Most cheating scandals in sports boil down to numbers: Barry Bonds’s 73 home runs in 2001 (or Mark McGwire’s 70 home run campaign three years earlier); Lance Armstrong’s six Tour de France titles; the World Series won by the sign-stealing Houston Astros. The scandal currently rocking the English Premier League is no different. The world’s most popular, lucrative domestic soccer league on Tuesday released a report detailing extensive financial improprieties, “sham” contracts, and outright fraud committed by its most successful contemporary club, Manchester City. The length of the report: 40 pages. The league titles City won between the fall of 2009 and 2019, when the investigation was launched: Three, plus another five domestic trophies. But the most important number might be £900 million, which is the amount the team inflated revenues and obscured costs during that period.
City’s most dominant stretch didn’t arrive until after 2019. Under the guidance of Pep Guardola, the greatest coach in the world, the club lost the league only once between 2018 and 2024, and won the European-wide Champions League in 2023. There are compelling reasons to believe the team’s financial improprieties stretched into that era, but in some ways that is immaterial. City’s success over a period of nearly two decades, dating all the way back to 2008, when the perennially mediocre team was purchased by the Abu Dhabi United Group, or ADUG—a consortium whose political and economic ties to the United Arab Emirates are so deep the team is state-run in all but name—resulted from what appears to be the most spectacular and brazen financial fraud in the history of professional sports. Every one of its titles is tainted. None of its success would have been possible without the extraordinary manipulations undertaken by its fabulously wealthy owners who transformed the team into a sporting juggernaut.
Given the scale of the violations detailed by the Premier League, there can be no question that City’s success is illegitimate. They cheated for nearly two decades and got away with it. Then they got caught. Wherever the Premier League—and soccer writ large—goes next it has to start from that point. But that’s the tricky part: what comes next. City’s abuses get at the heart of all that ails the sport, most of which can be traced back on some level not just to greed and corruption, but to its increasing dependence on multinational corporations, private equity, and nation-states. Cataloging City’s fraud is simple—so easy, in fact, that it’s not at all clear why it took the Premier League more than seven years to do so. Untangling soccer from the forces that corrupt it is another matter altogether.
This week’s explosive report released describes Manchester City’s fraud as a “disguised funding scheme” that allowed the team to evade financial regulations by inflating its income and hiding its expenses to the tune of nearly £1 billion between 2011 and 2019. It did so brazenly via fraudulent contracts with sponsors, many of which had close ties to team’s owners, who all just happened to include many of the most powerful people in the government and economy of the United Arab Emirates. When the ADUG purchased the team in 2009, its commercial revenues were a paltry £18 million; a decade later they had ballooned to £230 million—an increase of more than 1,000 percent. Commercial revenues from the league’s four biggest teams—Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Chelsea—increased an average of 213 percent over the same period.
Nearly all of that money was laundered in some form. Its “sham” contracts included sponsorship deals for its most lucrative properties. City plays in a stadium named after Etihad Airlines, the aviation company whose name also graces the front of its uniforms. The UAE-based airline paid the team £67.5 million a year for those privileges. But, per the Premier League’s report, Etihad Airlines actually paid just £8 million; the difference was covered via wire transfer by the holding company that actually owns the team. It’s all monopoly money, really: Both the soccer team and the airline are owned by groups with ties to the UAE that are so deep that they are, for all intents and purposes, state-owned.
City continues to insist not just on its innocence, but that it has “irrefutable evidence” proving it; Etihad Airlines is reportedly considering legal action against the Premier League. Yet the allegations are so extensive, clear, and damning that there can be no doubt that its present dominance was built on, and is inseparable from, fraud on a historic scale.
The report and the public statements that accompanied it also suggest that the Premier League means business. And yet, it’s not at all clear that the league is prepared to make the punishment fit the crime. City is in deep trouble, there’s no question. Whether or not that trouble is commensurate with the offenses committed is another matter altogether. In many ways, this is a problem of the league’s own making. City was far more successful during the seven years it took to produce the report than it was during the nearly decade-long period covered by that report. Invalidating that success would arguably also be existential, threatening to invalidate the Premier League itself. What should we now make of many of its most iconic moments: Sergio Aguero’s 2012 title-winning goal; the rivalry between Guardiola and Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp between 2016 and 2024; Kevin de Bruyne’s lobbed passes and whipped crosses, Rodri’s imperious command of possession, Erling Haaland’s impeccable finishing?
