The money landed on 14 October, two weeks after the Premier League published the commission’s verdict. Filings at Companies House show that City Football Group allotted 11,327,163 new shares to Newton Investment and Development, the Abu Dhabi vehicle through which Mansour holds his stake. The transaction raised around £100m and implied a valuation of CFG at £5.9bn, according to City AM.
Mansour now owns roughly 81% of the group, with US private equity firm Silver Lake holding most of the remainder. A CFG spokesperson said the proceeds would be used “for normal corporate purposes against our strategic plans, funding planned investments into the City Football Group.”
The timing is the message
The share issue was lodged with Companies House less than three weeks after the Premier League published the independent commission’s findings. The panel found City guilty of 114 of the 115 charges covering the seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18, including every charge related to inflated sponsorship revenue and 34 of 35 counts of failing to co-operate with the investigation.
City lodged a comprehensive appeal on 1 October, arguing that the commission’s opinion “contains clear material errors of law, principle and fact and is unsafe.” The club maintains it is innocent. Sanctions have not yet been set, and no points have been deducted from the current Premier League table.
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Keith Wyness, the former Everton chief executive now advising clubs through his own consultancy, told Football Insider that the injection is as much a political signal as a corporate one.
“I think it’s a statement of saying, we’re not going anywhere. That’s one thing,” Wyness said.
He also linked the fresh capital to the club’s rising legal bill, telling the same outlet that “the money was probably needed in terms of the legal bills that are being racked up” and that City’s large in-house legal team would be “working overtime” as hearings continue.
“Years and years” of fallout
Stefan Borson, a former City financial adviser who is now a regular talkSPORT contributor on the case, has repeatedly warned that the appeal is a long road with few off-ramps. He told Football Insider that City “didn’t co-operate initially” and that any punishment “will be severe”, adding that an appeal against a sanction would seek to row back a range of outcomes “and they are all severe”.
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Borson has also said the whole process, from guilty finding through sanction hearing and appeal, is going to “go on for years and years”.
The commission’s underlying finding is the heart of the problem for the club’s lawyers. The panel concluded that City had used “sham” contracts with commercial partners to disguise more than £830m in funding for football operations as sponsorship revenue over nine seasons.
Appeal verdict expected early in the new year
The Premier League is targeting an appeal verdict “early in the new year”, Football 365 reported on 31 October, citing Football Insider’s Pete O’Rourke. Wyness has publicly predicted a points deduction of around 40 to 50 if the appeal fails, with a substantial fine on top. The Premier League’s own rules list expulsion among possible sanctions, alongside reprimands, fines, suspensions and points deductions.
CFG chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak told reporters earlier in 2026 that the group would fetch “minimum” $10bn if it were sold, and that the ownership considered its clubs “jewels” with no desire to cash out. The £100m from Newton Investment and Development is the clearest sign yet that the position has not changed since the guilty verdict landed. The appeal hearing dates have not been made public.
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