The timetable is tight, but it is not tight enough. Manchester City’s appeal against their guilty verdict on 114 of 115 financial charges must be heard within a prescribed 12-week window, which independent football regulator chair David Kogan said will land “by the middle or the end of January”. A decision is expected within 30 days of the hearing. The sanction hearing that follows is a separate process, and any sanction will itself be appealable.
That is the hurdle the Premier League’s push for maximum punishment has to clear.
City filed their notice at 7pm local time on 1 October, two days after the independent commission’s verdict. The club’s statement called the opinion “unsafe” and said it “contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact”.
“The club is innocent of the accusations made by the Premier League,” the statement read.
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Why Borson expects the clock to run out
Stefan Borson, a finance expert who previously worked at Manchester City, has told the public that the sequential nature of the process is the point.
“I think it’s quite hard to know exactly where we are in the whole order of process because the appeal may or may not go before a sanction hearing,” he said.
“There’s a lot of talk about how this is going to go quick. It just seems to me that it’s very unlikely that that’s the case.”
His reasoning is simple. Any irreversible penalty, relegation above all, would hand City a damages argument if an appeal later cleared them.
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“If it was something that is irreversible, i.e. relegating them and then being corrected later, City would argue that was irreparable damage,” Borson said.
What maximum could mean
The Premier League Handbook, Section W.64, lists the sanctions available: a reprimand, unlimited fines, points deductions, expulsion from the Premier League, or any combination of those. The verdict covered breaches across nine seasons, from 2009-10 to 2017-18. Premier League chief executive Richard Masters, speaking after the verdict, said the club had “systematically broken the rules for nearly a decade”.
Reporting on the “maximum” package points to a points deduction heavy enough to guarantee relegation, with secondary measures aimed at the following season to make a bounce-back harder. A full demotion out of the English Football League has been ruled out.
UEFA’s position is more speculative. Colombian broadcaster Cesar Augusto Londoño posted on 15 October that European football’s governing body is considering a seven-to-ten-year ban from all its competitions if the guilty verdict survives appeal. UEFA has not confirmed any sanction.
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Liability ruling expected in late January
The appeal hearing is capped at five consecutive days. If the independent commission runs the full 12-week window and the three-member appeal panel takes the full 30 days to issue its ruling, a decision on liability lands in late January 2027. Only then does the sanction stage begin.
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