Al Mubarak vows City will fight to clear its name as sanctions and compensation claims loom

Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak has insisted the club remains determined to prove its innocence after a verdict found the Premier League side guilty of the vast majority of the 115 charges brought against it. In a letter published on the club's website, the chairman sought to reassure supporters at a moment of considerable uncertainty, with the Premier League yet to say what sanctions — if any — will follow.

The case against City centred on allegations that the club inflated sponsorship income from companies linked to its ownership and made a series of undisclosed, "off the books" payments designed to help it navigate football's financial regulations. Al Mubarak, who has held the chairman role since the takeover completed in 2008, framed his message less as a defence of the club's accounting practices than as a promise of a long legal fight.

The background to Friday's reporting stretches back almost four years. City were charged by the Premier League in February 2023, following an investigation lasting four years, and an independent commission concluded its hearing some 22 months before the verdict was reported. The news was first broken by The Athletic, and it came 1,327 days after the charges were filed. Remarkably, the Premier League itself has declined to comment, and no official announcement confirming the findings has been issued.

City also stopped short of confirming the verdict directly. A club statement said the "Premier League process remains ongoing with significant elements to be completed, and subject to strict confidentiality", adding that it has "diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League board and executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded" body. That wording left open the possibility of a challenge to the conduct of the proceedings as well as to the conclusions.

In his letter to fans, Al Mubarak acknowledged the immediate impact on supporters. Many people, he wrote, would have spent the evening after the reports fielding questions from friends, family and colleagues — as he had. What he told his own family, the chairman said, was that the process "still has a long way to run", and that the club's confidence in establishing its innocence was "just as strong as when this began."

Explaining why he could not offer more detail, Al Mubarak pointed to the confidentiality of the legal proceedings. There was a great deal he would like to tell supporters to help them understand the club's position, but those restrictions prevented him from doing so. He stressed that even the letter itself had been run through several legal checks to ensure it complied with the rules governing disclosure.

Beyond the league process, City are expected to take their own legal route. BBC Sport understands the club will appeal, while a number of Premier League clubs have already begun seeking legal advice about the compensation they may be entitled to recover. Football law expert Paul Gilroy KC said that, so far, four clubs have lodged protective claims reserving the right to pursue compensation if City are found guilty.

The scale of what is at stake is difficult to overstate. Sanctions have not been announced, but the range of possibilities includes a points deduction, a fine of unprecedented size, and the most severe option of all — expulsion from the Premier League. The length of the investigation and the number of charges involved have made this an unusually slow-moving case, with the eventual penalty still hanging in the balance.

Al Mubarak, meanwhile, has pushed back against what he describes as a campaign to undermine the club. While many observers have reached conclusions quickly amid the volume of commentary, he argued, the club's position has not changed, and City had "faced challenges together before and have prevailed". He added: "There remain many who want to undermine the momentum of our club. We will not give them that opportunity."

The financial question extends far beyond City itself. Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme, Purslow said the case raised an uncomfortable question about where a process of this kind ends. If the breaches are treated as running across the nine seasons now identified, he argued, then all 19 of City's Premier League rivals in each of those campaigns were affected, in different ways, by losses that are straightforward to calculate.

His arithmetic was stark. Each place in the table was worth roughly £3m, meaning a club finishing fifth rather than fourth — and missing out on Champions League football as a result — could be out of pocket by tens of millions of pounds. Clubs lower down suffered still more: had City not been in the division, a side finishing 18th might have survived, avoiding the enormous financial consequences of relegation. Add up the claims from nine years in the Premier League alone, Purslow said, and the potential for the dispute to spiral out of control is huge.

Gilroy, appearing alongside him, described the verdict as a "seismic moment for world football" — language that suggests the consequences of the case will be felt well beyond Manchester, and well beyond the financial rules that were the immediate subject of the charge.

The coming weeks will bring further clarity on two fronts. The first is whether the Premier League formally publishes its findings and moves to sentencing, including any points deduction or financial penalty. The second is the wave of civil claims now being prepared by rival clubs, whose lawyers are calculating the cost of competitive and revenue disadvantages they say they suffered. Al Mubarak's letter, for all its reassurance, offered no timetable for either — only a commitment to see the club's name cleared through a process that is still, in his words, a long way from over.