Of the £949.94m in sponsorship revenue Manchester City booked across nine seasons, only £119.25m was actually paid by the sponsors themselves. The remaining £830.69m came directly from Abu Dhabi United Group, the club’s ownership vehicle, and was recorded as if it had been commercial income.

That gap sits at the centre of the ruling published on Tuesday, in which the Premier League’s independent commission found City guilty of nearly all of the 115 financial charges it faced. The panel described the commercial deals with sponsors as “shams” and said the club had run a “concerted campaign to falsify” its accounts.

The mechanism was blunt. Sponsors paid a “base sum” that reflected the real market value of the deal, and ADUG then paid a much larger “tagged sum” on top, which City booked as if it had come from the sponsor. A separate device known as the Fordham arrangement inflated image-rights income by a further £90.2m, taking the total misstatement above £900m across the affected seasons.

Three titles, £1.2bn spent, nine guilty seasons

The findings cover 2009-10 to 2017-18. In that window, Manchester City spent about £1.2bn on transfers, bringing in Sergio Agüero, David Silva, Yaya Touré and Kevin De Bruyne among others, and won three Premier League titles, one FA Cup and three League Cups.

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That is the arithmetic behind the “asterisk era” label now attached to the trophies. BBC Sport’s forensic breakdown of the ruling made £830m the headline figure and framed City’s nine-year run at the top of English football as an era whose books have been rewritten in retrospect.

Premier League chief executive Richard Masters said the decision “details how the club systematically broke Premier League rules for nearly a decade”.

Appeal by Friday, then a sanctions hearing

Manchester City said they were “disappointed and surprised” by the verdict, insisted they were “innocent of the accusations” and cited what they described as “irrefutable evidence” in their defence. The club has until Friday, 2 October, to lodge an appeal, which would go to a fresh three-person commission under section W of the Premier League rules.

If the guilty verdict survives that process, a separate hearing will set the punishment. Available sanctions run from fines and points deductions to transfer bans and, in extremis, expulsion. No penalty has been fixed, and City remain free to play out the current season while the appeal process runs.

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