English football’s new regulator can force Manchester City’s owner to sell the club if the Premier League’s guilty verdict against it stands, its chair has said, dragging the sanction debate past points deductions and relegation to the most severe outcome the game has ever seriously contemplated.
David Kogan, who chairs the Independent Football Regulator (IFR), told the “Rest is Football” podcast that the body’s remit stretches to removing owners who fail to meet its standards of propriety.
“We have the power to ask an owner to step away from a club if we believe that they run a club in a way that is neither fit, fair or done with propriety.”
Asked whether an owner could simply refuse to divest, Kogan was blunt.
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“No, no, no. We’ve got absolute power to do so.”
A new regulator with teeth
The IFR came into force on 12 December 2025 under the Football Governance Act 2025 and licenses clubs across the top five tiers of English football. Its enforcement toolkit runs from financial penalties and public censure to, in extreme cases, forcing an owner to sell.
Kogan was confirmed as chair in October 2025 on a five-year term, after the legislation received royal assent that July. His remarks are the first time the regulator’s leadership has publicly tied those owner-removal powers to a specific case.
Why Manchester City are in the frame
An independent commission found Manchester City guilty on 29 September of 114 of the 115 Premier League charges first brought in 2023. The commission concluded that sham sponsorship arrangements distorted the club’s accounts by more than £900m across nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18, with over £830m in secret funding from the Abu Dhabi ownership disguised as commercial income.
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Richard Masters, the Premier League chief executive, said the ruling showed City had “systematically broken Premier League rules for nearly a decade”.
Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE vice-president and deputy prime minister, has owned Manchester City since 2008 through the Abu Dhabi United Group. His investment turned a mid-table side into eight-time Premier League champions and Champions League winners. No major European club has ever been subject to a forced sale by a football authority.
Appeal first, sanctions later
The club lodged its appeal on 1 October, citing what it called “fundamental errors” in the commission’s findings, and continues to deny wrongdoing. The appeal goes to a private Appeal Board, with sanctions deferred to a separate hearing for which no date has been set.
Kogan said it was premature to talk about any action the IFR might take.
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“I am not going to get pushed into making any judgement on this until we’ve seen all of those questions being answered.”
Any IFR move would in any case come only after the Premier League process concludes. For now, Manchester City’s immediate deadline is the appeal hearing, which the club has said it expects to be resolved before the end of the current season.
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