The guilty verdict handed down to Manchester City on 30 September 2026 pulled a question back out of the drawer that European football thought it had closed in 2021: if elite clubs are squeezed hard enough by financial rules, do they walk?
An independent Premier League commission found City guilty on all but one of the 115 charges, covering sham sponsorship contracts and £830m of inflated revenues between 2009/10 and 2017/18. City lodged their appeal on Thursday 1 October, with the hearing required to conclude by 24 December. A separate hearing will set sanctions, which could run from a points deduction to expulsion from the Premier League.
Danny Mills, the former Manchester City and England defender, told GOAL in an interview arranged by the betting portal Gambling.com that none of that is going to prise the super-clubs away from the pyramid.
The knighthoods argument
Mills’ case starts with the players, not the owners. A closed Super League, he argues, would still need FIFA’s blessing before its stars could be released for international duty. Without it, the biggest names in football simply cannot play for their countries.
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“If FIFA don’t ratify your Super League, none of those players can play in international competition,” Mills said.
In Mills’ reading, that is the trapdoor no breakaway can walk around, because the social reward of winning a World Cup or a Euros outranks any contract an owner can write.
“You win the World Cup, you win the Euros, you’re a legend of your country, you get knighthoods,” he said.
That is Mills’ core bet: that even owner-level money cannot outbid prestige, and that no modern player wants to spend a career in a competition his own country does not recognise.
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LIV Golf as the warning
The parallel he reaches for is golf. Saudi-backed LIV Golf split men’s professional golf in 2022 by signing major winners onto guaranteed contracts, and Mills’ verdict on the experiment is unsparing. He says it has not gone brilliantly, dismissing the breakaway product as “not watchable” once jeopardy is drained out. A Super League built on invitations rather than qualification, he contends, would run into the same wall.
A22 has already relaunched the idea
The timing of Mills’ warning is not idle. A22 Sports Management, the Madrid firm behind the collapsed 2021 project, has already rebranded the concept as the Unify League, a proposed 96-team competition across four divisions, with Real Madrid and Barcelona backing it publicly and A22 seeking endorsement from UEFA and FIFA. The pitch has been pointedly framed around qualification by domestic performance, in a deliberate effort to answer the “closed shop” criticism that sank the original.
Whether City’s conviction becomes fuel for that pitch now turns on the sanctions hearing. The independent commission has not fixed a date, but the Premier League has indicated a ruling should come before the appeal is resolved. City’s appeal must finish by 24 December 2026.
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