Livescore
It all goes back to December 2018. As the Premier League explained in their statement, their investigation into Manchester City began at that time, but it practically spans back for the entire previous decade.
One month earlier, in November of that year, German publication Der Spiegel shared Football Leaks documents that uncovered Manchester City‘s FFP infringements.
Over the course of a week, the German media outlet reported that Manchester City‘s majority shareholder and owner, Sheikh Mansour had been increasing the English club’s revenues through inflated deals with Emirati sponsors. As Der Spiegel explained, all sponsors had close ties to the UAE government.
In addition, last April, Der Spiegel published that “the holding company behind Manchester City appears to have violated the rules by paying millions in fees to player agents and also orchestrated a secret, triangular deal to sign an underage player”.
Mansour’s intention
The Athletic explain in their analysis that Mansour‘s idea was “to keep free-spending City from breaching UEFA’s limit for permitted losses between 2012 and 2016″.
Manchester City‘s reaction was swift at the time. They claimed that the documents had been obtained in a criminal manner. The club have always denied acting illegally and claimed that the attacks are part of a deliberate attempt to tarnish City‘s reputation, as reported by The Athletic.
Roberto Mancini’s secret contract
One issue that may prove crucial in this whole affair is Roberto Mancini‘s secret contract. In documents uncovered by the Football Leaks investigation, Der Spiegel revealed that the Italian coach had received payments through a fictitious employment contract as a consultant to Al Jazira.
This contract brought him an income of 1.9 million euros in addition to the 1.6m euros he was earning as a Manchester City coach.
According to The Times, the Italian coach’s company issued quarterly invoices to Manchester City paid by the Abu Dhabi United Group to the coach via Al Jazira.
Man City have already been banned and cleared
This is not the first time Manchester City have been at the receiving end of criticism. In February 2020, UEFA handed the Sky Blues a two-year ban from European competitions for breaching Financial Fair Play. In addition, they were handed a 30 million euros fine.
However, the European Court of Arbitration (CAS) decided in July 2020 to overturn the ban and reduce the fine to less than 10 million euros.
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