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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/7637772\/2026\/09\/28\/manchester-city-damages-premier-league-clubs-finances\/?source=athletic_moneycall_newsletter&campaign=19934032&userId=16438468",
    "parsed_content": "\u201cDoes the flap of a butterfly\u2019s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?\u201d asked mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz. He founded chaos theory. In his honour, might we now ask: does a bank transfer from Abu Dhabi set off an earthquake in England?On Friday\u2019s evidence, we have a resounding answer.As first reported by The Athletic, Manchester City have been found guilty on substantially all the charges levelled at them by the Premier League, a verdict which has sent shockwaves through world football and which promises only more uncertainty and chaos.What will City\u2019s punishment be? Will their appeal be successful? Will individual clubs follow up the Premier League\u2019s case, whenever it eventually comes to a close, with compensation claims of their own?\n \n \n \n \n What You Should Read Next\n \n \n \n \n Manchester City versus the Premier League: After the day that shocked football, what next?\n \n \n Manchester City will fight on after being found guilty on almost all Premier League charges, but the future is uncertain for all parties\n \n \n \n \n \n The haze of Friday\u2019s fallout will take a long time to lift, but its seismic nature is already clear.\u00a0One tranche of charges levelled at City accused them of not providing accurate financial information in each season from 2009-10 to 2017-18, a period in which they won three Premier League titles. Another accused them of refusing to co-operate with Premier League investigations between 2018-19 and 2022-23, when they won four more. Another championship followed in 2024.The club who won eight English titles in the past 15 years have been found guilty of a huge raft of allegations fired at them by their own league. The repercussions, for City, for the Premier League, for football, are enormous.The existing case will run and run, but that final earlier question, of how individual clubs may react, threatens to engulf football entirely.With City now found guilty of systemic rule-breaking over multiple seasons, others are mobilising and claims are being readied. A class action, where damaged rivals come together to seek compensation, might materialise. Compensation running into the hundreds of millions is being discussed with increased legitimacy.The scope of City\u2019s transgressions and the knock-on impact of their enormous past spending makes determining the full extent of those damages nigh on impossible.It is not clear which clubs could even pursue them. A Friday evening report in The Independent detailed how each of Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur have preserved their right to compensation under the Premier League rulebook\u2019s section W, which is the one under which Burnley successfully pursued Everton following the latter\u2019s breaching of financial rules.\u00a0Rule W.51.5 \u2014 since shifted to W.64.5 under the league\u2019s latest set of laws \u2014 states an independent commission can order a rule-breaking club \u201cto pay compensation unlimited in amount to any person or to any club\u201d. That Burnley case may have opened a huge can of worms. Yet it is unclear whether those teams who didn\u2019t actively preserve their rights in respect of City\u2019s breaches would now be able to make similar claims.\n \n \n \n \n What You Should Read Next\n \n \n \n \n The Manchester City verdicts as viewed by the rest of the football world\n \n \n The Athletic spent the weekend talking to executives and officials at clubs and organisations to see how they view the situation\n \n \n \n \n \n Even just figuring out where to draw the line for any potential damages is difficult.Do we stop at the end of 2017-18, when the charges of supplying inaccurate financial information and breaching Premier League and UEFA rules run to? Do we continue to 2022-23, encompassing the non-cooperation charges? What about since then? Do we take City as having acted within the rules for the past three seasons? Did the advantages gained through transgression suddenly evaporate?The effects of the actions taken, the money spent, to muscle City into world football\u2019s elite in the early 2010s remain in place today.Theirs has been the highest wage bill in English football in eight of the past nine years we have published data for. An academy which had vast sums poured into it in the early days of City\u2019s Abu Dhabi ownership now serves up a steady pipeline of talent, its graduates able to be turned over for hefty profits to keep the riches flowing to the first team \u2014 only Chelsea, with their voluminous player trading, have made more profitable sales. Those massive commercial deals with related parties, for a long time eyed sceptically and now under the strongest of microscopes, have enabled City to repeatedly put out one of the most expensively assembled and highly remunerated squads in world football.\n Pep Guardiola kisses the Premier League trophy after City\u2019s fourth consecutive title in 2024Oli Scarff\/AFP via Getty ImagesIn return, in a sport where winning is insufficient and cash must follow too, City\u2019s success has generated whopping sums of prize money, a consequence of booming television rights deals for the Premier League and UEFA\u2019s Champions League and City\u2019s newfound ability to win the former a lot and frequently progress far in the latter, with 20223 bringing one title in that as well.If we just cover the period the charges other than the non-cooperation ones relate to, so 2009-10 to 2017-18, we find City earned \u00a31.094billion from Premier League and UEFA prize money, the third-most of any English club behind Chelsea (\u00a31.127bn) and Manchester United (\u00a31.105bn). Add on the years with the non-cooperation charges and no side in the country matches them. Add on the remainder and, since the 2008 takeover, City\u2019s prize money across all competitions tops \u00a33bn.