The Simple Question Nobody Wants to Answer

By Ted

They call it the accountants’ league now. And they are right. The Premier League, once the most viscerally exciting competition on the planet, has been hijacked by spreadsheets, amortisation schedules, and men in suits who want to pull up the drawbridge the moment they have climbed over it themselves.

Manchester City stand accused of 115 (or 134) breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules . The charges are grave, the language around them graver still. The punishment, we are breathlessly told, could be relegation, expulsion, or the stripping of six Premier League titles won between 2012 and 2023. The central tenet of the accusation is that City’s owners, the Abu Dhabi United Group, disguised direct equity investment as independent sponsorship revenue — from Etihad, from Etisalat, from a constellation of Abu Dhabi-linked entities — in order to circumvent Financial Fair Play . They inflated their income, the Premier League alleges. They deflated their costs, hiding manager Roberto Mancini’s true salary behind a consultancy arrangement with a related company . They cheated, in other words, over nine seasons, across 115 (or 134) separate counts.

But there is a question at the centre of all this. A question so obvious, so fundamental, that its absence from the public discourse is itself a kind of scandal.

Why would they bother?

The Loophole That Nobody Talks About

To understand why the charges against Manchester City strain credulity, you first need to understand what Financial Fair Play and PSR actually are. Not what they claim to be. What they are.

They are not a level playing field. They never were. They are a moat, dug by the established elite to prevent the new money from doing what the old money had done for decades.

When Michel Platini championed FFP in 2009, he framed it in the language of responsibility and sustainability . More than half of Europe’s 655 top-flight clubs were losing money, he said. The system was broken. Something had to be done. And so UEFA agreed regulations requiring clubs to break even over a rolling three-year period if they wished to play in European competition . The Premier League followed with its own version, the Profitability and Sustainability Rules, which allow clubs to lose no more than £105 million across three seasons .

Sounds reasonable. Sounds fair. Sounds like exactly the kind of thing football needed.

It was not.

Real Madrid had spent decades buying the best players on the planet, building a global brand worth billions, and then using that brand to justify spending even more. Bayern Munich had done the same in Germany, creating a domestic hegemony so complete that their Bundesliga rivals now exist largely as a supporting cast. Juventus, for much of the 1990s and 2000s, operated as a de facto Italian monopoly. These clubs had built their commercial empires on the back of decades of dominance, and FFP — by tying future spending to current revenue — enshrined that dominance in law .

Then came Roman Abramovich at Chelsea in 2003. Then Sheikh Mansour at Manchester City in 2008, paying £200 million for a club that had spent most of its existence in the shadow of its more glamorous neighbour . The old guard panicked. Here were owners with the resources to replicate, in a decade, what it had taken the established elite half a century to build. The rules had to change.

The rules changed.

But the rules, as they always do when powerful interests are involved, changed with a loophole. A loophole so large you could drive a fleet of Etihad aircraft through it.

The shareholder loan.

The Loophole in Plain Sight

A shareholder loan is money borrowed by a football club from its owners. In the vast majority of cases across the Premier League, these loans are interest-free. They have no fixed repayment date. In practice, they are never repaid. They are, to every economic and practical intent, direct owner investment — money poured into the club by its proprietors to fund wages, transfers, and operations. But because they are structured as loans rather than equity injections, they were excluded from the Premier League’s PSR calculations .

This is not a grey area. This is not a matter of interpretation. The Premier League’s own rules, as they stood until recently, explicitly exempted shareholder loans from the Associated Party Transaction framework that governed commercial deals between clubs and their owners . You could borrow unlimited sums from your owner, interest-free, with no repayment schedule, and it would not count against your PSR allowance.

Now look at the numbers. They are public. They are filed at Companies House. They are not secret.

Club	Shareholder Loans (2022-23 accounts)
Everton	£451 million
Brighton & Hove Albion	£373 million
Arsenal	£259 million
Chelsea	£146 million
Liverpool	£137 million
Leicester City	£132 million
Bournemouth	£115 (or 134 😜 ) million
Wolverhampton Wanderers	£65 million
Brentford	£61 million
Crystal Palace	£38 million
Nottingham Forest	£23 million
Aston Villa	£10 million

Source: Telegraph, October 2024, citing 2022-23 club accounts .

Fourteen of the twenty Premier League clubs at the time of the 2022-23 season had shareholder loans. The total across the league was approximately £4 billion . Of the clubs without such loans, Manchester City and Newcastle United were notable — the very clubs whose owners, we are told, have been most aggressively seeking to circumvent the rules.

