Manchester City and the 114 verdict: what are the implications?

The verdict on Manchester City’s financial rule-breaking will have wide-ranging effects. In terms of this season’s Premier League, whatever punishment the club receives will benefit other teams: a deduction of 20 points or more would give Arsenal an 83% chance of winning the title and Liverpool 12%.

Friday brought the news that English football – and indeed global football – has been anticipating for a long time. We wrote here in early 2023 about the 115 charges that the Premier League had brought against Manchester City. Of those 115, the verdict that a panel has reached after more than three years, as leaked by The Athletic, is that City are guilty of 114 of them.

These are various rules broken over the course of many years over the last decade and a half. The rules are essentially what is referred to as ‘financial fair play’ – regulations designed to bring some limit to the extremes of reckless financial mismanagement in football over the decades – especially since the advent of the Premier League in 1992, which brought much greater levels of finance into the game.

The rules limit what clubs can spend relative to their size. But at the same time, they have the effect of preserving the status quo – as in, protecting the big clubs at the top of the Premier League, and blocking teams who seek to join them in enjoying the top silverware that the game has to offer.

The Premier League and those billions in television revenues have entrenched the elite clubs to a level not previously seen in English football. In 1992, over the previous 30 years, there had been ten different winners of the league title, the ultimate prize. Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s, there were 14 different winners. In the 30 years to the end of last season, there has been just six (Arsenal, Chelsea, Leicester City, Liverpool, Manchester City and Manchester United).

Figure 1: The shrinking circle of champions

Number of different clubs winning the English top-flight title in the previous 30 seasons, 1918-2025. Source: Economics Observatory scorecasting data.

Newcastle United have found out the challenges presented by the rules since their Saudi takeover in 2021, with financial limitations meaning heavy restrictions on recruitment. In contrast, it would seem, Manchester City simply broke those rules in their ascent to the summit of the English game in the early 2010s.

Much of the delay in this verdict being announced is down to the extent of litigation in football now. City are well known for retaining some of the most fearsome lawyers, and both the Premier League and UEFA, European football’s governing body, have felt this over recent years.

Clearly, any verdict had to be watertight – and will nonetheless still attract an appeal from City that all hope will take less than another three years to resolve. But City are hardly alone here. Recently, Burnley were successful in a legal claim against Everton relating to the latter’s breaking of the Premier League’s spending rules.

The Burnley case related to the loss that the club felt, they argued, as a result of Everton overspending. While Everton were punished with a points deduction, that was in the season after the overspend occurred, and hence Burnley didn’t benefit due to the action not being retrospective.

What penalties might Manchester City face?

That lack of retrospective action may give a hint as to what any eventual punishment for City may look like. There is clamour for City to be stripped of titles retrospectively, but this is something that’s never happened in the professional English game. The closest to this was perhaps the Spygate verdict against Southampton in May this year, where the club was expelled from the Championship playoffs. But that was only possible due to a very speedy verdict – something that hasn’t happened here.

Everton were one club given a points deduction for breaking the rules; Nottingham Forest another; while Chelsea escaped with a financial penalty and no points deduction more recently. All of these though were for offences of much smaller magnitude than City's.

There’s an argument that fans of other clubs have been deprived of enjoying success over the last decade and a half – Liverpool finishing second to City twice, Arsenal too. The romantics though might point more to Stoke City and Watford losing FA Cup finals to City, and Wycombe Wanderers a League Cup semifinal. Could sporting success have been better spread around without City’s rule-breaking?

Another notable feature of the Burnley case was the use of what was essentially a sports economics prediction model. Akin to our Economics Observatory scorecasting forecast models that use goal arrival Poisson regression techniques, both Burnley and Everton employed similar models to make points about the likelihood of particular outcomes having occurred.

This is arguably a good thing (says the sports economist). Such probabilistic modelling, provided the underlying models are reasonable, does provide a proper counterfactual – what might have happened otherwise?

The Poisson goal arrival models are good. This has been shown by a range of publications, and the role that two of the original proponents of these models, Mark Dixon and Stuart Coles, have had in both successful gambling, but also successful football clubs (Brentford and Brighton and Hove Albion).

They are thus a good source for counterfactual analysis – analysis that can yield important insights that take account of uncertainty alongside what might have happened.

Where might Manchester City finish if they face a points deduction?

With our forecasts published before the season began, we had City at 60% to win the Premier League. That was an extraordinarily high number – our other division forecasts came in with generally lower probabilities for outcomes – since the Premier League features 380 matches, each of which is highly uncertain. Even if City are 60% to win every single match, there’s only a 0.6% chance that they win ten in a row, and an 8% chance that they win the five in a row needed for a haircut nowadays.

We can put our model to use in this scenario, too. We can simply deduct a number of points from City’s final tally, and look at what that means for the final table. Our simulations have City achieving 76 points, on average –that seems low, but it still puts them at 22% to win the title (factoring in their managerial change in the summer).

If City were deducted ten points (Everton’s penalty, later reduced to six after being guilty of one charge), this would have very little effect – there’d still be an outside chance that City could win the title (4%).

A deduction of 20 points would rule the title out, but still see City finishing in the top four with 16%, and just a 0.2% chance of being relegated. A deduction of 30 points would start to bite – now City would only average about 46 points and an average position of 12th. But it seems unlikely these sizes of punishment would satisfy the clamour for serious action to reflect the magnitude of the crime.

A deduction of 40 points would really bite – City would then be 35% to be relegated and would finish, on average, in 16th place. A deduction of 50 points would put City on 26 points and somewhere between 18th and 19th – with an 81% chance of being relegated. A deduction of 60 points would all but relegate City, putting them on just 16 points and with a 99% chance of being relegated.

Figure 2: What a points deduction would mean for Manchester City

Manchester City's chance of each outcome under points deductions of zero to 60, from our updated end-of-season simulations, September 2026. Top four includes winning the title. Hover for values.

One key consideration is how this all would affect other clubs. Arsenal and Liverpool would be the primary beneficiaries, since both increase their chances of winning the Premier League. Once City are knocked out of title contention (a deduction of 20 points or more), Arsenal are 83% to win and Liverpool 12%.

Brentford and Brighton would rise to around a 1.4% chance of what would be a truly remarkable achievement for either club. But perhaps more realistically, they would both rise to a close on 50% chance of qualifying for next season’s Champions League.

Figure 3: How a City deduction would reshape the whole table

Probability of each final outcome for every club. Use the buttons to set the size of City's points deduction; clubs re-order by their chance of a top-four finish. Source: as Figure 2.

This analysis featuring other clubs emphasises that in each season that City broke the rules, clubs like Brentford and Brighton suffered. Leicester City, now stuck in League One, may have reached the Champions League more often if City had not broken the rules.

Given that Burnley were successful in their legal action against Everton for just one rule violation, it seems highly likely that a significant number of challenges would await City. Burnley were awarded £35 million from Everton, a huge sum of money, just for one rule violation, and hence the exposure that City may have could be vast – as Christian Purslow writes about here.

Where can I find out more?

This article explains UEFA’s financial fair play (FFP) regulations in more detail.
These data from Statista list the most expensive transfers of all time. Note: only one signing relates to Manchester City: Jack Grealish.