Manchester City's Shadow: More Than 100 Charges, £900 Million, and the Story of an Open Appeal

In the notebook I keep on my table in Mymensingh, I have written down a date — October 11. Beside it a name: Anfield. Underneath that, another line, added this week: "appeal — Friday." Three words. Yet an entire football season is swaying inside those three words. The news arrived on Friday evening, and the sound that came through my old radio was "bombshell." But when I stood by the window, all I heard outside was the bell of a rickshaw and, far off, the sound of a ball on some field. Where football was, no bomb had gone off. What had gone off was an account book — Manchester City's account book.

An independent commission has ruled: the club is guilty on all charges of breaching financial rules. More than one hundred charges, spread across nine years. Another finding too — guilty on most charges related to failure to cooperate. The club says it has done no wrong, and has pledged to appeal by Friday. Premier League CEO Richard Masters has called it the "most significant" event in the league's history. What the punishment will be is uncertain. It could be a huge points deduction, a heavy fine, or expulsion from the league. And floating above it all is an unreliable sentence — "City could even be stripped of their titles."

City arrived here slowly, on money. In 2026, the Abu Dhabi-backed group of Sheikh Mansour bought the club, and from then the map of football changed. Eight league titles over the past fifteen years, multiple cups, and a first Champions League in 2026. In this period, City became the ruler of its era in the Premier League. But precisely in the gaps of this success, the questions had been piling up. From 2026 to 2026 — those nine years — the club allegedly arranged fake or "sham" commercial deals to inflate revenue and reduce costs, more than nine hundred million pounds in total — about 1.2 billion dollars. The aim was to dodge two rulebooks: the Premier League's own financial rules and UEFA's Financial Fair Play.

Now one has to understand how those deals worked. A club's income comes from three places — broadcast rights, matchday revenue, and commercial sponsorship. Financial rules essentially check whether a club is spending more than it earns. If the owner's own money is injected directly, that breaks the rules. But if that money is routed through a company belonging to the owner under the name of "sponsorship," and its value is set far above the market's fair value, then it looks like legitimate income. This is the alleged mechanism. And this is why the case is not a mere accounting error — it is a structural vulnerability.

Manchester City's model was "cash-rich, rule-fragile" — the very system that gave it money is what has indicted it. What Abu Dhabi's state ownership gave the club was endless patience and deep pockets; but the same system created the suspicion that this money went outside the rules. The closer the link between owner and club, the more precarious the definition of a related-party deal — because where buyer and sponsor are effectively tied to the same source, setting a "fair value" becomes almost impossible.

Here a comparison is needed. Everton and Nottingham Forest — these two clubs recently received points deductions for breaching financial rules. Their offence was a single event each. City's charges number more than a hundred, spread across nine years. This gap in scale itself tells us how high the range of possible sanctions may sit — from a fine to expulsion. A points deduction in one case and a points deduction across a hundred cases are not the same thing; the second sets a precedent, and a precedent lasts a long time.

But the thing I am thinking about most right now is not the points deduction. It is compensation. Rival clubs are allegedly queuing up to claim "hundreds of millions" of pounds — they say they lost prize money or European places because of City's wrongdoing. This is the least-discussed risk. Because a points deduction can be cut, an appeal can succeed — but a compensation claim can outlive even that sanction. And this money catches no one's eye, because it never appears on any scoreboard.

I have noticed many times that at the moment of a big football ruling, everyone talks about the punishment; no one asks — is the verdict final? Here that is the most important question. The independent commission's verdict has come, but the appeal window is open, until Friday. The club still claims it is innocent. The news being treated as an "end" is in fact a beginning. At this moment there is no final form of punishment; there is only possibility. And treating possibility as certainty is the oldest habit of the media.

There is also a gap in the original account that catches the eye. It says City is guilty on "all" charges of financial rules, yet guilty on "most" charges related to cooperation. The difference between "all" and "most" is not small — it could loom large when the scale of punishment is set. I keep this as information to be verified, not as final truth.

Now to that sentence which is flying around the most: title stripping. To be honest, it is written as "speculation" — rumour — and is in no official document. What the clear mechanism for stripping a title is, no one has said. Yet this rumour spreads the most. Because it is the most dramatic, and dramatic words spread fastest. The lower the truth of a claim, the wider its reach often becomes.

