Manchester City had a way out. In a Bloomberg report published on October 9, the club and the Premier League were revealed to have held early-stage settlement talks before the independent commission’s verdict, exploring a financial payment that could have taken the harshest sporting punishments off the table.

Those talks never got anywhere. According to the Bloomberg reporting, cited by Goal, City “refused to compromise on their steadfast claims of innocence,” which left no space for a deal.

Both City and the league declined to comment on the discussions.

A payment, not a points deduction

What was on the table, Football365 wrote from the Bloomberg piece, was a “sizeable financial payment rather than relegation and stripping of titles.” In other words, a cash fine in exchange for the heaviest sporting penalties being kept off the sanctions sheet.

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Even a successful deal would not have ended the case outright. Any settlement, Bloomberg reported, would likely only have reduced its scope.

Rival Premier League clubs were never going to welcome a quiet financial fix. Several of them want retrospective and forward-looking sanctions now that the verdict has landed.

£900m and “sham” contracts

The reason a settlement was on the table at all is the scale of what the independent commission found. On September 29, City were found guilty of nearly all the serious financial breach charges first brought in February 2023.

The commission concluded that between 2009-10 and 2017-18, City arranged “sham” commercial contracts that artificially inflated revenues and reduced costs by more than £900m, with the shortfalls covered by the club’s Abu Dhabi ownership.

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The Premier League said in its statement that the ruling showed how the club “systematically broke Premier League Rules for nearly a decade,” and called the case the most significant in the competition’s history.

City’s response was unchanged from the position that had just killed the settlement.

“The Club is innocent of the accusations made by the Premier League and a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence exists in support of all of its positions, relating to this case.”

The club filed its appeal on October 1.

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40 to 60 points in play

With the settlement route closed, sanctions will be decided in a separate hearing under Premier League Rule W64. No date has been set. The commission has the power to impose fines, points deductions, expulsion from the league, or, under an “other order” clause, the stripping of titles.

There is no established tariff for a case of this size. Football finance expert Kieran Maguire told Al Jazeera that any penalty should “add a zero to what we’ve seen in terms of Forest and Everton,” a scale that would push the deduction into the 40 to 60 point range. Forty points would have left City 18th in the 2025-26 table.

The appeal is heard by a private Appeal Board. Under Premier League rules, a verdict on the appeal is expected to be published by early February.

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