In July 2011, on an Arsenal preseason tour in Kuala Lumpur, Arsene Wenger used a news conference to pick apart Manchester City’s ten-year, £400m sponsorship agreement with Etihad Airways. UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regime was about to come in. Wenger’s objection was simple: either the numbers in a sponsorship had to resemble the market, or the whole system fell over.
“The sponsorship has to be at the market price,” he told reporters. “It cannot be doubled, tripled or quadrupled.”
“It raises the real question about the credibility of the financial fair play.”
Manchester City pushed back. In a club statement issued at the time, City said the “financial details of the comprehensive agreement…remain confidential and figures being speculated about are not accurate”.
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114 of 115 charges, £900m in disguised funding
On Tuesday 29 September 2026, an independent Premier League commission found City guilty of 114 of the 115 charges first brought in February 2023. The financial breaches cover the nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18, a period in which the club lifted three Premier League titles. A separate strand of charges addressed City’s failure to cooperate with the investigation between 2018 and 2023.
The commission concluded that City had used “sham” commercial contracts to disguise more than £900m of funding, inflating revenues and understating costs so that the accounts would appear to comply with Premier League and UEFA spending limits. The vehicles the commission identified included inflated sponsorship figures tied to Abu Dhabi.
In a statement, City said it was “disappointed and surprised” by the verdict, that it was “innocent of the accusations made by the Premier League” and would be “relentless” in pursuing an appeal. The sanctions tariff, ranging from fines and transfer bans up to points deductions or expulsion, is a separate stage.
Wenger: “Nothing they achieve will ever be celebrated in the same way”
Wenger, the former Arsenal manager and FIFA’s Chief of Global Football Development since 2019, said after the verdict that the sporting sanction is not the real punishment.
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“Man City may be lucky. They may just get a fine and a transfer ban,” Wenger said.
“Nothing they achieve from now on will ever be celebrated in the same way.”
City’s appeal to a new three-person panel is due by Friday, 2 October 2026, with no hearing date yet set.
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