What punishment could Manchester City face after the 115-charge verdict?
Etihad StadiumManchester City have been found guilty on 114 of the 115 charges brought against them by the Premier League, and the first question everyone asked was the one nobody can answer yet: what happens to them now?
No sanction has been decided. The independent commission that reached the verdict still has to rule on punishment, and City are expected to appeal. What can be said is what the rules allow, what the league has done before, and what the people who have studied the case were expecting.
What the commission is allowed to impose
The Premier League handbook sets out the powers. A commission can issue a reprimand, impose an unlimited fine, deduct points, attach conditions, or expel a club from the competition. Rule W.51.7 lets the panel combine those or devise something else it considers appropriate.
The single real constraint is proportionality. A sanction that does not fit the breaches is the easiest thing in the world for a club’s lawyers to overturn, and City’s lawyers will be reading the ruling with exactly that in mind.
The precedents are recent, and they are small
English football has two modern comparisons, both from the 2023-24 season: Everton and Nottingham Forest, docked six points and four points respectively for breaching profitability and sustainability rules.
Both covered around three years. City’s charges span 2009 to 2018. That gap is the whole argument about what a proportionate punishment looks like here.
The comparison is not a new one. When Everton were facing their deduction in October 2023, Jamie Carragher made the point about scale that has hung over the case ever since — and the number he used then is the number the commission has now found proven.
What was expected before the ruling
It is worth being clear about the timing of what follows. The football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire set out his reasoning in February 2026, speaking to The Overlap — seven months before the verdict landed, and on the basis of what should happen if City were found guilty. He has not revised it in public since the ruling. His arithmetic started from those two precedents.
If we take a look at precedence, we have had Everton and Nottingham Forest with six and four-point deductions for a single offence covering a three-year period. The accusations against Manchester City cover a nine-year period, so it is far bigger.
From there he arrived at a number.
The numbers involved we are not certain about but they are likely to be quite significant. I think you have to add a zero to what we’ve seen in terms of Forest and Everton, so somewhere between a 40 and 60-point deduction would be, on merit to be consistent with what we’ve seen with other decisions, would make a lot of logic.
Christian Purslow, a former Premier League chief executive, framed the same point in terms of where a deduction of that size would leave the club. He was speaking to The Football Boardroom, also before the verdict.
The sporting sanction is likely to be major points deductions, which ultimately could translate into relegation.
A fine is widely expected on top, particularly on the charges relating to a failure to co-operate with the league’s investigation.
Why relegation is not a punishment the league can hand out
This is the part most often got wrong in the argument. The Premier League cannot send City down the divisions, because which league a club plays in below the top flight is not the Premier League’s to decide. Maguire put it plainly.
The Premier League cannot relegate Manchester City to League One or League Two because that is an EFL decision and Manchester City have not had any charges proven against them by the EFL. Therefore, it has to be a points deduction.
So the route to City going down is not a relegation sanction at all. It is a points deduction large enough to send them down on the table — which is precisely what Purslow was describing.
The boardroom, not the trophy cabinet
The other thing being said everywhere is that City will be stripped of the titles they won. Nobody who has examined the case closely is arguing that. Everton and Forest kept every result they earned, and the comparison people reach for — Juventus — is a Serie A case about match-fixing, under a different governing body.
Maguire does invoke Juventus, but about the directors rather than the trophies.
If you take a look at what happened with Juventus in Serie A, the board had to resign when they were claiming things about player wages which were proven to be untrue.
What happens next
The commission has to decide the sanction, and City are expected to challenge the verdict. Their record on appeal is not nothing: UEFA banned the club from the Champions League for two seasons in 2020, and the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned it.
Anyone telling you today what City’s punishment will be is guessing. What is worth knowing is the range it has to come from, and that range starts a long way above anything English football has handed down before.