\n \nShareAt home, City earned \u00a3199million in Premier League merit payments across the nine seasons from 2009 to 2018, \u00a313m more than next-highest Chelsea. Those merit payments have evolved from \u00a3725,000 per Premier League place when City were taken over to \u00a31.93m in 2017-18, to \u00a33.76m last season. These are big amounts. Arsenal, last season\u2019s champions, banked \u00a375m in merit payments alone.Since the 2009-10 season that the earliest charges relate to, notwithstanding pandemic-hit 2019-20, where detailed distribution amounts weren\u2019t published, the Premier League has dished out \u00a36.121billion in merit payments to 42 different clubs. City received \u00a3559.6m of that, nine per cent of the total and more than any of the other 41 teams. Arsenal, next in line, are almost \u00a350m behind.\n \nShare\u00a0Success breeds money breeds success. Premier League clubs get more cash depending on how often they are televised each season and, sure enough, City\u2019s improved performance saw them selected for broadcast more often. In that nine-season 2009-18 period, they received \u00a3170million in TV \u2018facility\u2019 distributions; only Manchester United (\u00a3180m) and Liverpool (\u00a3175m) received more.Much commentary over the weekend has focused on who would have won the league instead of City in the years of their infractions, but the consequences of long-term rule-breaking in a sport like football are far broader than that.\n \n \n \n \n What You Should Read Next\n \n \n \n \n What if\u2026 Manchester City have their trophies taken away from them?\n \n \n It is not known what sanctions the Premier League giants could face, but all options are on the table and plenty of clubs stand to benefit\n \n \n \n \n \n City have played in the Champions League every year from 2011-12 onwards, achieving qualification in eight of the nine years the main charges spanned.Their qualification naturally means others missed out. On that particular measure, Tottenham were worst hit, finishing one spot outside of the Champions League places on four occasions during that spell. Their Europa League earnings from those occasions totalled a combined \u00a328.8million; City made \u00a3141m from the Champions League in the same seasons.Two clubs who missed out, Manchester United in 2016-17 and Chelsea two years later, actually won the Europa League in those seasons. Yet even their earnings paled in comparison to City\u2019s from UEFA in those years.Across the eight seasons from 2011-12 to 2018-19 (so those in which City were accused of not providing accurate financial information while qualifying for the Champions League), the clubs who missed out on UEFA's marquee competition by one spot earned a combined \u00a3147million in UEFA prize money. City earned \u00a3358m. That doesn\u2019t even take into account the unrealised gate receipts or commercial income of those who just failed to qualify.\n \nShareWith a chunk of UEFA\u2019s distribution mechanism weighted toward historic performance, clubs who qualify year-on-year enjoy compounding benefits. City, The Athletic estimates, were entitled to over \u00a352million in prize money this season even before a Champions League ball was kicked, a mark only three other teams also exceed.It is not just those fighting for titles or European spots who may feel they\u2019ve missed out. What of Stoke City and Sunderland, beaten by City in the FA Cup and League Cup finals of 2011 and 2014, respectively? Will they be the focus of some of the charges surrounding player remuneration?How on earth do we quantify the impact across the Premier League, where City\u2019s thumb on the scale has impaired the fortune of others?One way might be to scrub their participation from the record, wiping out every game they played in the relevant period. Notwithstanding the fact this thought exercise would render the Premier League a 19-team division, Blackpool would have avoided relegation at the expense of Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2011.\n A Blackpool fan reacts to their relegation in 2011Shaun Botterill\/Getty ImagesHow might their history have unfurled? It is a counterfactual impossible to project with any great confidence \u2014 not least when we remember Blackpool\u2019s then owners extracted \u00a327million from the club during and after that solitary Premier League season \u2014 but they\u2019ve never returned to the top tier since and currently lurk in third-tier League One.Re-run the division without City in it over the nine seasons from 2009 to 2018 and you find 42 instances where a club would have earned more in merit money.Bolton Wanderers would have jumped three places in 2010-11, generating an extra \u00a32.3million in merit payments and upping that year\u2019s overall revenue by four per cent. Naturally, others would have earned less. Extend the City-free exercise to today and a rather startling scenario presents itself: Tottenham, not West Ham United, would have gone down last season.All of that is hypothetical, and feels a little ludicrous. Spurs might not have tumbled into their expensive malaise had the economics of the sport not moved in the manner they have. You can\u2019t just strip one team out of a season already played and assume everything else would have transpired in the same manner.Yet ludicrousness is where we are driven when rules breaches cover so much ground as they do here. When a sport's integrity, whatever we may think of how much it had in the first place, is so willingly bruised by bad actors. Unravelling the repercussions is migraine-inducing.In undertaking all of this, City, or certainly those in charge of them, have abrogated their responsibility to the game. There is a reason sporting rules are sacrosanct. The whole show doesn\u2019t really work without them.