Why Would City Cheat?

They call it the accountants' league now. And they are right. The Premier League has been hijacked by spreadsheets, amortisation schedules, and men in suits who want to pull up the drawbridge the moment they have climbed over it themselves.Manchester City stand accused of 115 (or 134) breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules [1]. The punishment, we are breathlessly told, could be relegation, expulsion, or the stripping of titles. The central tenet of the accusation is that City’s owners, the Abu Dhabi United Group, disguised direct equity investment as independent sponsorship revenue to circumvent Financial Fair Play [2]. They cheated, in other words, over nine seasons.But there is a question at the centre of all this. A question so obvious, so fundamental, that its absence from the public discourse is itself a kind of scandal.Why would they bother?To understand why the charges against Manchester City strain credulity, you first need to understand what Financial Fair Play and PSR actually are. They are not a level playing field. They are a moat, dug by the established elite to prevent new money from doing what the old money had done for decades [3].The rules changed to stop wealthy owners pouring money into clubs. But the established elite made sure there was a backdoor.The shareholder loan.A shareholder loan is money borrowed by a football club from its owners. In the vast majority of cases across the Premier League, these loans are interest-free. They have no fixed repayment date. In practice, they are never repaid. They are direct owner investment. But because they are structured as loans rather than equity injections, they were excluded from the Premier League’s PSR calculations [4]. You could borrow unlimited sums from your owner, interest-free, and it would not count against your allowance.

Look at the numbers. Fourteen of the twenty Premier League clubs at the time of the 2022-23 season had shareholder loans. Everton owed £451 million. Arsenal owed £259 million. Liverpool owed £137 million [5].The clubs with the wealthiest, most powerful owners — the ones supposedly most motivated to cheat, like Manchester City — are the ones without shareholder loans. The clubs with hundreds of millions in interest-free owner funding, never to be repaid, are the ones pointing the finger.Let us talk about the clubs nobody wants to talk about. Brighton & Hove Albion, AFC Bournemouth, and Brentford FC. Three clubs currently occupying Premier League places, celebrated as triumphs of smart thinking and progressive management.By any honest measure, they are only in the Premier League because their owners are pouring money in through the shareholder loan backdoor.Brighton’s ground holds 31,800 [6]. Yet for much of the last 30 years, before the stadium was built and the Premier League money arrived, their average attendances at the Goldstone Ground and the Withdean Stadium were typically hovering around the 2,000 to 6,000 mark. That is not the foundation of a self-sustaining Premier League business. Tony Bloom, their owner, has lent the club £373 million, interest-free, with no repayment schedule [7]. Without it, Brighton are a Championship club. With it, they are a Europa League contender.Brentford’s owner, Matthew Benham, has lent his club £61 million [8]. Bournemouth avoided breaching PSR rules in 2025 only after having a £71.4 million shareholder loan write-off approved by the Premier League itself [9].These are not criticisms of the clubs. But the hypocrisy is breathtaking. These clubs celebrate their presence as a meritocratic triumph while the mechanism that put them there — unlimited, interest-free owner loans — is the exact thing the rules were supposedly designed to prevent.

There is another layer of hypocrisy here. Both Brentford and Brighton have questionable ownership models regarding the integrity of the sport. Matthew Benham and Tony Bloom made their vast fortunes through betting on sport, usually football [10]. Bloom operates the Starlizard syndicate; Benham founded Smartodds. The FA has a strict rule: players are banned from betting on football. Ivan Toney was banned for eight months; Sandro Tonali faces career-ending charges. Why aren’t these owners held to the same standard? The FA has reportedly granted them special dispensation, a secret agreement allowing them to continue their betting operations while owning Premier League clubs [11]. It is a double standard that defies belief.Meanwhile, clubs with genuine historical weight, genuine fanbases, genuine organic support — Ipswich, Sheffield Wednesday, Sheffield United, Derby County & Middlesbrough — languish in the Championship and below. Even clubs like Birmingham, Blackpool, Bristol City, Cardiff, Norwich, Plymouth, Preston North End, Stoke and Swansea dwarf the three Premier League minnows. They are not in the Premier League because they do not have owners willing to exploit the loophole.Now return to the central question. The one the 115 (or 134) charges cannot answer.If Manchester City needed their owners to subsidise the club, why would they not simply use the shareholder loan mechanism that Arsenal, Brighton, Liverpool, and fourteen other Premier League clubs were using without sanction?The prosecution’s case rests on the premise that City chose to construct an elaborate, multi-year fraud when they could have achieved the same financial outcome by simply calling the money a loan. A loan that would never be repaid. A loan that every other major club in the league was already using.It makes no sense. The alleged fraud was not necessary. It was the most unnecessarily complicated way of achieving something that could have been done legally, openly, and without any risk whatsoever.

When the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned City’s UEFA ban in 2020, they gave eight separate grounds for their decision [12]. The narrative is that City got off on a time-bar technicality over a £10 million-a-year Etisalat deal. But the much larger £50 million-a-year Etihad deal was not time-barred. It was considered in full. And CAS found that UEFA had zero evidence the alleged conspiracy was ever executed. The emails showed plans; they did not show disguised payments. The case collapsed on the facts.And in October 2024, an independent arbitration tribunal delivered its judgment on Manchester City’s challenge to the Premier League’s Associated Party Transaction rules. The core finding was devastating. The exclusion of shareholder loans from the framework was unlawful. It was discriminatory and distortive of competition [13].The Premier League had rigged the game. And an independent panel of judges said so.The rules were broken from the start. Not by Manchester City. By the people who wrote them. The accountants' league has its verdict ready. It just needs to explain why the rules only apply to some.

Read the full unabridged article at: https://mancitystuff.co.uk/why-would-city-cheat/

References

[1] Sky Sports, "Man City Premier League charges explained," July 2025. [2] BBC Sport, "Manchester City finances: What do Premier League charges mean?" February 2023. [3] Bleacher Report, "Is Bayern Munich’s FFP Plan Truly Promoting Fair Play?" June 2015. [4] The Guardian, "Manchester City claim victory over Premier League after tribunal verdict," October 2024. [5] Yahoo Finance / The Telegraph, "Arsenal and Liverpool to escape liability for huge interest on owners' loans after City’s legal case," October 2024. [6] Brighton & Hove Albion official website, "Men’s First Team History." [7] Swiss Ramble, "Brighton and Hove Albion Finances 2024/25," January 2026. [8] Yahoo Finance / The Telegraph, "Arsenal and Liverpool to escape liability for huge interest on owners' loans after City’s legal case," October 2024. [9] The Athletic / New York Times, "Bournemouth managed to avoid breaching PSR rules after having a £71.4m shareholder loan write-off approved by the Premier League," April 2025. [10] The Athletic / New York Times, "Why Matthew Benham and other club owners are allowed to bet," September 2023. [11] The New York Times, "England Bans Betting in Soccer, but Not for 'The Lizard’," August 2017. [12] The Guardian, "CAS releases its reasons for overturning Manchester City’s Europe ban," July 2020. [13] BBC Sport, "Man City v Premier League legal case verdict — what it all means," October 2024.