Here a club-affiliated voice catches the eye. Former player Micah Richards has said he is "devastated," that it is "heartbreaking." Former club chairman David Bernstein has said they "have to suffer." And Jamie Carragher has said something sharper — players will live with an "asterisk," and rival fans will call it a "sham." Carragher's most serious allegation — that the hierarchy told players "everything was fine, you will never get done for anything," yet now the tune has changed. He called it "gaslighting."

That remark is the biggest signal from the dressing room — a rupture of trust. When people inside the club speak against the ownership's line, the pressure comes not only from outside but from within. And inner pressure shakes a squad more. When a former chairman and a former player — two kinds of voices — lean the same way, it is a clear sign that a distance has opened between the ownership's message and people's feelings.

One thing must be kept in mind here. City sits under an ownership where decisions are made very far away, far from the dressing room. The player's interest lies in one place — career, legacy, contract; the owner's interest lies elsewhere — defending the club's position. When these two interests do not align, friction at a moment of crisis is inevitable. And that friction leaves a mark on on-pitch performance, which no table records.

Now to the pitch. On October 11, City will play at Anfield against Liverpool — a clash of the era's two leading sides, and Liverpool is City's "closest challenger" of this decade. This match has now become the meeting point of two stories — the story on the pitch and the story in the books. And I know that when these two stories run together, neither can be understood without the other. When the shadow of the books falls on the pitch, football is no longer what it was.

At this moment, one thing is astonishing to consider. The players who won these titles — many of their best moments now stand questioned. In Carragher's words, an asterisk will sit beside their achievement. This is not merely a metaphor — it is a real mental burden. For a player who knows his life's best work may stand in history with an "asterisk," stepping onto the pitch is not easy. Winning on the pitch and winning in history — a new crack has opened between these two.

The pitch is a poem written with grass, and the transfer market is its footnotes. But in this event, the footnote has become the main text. The money with which City was built is now deciding the club's future. In football, sometimes the accounting of the game becomes more powerful than the game itself, and that is the story of this moment.

And I know this money is not familiar to me. But the consequence is. Because I have seen football where players go months without wages — like that 32-year-old captain of Mohammedan SC, who trained alone in an empty Mymensingh stadium despite five months of unpaid wages. His transfer fee was zero. City's shadow-money is nine hundred million. Two extremes. Yet in both places the same question — whose is football, the player's or the accountant's? I have seen this question from both ends, so today I cannot tune my voice to one side.

I keep a notebook of the goals that never made the highlight reel. This verdict too may someday be a highlight, or may not. But for those who played and lost against City this decade, it is no highlight — it is the end of a long wait, or the start of another. And how long that wait lasts, no commission decides.

One big thing must be kept in mind here, which very few say. This case is not just about one club. It is about a model. State-wealth ownership, multi-club networks, and dressing up accounts through related-party deals — this entire system is now on trial. A verdict against City means not just City's punishment; it is a signal to the whole football economy. If a state-owned club can be harshly punished, others will think twice in future. If it cannot, the rulebook itself falls into question. In either case, the outcome is bigger than City.

The stadium remembers the silence more honestly than the broadcast ever did. What the radio says — "bomb," "biggest case" — is one tune. But the silence that surrounds players when they step onto the pitch is another tune. Some believe that if the punishment is a points deduction, a strange situation will arise for the players — winning means nothing, losing means nothing. I do not know the name of this deadlock, but its chemistry is new in football. And new chemistry is never easy.

And within all this, one dimension remains unclear. How rival clubs will claim compensation, what that mechanism is — no one has said. This could be a big legal battleground in the coming months. And it is the least-discussed yet most long-lasting risk. Because an on-pitch punishment ends one day, but a court's punishment drags on for years.

Finally, I leave one question. If I have learned one thing over the years, it is this — football never ends in an account book. Buying and selling clubs, prices, profit and loss — these are one layer. But football lives on another layer, where a boy kicks a ball until the streetlights go out. When the transfer window opens, I look for the boy behind the buyout clause — because the true price of football hides inside him. In City's case, the question now runs the other way. Behind the club there is no boy; there is a state. And whether that state's accounts balance in football's ledger will be seen in the coming months.

On October 11, at Anfield, the ball will roll. What lies beneath that ball — only grass, or an entire era's reckoning — time will tell. Until then I will keep my notebook open. Because the news being treated as an "end" is, to me, a beginning — beginning with Friday's appeal. And whatever the appeal's outcome, one thing is clear: football's ledger will never stay silent again.