All of that is already tarnished, whatever punishment the Premier League chooses to hand down. But its problem is also—sorry—epistemological. Those moments not only defined the league, they defined many lives, my own very much included. We watched them and felt them. Invalidating them is one thing. But what would it mean if the world’s biggest sports league essentially declared that many of its most defining moments of the last two decades weren’t real?
There are other less abstract problems, too. One is simply that, thanks to all the cheating, Manchester City is now one of the biggest teams in the most powerful league in the world. Guardiola and Rodri are gone as of the summer; de Bruyne left a year earlier. But Haaland, fresh off a breakout World Cup campaign that elevated his already superstardom to another plane, is still there, as are a host of other stars. A forced relegation, either via points deduction or other means, whether to the second division or out of the top four English leagues altogether—a punishment that has been floated—is more than fair given the extent of City’s crimes. But kicking the team out of the Premier League would not just necessitate a historic sell-off—and likely lead to some stars, including Haaland, leaving England altogether—it would diminish the Premier League itself.
The Premier League’s emergence as a juggernaut—both in a financial sense and a sporting one—coincided, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, with the rise of Manchester City. The league has, over the past decade, become by far the sport’s most profitable league and it has done so while most superstars—Haaland being a key exception—have played elsewhere. It is rare for all six of the league’s so-called Big Six—City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Tottenham—to be firing on all cylinders simultaneously (and a strong case should be made for excising Tottenham from the club altogether) but fielding several big-spending, if not always competitive, teams does matter. Spain has two (Barcelona and Madrid, though Atletico Madrid is hovering somewhere outside that duopoly and the sea of mediocrity below it); France and Germany have one; Italian teams are presently so broke they don’t even rate on this scale. Manchester City is undoubtedly a key pillar of the Premier League’s growing economic might and stature. Does that mean that it’s too big to fail? To put it another way, keeping City in the competition would diminish the prestige of the Premier League but so would kicking them out.
That’s a thorny problem, but it’s the league’s problem, not ours. It’s one that will ultimately be solved by the lawyers and public relations executives who have been raking in billable hours for seven years. I have little faith that it will be solved in a way that feels just and even less that it will solve the underlying issues that created it. The Premier League may solve its City problem or it may not. But it won’t lay a glove on the real problem. City’s importance to the Premier League both as a brand and as a business is the real scandal here.
That scandal can be found in the numbers too. The £900 million in fraudulent accounting matters. So do the eight Premier League titles and 22 trophies that the team has won since being taken over by the UAE. But the really important number is the 18 years that have elapsed since that takeover. The fraud is historic, both in a financial sense and in terms of how much success it bought. But it was brazen from the very beginning. It not only required, but demanded, willful ignorance on an almost comical scale. City’s rise may have been meteoric, but the simple—publicly available—evidence always pointed to massive fraud. The team was owned by the UAE. Its stadium and jerseys were sponsored by a UAE-based airline. It rocketed from obscurity to being a brand and business ostensibly on par with Manchester United and Liverpool in a few short years.
It was always a farce. The report released by the Premier League earlier this week details the specifics of its massive accounting sham. But the sham itself was always apparent for anyone with eyes to see. Manchester City’s rise was not inexorable, nor was it the result of a sophisticated, hidden conspiracy that required nearly a decade to unravel. Manchester City committed fraud on a massive scale primarily as a soft power project for an authoritarian nation because they were allowed to do so. The Premier League chose to look away. The team was good and the money was flowing. Questions about its finances—let alone about its ownership—were swept under the rug. As Manchester City became the best team in the Premier League, the Premier League became the most powerful league in Europe and, by extension, the world.
Here, too, the numbers tell a story. The 2024/25 campaign was not a particularly good one for City, which finished in third place, 13 points behind champions Liverpool. But it was an excellent one for the Premier League, which not only raked in £6.8 billion in revenue, but easily outpaced its European competitors: The Bundesliga and La Liga, the other two top leagues, both brought in about £4 billion. Compare that to the 2008/09 campaign, the season the ADUG bought Manchester City: Back then, the Premier League brought in a respectable £1.9 billion, while the Bundesliga and La Liga brought in $1.6 and $1.5 billion, respectively. The growth of the Premier League’s edge over its rivals from $300 million to almost $3 billion is perhaps the biggest story in global soccer over that period. It’s also a story that can’t be told without the biggest fraud in the history of the sport.
