A guilty verdict is now confirmed for Manchester City FC in the 115-charge case brought against it by the English Premier League over violations of the league's financial rules.
In this episode of The Blueprint, hosts John Baney and Trey Fillmore try to get to the bottom of how this massive development for City Football Group's biggest club will impact its sister team in the United States, New York City FC.
The 115 charges have hung over Manchester City since 2023, but there's finally a ruling. Before getting into the "what it means for NYCFC" portion of the issue, there's a need to run through the long-running case itself, as well as other financial rules-related scandals that have swirled around Manchester City going back years even before the 115 charges.
Then it's on to the ruling. The Premier League's case found that the club created "sham" sponsorship arrangements that disguised injections of cash from CFG's United Arab Emirates-backed ownership as sponsor revenue, while generally being in breach of both the Premier League's and UEFA's spending limits. Manchester City and its leaders publicly remain defiant and claim innocence, but the club's window to appeal the ruling is short, and that appeal can only address legal or procedural errors made in the case — so the next big question becomes, how will Manchester City be punished?
The punishment, whether it be stripped titles, forced relegations, gigantic financial fines, or some mix of that or more, remains unclear, and your hosts doubt any penalty will be proportionate to the size of the violations, though they also don't think Man City will ever be the same once the dust settles.
Part of the settling of the dust is how all this trickles down to the other teams inside Man City's shared City Football Group ecosystem. John and Trey think there are multiple possible points of complication for New York City FC, like the MLS club not turning a profit and relying entirely on CFG's funding, the multi-club group's global influence in the realms of scouting and player recruitment, and the ubiquity of Etihad Airways, UAE state-owned airline, as a NYCFC sponsor, on a club and now stadium-naming-rights level.
There are also people inside the MLS and NYCFC spheres of orbit wrapped up in the Manchester City situation, like NYCFC's current Chief Financial Officer, who was Man City's finance director during the period covered in the Premier League's case.
There are a significant number of unanswered questions still swirling around in the wake of the ruling, but this episode covers as many of the possible points of connection between the scandal and NYCFC as it can, with plenty more still to come in future episodes or in future developments that occur as a result of the case.
Listen to this deep dive on the 115 charges at the very top of this post where the episode is embedded, or find it as part of The Soccer Journal Podcast feed wherever you find podcasts, like Apple Podcasts and Spotify for example.
