, while City could also sell players who wanted to leave. What they could not do is simply replace those players by returning to the transfer market.
Such a sanction would undoubtedly produce an extraordinary transfer situation. Elite footballers would have their own decisions to make, and the contractual consequences would have to be handled individually. Some might stay, while many could seek opportunities elsewhere.
What City would be left with is something much closer to genuine sporting reconstruction. They would have to coach the players already available to them, develop their academy and earn their progress back through the pyramid. Five years would be an exceptional restriction, but this is an exceptional case.
This cannot only be about Manchester City
The final judgment in this case should not be viewed solely through the question of how severely Manchester City deserve to be punished. It also has to consider everybody who competed against them.
Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham and numerous other clubs have spent years fighting City for league positions and trophies. Some finished second in title races, while others missed Champions League qualification or lost cup finals.
Further down the table, even one league position can affect prize money, recruitment and the direction of a football club. Those teams entered competitions on the understanding that everybody was bound by the same regulatory framework.
If it is ultimately established that one of the dominant clubs of the era repeatedly operated outside that framework, football cannot restore every opportunity that may have been lost, but it can demonstrate that its rules have consequences.
Manchester City still have the right to appeal, and until that process has concluded there will remain legal uncertainty around the final outcome. But if the findings now being reported survive that scrutiny, a fine and a points deduction would not come close to reflecting the scale of the case.
Manchester City expulsion should no longer be regarded as an unthinkable sanction if those findings survive appeal. It should form part of a wider response that also considers the club’s existing results, its trophies and its future ability to use the transfer market to reconstruct its position.
Expulsion should be on the table. This season’s league results should be removed if City leave the competition, the trophies built on the period of advantage should be reconsidered by the relevant governing bodies, and the club should face a lengthy registration ban that prevents it simply spending its way straight back to the top.
None of that can reconstruct the football history that might otherwise have existed. What it can do is establish something just as important for the future: that the financial rules governing English football are rules, rather than merely a price that the wealthiest clubs can afford to pay.