Manchester City are not being spoken of in the same breath as Everton or Nottingham Forest. Both clubs took points penalties for what the Premier League treated as isolated breaches of the profit and sustainability rules. City, in the language of football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire, are accused of “corporate fraud”, and the numbers now attached to their case reflect that gap.

Maguire has put the punishment range at 60 to 100 points if the club is found guilty. The upper figure would mathematically guarantee relegation on any reading of a 38-game Premier League table, and it puts any sanction on a different scale from the precedents the competition has to work with.

An independent commission has found City guilty on 114 of the 115 charges brought by the Premier League, as first reported by The Athletic’s David Ornstein on Friday, 25 September 2026. City deny any wrongdoing and are expected to appeal.

What the panel can actually impose

The Premier League’s disciplinary process gives the commission access to fines, points deductions and other sporting sanctions. Expulsion is theoretically available but has never been used in the competition’s history, and retrospective title-stripping is not set out as an automatic consequence.

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Everton were docked eight points across the 2023-24 season in two separate rulings. Nottingham Forest lost four points in March 2024. Both cases were treated as straightforward breaches of the profit and sustainability rules, without the layer of alleged concealment that runs through the City case.

The 50-point ‘certain’ claim

Former Everton chief executive Keith Wyness has been more specific about the lower end.

“That would certainly include something up to 50 points, which would probably ensure relegation in some way,” he told Football365, describing City’s grounds for appeal as “tenuous at best” and predicting the appeal itself would run for “two or three months maximum”.

Legal analyst Ian Hargreaves has drawn the spectrum wider still. He told Al Jazeera the range runs from “transfer ban at the more moderate end of the spectrum and expulsion from the league the most severe repercussion”, with a points deduction the most obvious middle ground.

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Why the panel may aim high

Former City financial adviser Stefan Borson has flagged the factor that keeps the ceiling in play.

“City didn’t cooperate initially,” he said.

“That is a major aggravating factor.”

That is where the harshest projections rest. If the panel accepts the Premier League’s case that the alleged breaches were both severe and concealed, and treats non-cooperation as a distinct aggravation, the number moves closer to Maguire’s upper figure than to the Everton and Forest benchmarks.

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Even so, none of the specific numbers has been set. Claims that City will automatically lose 50, 80 or 100 points remain speculation until the commission publishes its decision. The full findings document is expected to run to several hundred pages, with publication potentially slipping into early 2027.

City have 14 days from the sanction ruling to appeal to a separate three-person board, and cannot take the case on to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. City have not indicated any change to their position that they respected due process throughout the investigation.

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