That's how Manchester City cheated

The word "sham" is used as many as eight times in the Premier's Independent Commission's extremely damning report against Manchester City . Throughout the 40 pages , many names, of witnesses and officials, are omitted, for now.

The English team, accused of 114 financial charges and of deliberately falsifying its accounts, deceiving the competition and its rivals, football itself , responds that it is innocent. According to its CEO, Ferran Soriano, "it is all a conspiracy".

Abu Dhabi United Group, owners of City for the past 18 years, understood from the beginning that the only way to establish a mid-level team among the elite was by fattening its sponsorship accounts, whether genuine or inflated, as the BBC explains, since UEFA, like the Premier League, were about to introduce financial fair play rules back around 2010.

And for almost a decade, the so-called Covert Financing Plan managed to conceal approximately 1 billion euros in sponsorship funding, basically because it was the owners, not the sponsors, who paid most of the sponsorship or even part of the players' salaries .

Since 2010, City split the sponsorship agreements between a base fee , which was what the sponsors actually paid, and an additional fee, contributed by the new and wealthy owners... which would allow them, among other things, to invest in prohibitively expensive players.

'According to the Premier, it "gave the misleading impression to third parties (including the regulators and their auditors) that its commercial revenues from sponsorship agreements were much, much greater than they really were and from time to time they modified it to facilitate the ongoing concealment and avoid difficult questions". '

In some cases, these levers reached as much as 125 million , as in 2017: from the 11 declared to the real 134. In total, sponsors are estimated to have paid 119.25 million over those nine years under investigation, but City inflated them as if they had brought in 1,111 million, almost ten times more.

Examples of irregular financing

Let’s look at a couple of practical examples, taken from witness statements given in private during the investigation:

1. A front company like Fordham was used (involved in other legal activities under the name Project Longbow) to acquire the players' image rights from the club (at a highly inflated price). This again concealed the true origin of the money in order to bring in more funds as operating income. In this way, some 30 million came in and another 55 were excluded from expenses, "all erroneously," but with the "knowledge and approval of the club," according to the court ruling.

2. Another example: the multi-million contracts of players and coaches were hidden from the accounts, with the payment of salaries through third parties which, once again, were made by the owners themselves. There are three different cases related to this matter, whose names have been omitted from the document... for now. And the final amount is close to 20 million.

'This "was recorded in a consultancy contract" and "concealed the true extent of the club's responsibilities," the report says.'

The club has the right to appeal the findings of the independent Commission and has until Friday 2 October to exercise that right.

The intention of the Premier League Board is for the entire process (including appeals and the publication of the relevant decisions) to conclude as soon as possible.