Manchester City could be deducted 40 to 60 points if they are found guilty of some of the most serious charges against them, according to a football finance expert. City and the Premier League are still waiting for the verdict over 115 alleged financial breaches by the club between 2009 and 2018.
The hearing into City’s alleged breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules concluded in December 2024 following a 12-week tribunal but the independent commission is still yet to make its conclusion public. City have denied any wrongdoing and are understood to be confident of being cleared.
There have now been 14 months since the tribunal and the commission are still deliberating. Football finance expert Kieran Maguire has followed the case closely and says an estimated 500,000 pieces of evidence were presented by the defence and prosecution during the tribunal.
Maguire believes a verdict should come in the next few months, with City and the Premier League likely to get 24 hours' notice before it is made public. He says that, while predicting the outcome is impossible, looking at recent precedents shows just how seismic the result could be, if it goes the wrong way for City.
“The Premier League cannot relegate Manchester City to League One or League Two because that’s an EFL decision and Manchester City have not had any charges proven against them by the EFL, so therefore it has to be a points deduction," Maguire explained on The Overlap Fan Debate.
“If we take a look at precedents, we’ve had Everton and Nottingham Forest with six and four-point deductions for a single offence covering a three-year period. The accusations against Manchester City cover a nine-year period, so it’s far bigger. The numbers involved, we’re not certain about, but they’re likely to be quite significant.
"So I think you have to add a zero to what we’ve seen from Forest and Everton, so somewhere between a 40 and 60-point deduction would, I think, on merit, be consistent with what we’ve seen from other decisions on logic. If they want to go further then we don’t know the severity.
"In the cases of both Forest and Everton, they were to do with FFP [Financial Fair Play] purely. The accusations against Manchester City are why it’s taking so long. Corporate fraud is a very serious accusation. The board of directors would have to go. How can you be in a meeting room with other members of the Premier League and the Premier League itself, of whom you’re a shareholder, with this accusation being proven?
"If you take a look at what happened with Juventus in Serie A, their board had to resign when they were claiming things about player wages that were proven to be untrue. I think there’s an honesty thing here, if Manchester City are proven to be guilty. And that could mean a complete restructure of the club.”
There has been a great deal of frustration around the delay, which is down to the complexity of the case and the need for the three-person commission to deliberate together.
“[Judging] by the cases similar to a fraud case, I think we’re probably into the final reaches of getting a decision," Maguire added. "I think part of the challenge is that, because there are three very senior people on the call for making that final judgement, getting those three together at the same time is actually very difficult and that has delayed the case.
"It should be resolved in the next few months, but we’ve said this before. But there’s an awful lot of evidence to go through and the charges are very very serious so you’ve got to have enough evidence.”