Man City Lodges 'Comprehensive' Appeal After Financial Scandal Guilty Verdict

Manchester City has lodged a "comprehensive" appeal, the club confirmed Friday, following the publication of a report by an independent commission detailing large-scale financial rule-breaking by the Premier League giant in one of English soccer's biggest scandals.

"The clubs firm position," read a short statement from City, "is that, on multiple grounds, the opinion contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact and is unsafe."

City has protested its innocence throughout the long-running case, which dates back to 2018 and reached a milestone Tuesday, when the Premier League published a verdict saying the Abu Dhabi-controlled club was "guilty of all charges related to serious breaches" of the competitions financial rules from 2009-18.

City has yet to receive a punishment. According to the Premier League, potential sanctions could be a reprimand, fine, points deduction or, in the worst case, expulsion from the competition. No team has ever been expelled from English soccers top flight.

City officials said they would lodge an appeal and that was filed on Thursday evening, the club said, ahead of Fridays deadline.

"The club is innocent of the accusations made by the Premier League and a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence exists in support of all of its positions, relating to this case," City said, using language from previous statements on the case.

Premier League regulations state that the chair of the three-person disciplinary commission that found against City now has to appoint a new appeal board. That also will consist of three people, one of whom "shall have held judicial office," the leagues rules state.

The appeal board will then schedule a hearing that should finish within 12 weeks after the appeal is filed, and cannot exceed five consecutive days.

That will be addressed in a separate, confidential hearing with the commission and there has been no word whether sanctions can be imposed before the decision of the appeal is reached.

The Premier League has only said its intention is that the process is concluded "as soon as possible."

City was found to have systematically broken the Premier Leagues financial rules for nearly a decade in what the competitions chief executive, Richard Masters, described as the most significant disciplinary case in the leagues history.

The investigatory panel found that City artificially inflated its revenue — using what the league has called "sham" commercial deals — by more than $1 billion from 2009-18 to circumvent financial fair-play rules that restricted rival clubs, and allowing City to buy some of the best players in the world.

That was the foundation of a long and unprecedented period of success in which City changed the landscape of the worlds most popular soccer league, with the northwest club winning eight league titles from 2012-24.

City committed almost all of the 115-plus violations, the commission found: 80 from 2009-18 for alleged financial misdeeds and another 35 from 2018-23 for allegedly not cooperating with the investigation.

City is likely to focus part of its appeal around the issue of how its Abu Dhabi-based sponsorship deals were funded.

The commission found that sponsors in Abu Dhabi only paid 119.25 million pounds (158.4million) of the 949.94 million pounds (1.26 billion) stated in club accounts, with the remaining 830.69 million pounds ($1.1 billion) being paid by the Abu Dhabi United Group, the private company of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan that bought City in 2008.

Sheikh Mansour is a member of the United Arab Emirates ruling family.

City contended that "no part" of the deals were funded by the ADUG and that, instead, the Abu Dhabi government — which owned the sponsors — had helped to fund the deals "from time to time." And so in Citys opinion, that source of extra funding was misunderstood, the commission wrote.

The panel rejected that explanation by