Man City lodge appeal hours before deadline as they fight guilty verdict
Manchester City have formally launched their fight against the ruling that found them guilty of breaking Premier League financial rules, filing their appeal at 7pm on Thursday, October 1, with less than a day to spare before Friday’s deadline.
The club gave little away in a brief statement on Friday. They said they would continue to respect due process but are restricted in what they can say until the case is over.
They also held firm on the line they’ve taken from the start: City are innocent, and they say a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence backs every position they’ve taken.
The verdict City are fighting
Tuesday’s ruling was as damaging as it gets. An independent commission found City guilty on all of the 100-plus charges first brought in February 2023.
The panel concluded that between 2009 and 2018, the club used sham deals with commercial partners to artificially inflate commercial revenue by £830 million.
City were also found to have broken both Premier League and UEFA spending limits by a significant margin, and to have failed to cooperate with the league’s investigation in good faith.
“Unsafe”
City’s response was immediate.
Within hours of the verdict, the club said the commission’s opinion contains clear material errors of law, principle and fact and is unsafe. CEO Ferran Soriano repeated that wording in a video message to staff, and former manager Pep Guardiola went public with his backing for the club.
That defiance contrasts sharply with the mood elsewhere. The FA said on Friday that the verdict damages the integrity of the game.
No escape route to CAS
This time City can’t take the fight to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the body that overturned their two-year UEFA Champions League ban in 2020.
The appeal stays within the Premier League’s own system, and the league has made clear it wants this settled quickly after more than three and a half years.
The biggest question is still open: punishment. Sanctions have not yet been decided, and fines, points deductions and even relegation have all been discussed as possibilities throughout the case.
For now, the league’s most successful club of the past decade waits to find out whether the verdict stands, and what it will cost them.