\u00a0The ramifications of the wealth City dispensed across football, cash injections which we now know broke the rules, are seemingly endless.Take, for example, the new four-year deal Barcelona handed to Lionel Messi in late 2017, one which ultimately saw them pay out over \u20ac500million (\u00a3429m\/$568.5m at the current rates) to a single player. Messi is the greatest to have ever played the game but, even for him, the sums doled out were astonishing, so astonishing they contributed to an almighty financial mess in Catalonia, one which Barca are still struggling to recover from.That mess wasn\u2019t solely down to paying one player such massive money, but would Barca have felt the need to do so had Messi not been so heavily linked with a move to City that summer? City's then manager Pep Guardiola would later deny they tried to sign Messi, but the links were real and, more importantly, made feasible by their revenues \u2014 revenues which are at the heart of allegations the club have now been found guilty of.\n Oscar del Pozo\/AFP via Getty ImagesWithout City on the scene, there\u2019s a world where Messi\u2019s contract is renewed at a lower rate, likewise others, Barca\u2019s wage bill doesn\u2019t balloon quite so extravagantly and they don\u2019t go down the path of pulling levers, or palancas, selling tomorrow to keep up with the Citys of today.It\u2019s all made-up, rooted in speculation and nowhere close to the only alternative to what actually happened. But it\u2019s a possibility, just as there are endless possibilities in a world where City didn\u2019t cheat.Like the one where Leicester City didn't miss out on the Champions League by one spot and one point in 2021, didn't lose huge sums of cash since and don't now sit in League One with Blackpool. Or the one where Aston Villa qualified four years later and weren't required to make the player sales they did this summer to ensure their own rule compliance.City can\u2019t be blamed for other clubs' missteps, nor can they be held wholly responsible for football\u2019s rampant wage inflation. The arrival of Roman Abramovich at Chelsea five years before City\u2019s takeover should be apportioned plenty of fault. Likewise the Qatari takeover of Paris Saint-Germain in 2011, and the actions of English clubs generally in the Premier League era.Yet when City have routinely been one of the highest wage payers in the sport and, now, have been found to have broken rules while doing it, it is impossible to say they\u2019re free of culpability. Across the nine seasons they were accused of not providing accurate information, City spent \u00a31.943billion on wages \u2014 over \u00a3100m more than any other English club.\n Star striker Erling Haaland is City's current top earnerMichael Regan\/Getty ImagesIn 17 Abu Dhabi-controlled years to the end of 2024-25, their combined wage bill was \u00a34.963billion. At United and Chelsea, the next-highest combined bills in England, the figure is around \u00a3600m lower. It is a staggering difference.Sky-high wages have left a vast majority of EFL clubs reliant on benefactor owners pouring in millions to keep them afloat. That wage inflation comes from the top; a vantage point City have peered down from for many a year and that they achieved, we\u2019re now told, through cheating. Do all of those teams, indirectly injured, have a claim?It is almost certain they don\u2019t, but this all highlights how City\u2019s rule-breaking goes far beyond just disjointing the noses of those who would have won Premier League titles instead of them.Their impact on the sport has been enormous. The damage, both financial and reputational, may be incalculable.\nChris Weatherspoon is a Football Finance Writer for The Athletic UK. A chartered accountant, he has previously covered the business of sport on a freelance basis, spanning deep dives into individual club accounts and broader analyses of industry-wide trends and issues, and utilises data and financial acumen to explore the money behind the game.Follow Sep 30, 2026Connections: Sports EditionSpot the pattern. Connect the termsFind the hidden link between sports termsPlay today's puzzleWhat did you think of this story?MEHSOLIDAWESOME",
    "published_at": "2026-09-28T11:23:37+00:00",
    "author_name": "Chris Weatherspoon",
    "site_name": "The Athletic",
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    "ai_headline": "Manchester City\u2019s rule-breaking: The financial damage to Premier League clubs and beyond",
    "ai_simplified_title": "Manchester City Guilty Verdict Financial Impact on Premier League Clubs",
    "ai_excerpt": "Manchester City has been found guilty of financial rule-breaking, leading to discussions of massive compensation claims from other Premier League clubs. The article explores the far-reaching financial impact of City's actions, including prize money, TV revenue, and Champions League qualification, and speculates on the broader consequences for football.",
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