Think about that for a moment. The clubs with the wealthiest, most powerful owners — the ones supposedly most motivated to cheat — are the ones without shareholder loans. The clubs with hundreds of millions in interest-free owner funding, never to be repaid, are the ones pointing the finger.

The Brighton, Brentford, and Bournemouth Problem

Let us talk about the clubs that nobody wants to talk about.

Brighton & Hove Albion. AFC Bournemouth. Brentford FC. Three clubs currently occupying Premier League places. Three clubs whose presence in the top flight is celebrated as a triumph of smart thinking, progressive management, and the romance of the underdog.

Three clubs that, by any honest measure, are only in the Premier League because their owners are pouring money in through the shareholder loan backdoor.

Brighton’s ground, the Amex Stadium, holds 31,800 . Yet for much of the last 30 years, before the stadium was built and the Premier League money arrived, their average attendances at the Goldstone Ground and the Withdean Stadium were typically hovering around the 2,000 to 6,000 mark. That is not the foundation of a self-sustaining Premier League business. Tony Bloom, their owner, has lent the club £373 million, interest-free, with no repayment schedule . That money has funded the infrastructure, the data analytics operation, the scouting network, the transfer activity. Without it, Brighton are a Championship club. With it, they are a Europa League contender.

Bournemouth’s Dean Court holds 11,307 . Eleven thousand, three hundred and seven. That is not a Premier League ground. That is barely a League One ground. Their historical attendances in the lower divisions were often below 5,000. They entered administration twice — in 1997 and again in 2008 . They were in League Two as recently as 2009. Their rise to the Premier League under Eddie Howe was genuinely admirable, but it was funded by owner investment — first through Maxim Demin, who pumped money into the club through loans, and subsequently through the American consortium that now controls them . Bournemouth avoided breaching PSR rules in 2025 only after having a £71.4 million shareholder loan write-off approved by the Premier League itself .

Brentford have a new stadium, the Gtech Community Stadium, with a capacity of 17,250 . Their historical average attendance in the Championship was around 10,000. Owner Matthew Benham, who made his fortune in sports betting analytics, has lent the club £61 million . Without that money, without that interest-free subsidy, Brentford are not in the Premier League.

These are not criticisms of the clubs or their owners. The owners of Brighton, Brentford, and Bournemouth are doing exactly what football owners do — investing in their clubs to achieve success. But the hypocrisy is breathtaking. These clubs, and their cheerleaders in the media, celebrate their presence in the Premier League as a meritocratic triumph while the mechanism that put them there — unlimited, interest-free owner loans — is the same mechanism that the rules were supposedly designed to prevent.

There is another layer of hypocrisy here, one that the game’s governors prefer to ignore. Both Brentford and Brighton have questionable ownership models when it comes to the integrity of the sport. Their respective owners, Matthew Benham and Tony Bloom, made their vast fortunes through betting on sport, usually football . Bloom operates the Starlizard syndicate; Benham founded Smartodds. Yet no one in the football hierarchy sees any issue with owners — who can influence football performance, recruitment, and results — operating massive betting syndicates and placing wagers accordingly. The FA has a strict rule: players are banned from betting on football to protect the integrity of the game. Ivan Toney was banned for eight months; Sandro Tonali faces career-ending charges. Why aren’t these owners held to the same standard? The FA has reportedly granted them special dispensation, a secret agreement that allows them to continue their betting operations while owning Premier League clubs . It is a double standard that defies belief.

Meanwhile, clubs with genuine historical weight, genuine fanbases, genuine organic support — Ipswich, Sheffield Wednesday, Sheffield United, Derby County & Middlesbrough — languish in the Championship and below. These are clubs with attendances over 20,000. Clubs that are, by any commercial measure, viable football businesses with a stream of trophies to back them up. Even clubs like Birmingham, Blackpool, Bristol City, Cardiff, Norwich, Plymouth, Preston North End, Stoke and Swansea dwarf the three Premier League minnows. They are not in the Premier League because they do not have owners willing to exploit the loophole.

The Accusers and Their Accounts

Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, and Tottenham Hotspur all gave evidence in support of the Premier League during Manchester City’s APT legal challenge . These are the clubs most vocally supportive of the financial regulations. These are the clubs most eager to see City punished.

Arsenal owe their ownership group £259 million in interest-free shareholder loans . Liverpool owe £137 million . Manchester United and Tottenham, it should be noted, had no shareholder loans at the time of the most recent accounts — but both have benefited from owner investment in other forms over the years, and both operate within a commercial infrastructure built on decades of dominance that FFP has helped to protect.

The question is not whether these clubs have broken the rules. They have not. The shareholder loan mechanism was legal. The question is whether the rules themselves are fair. And the answer, as an independent arbitration tribunal confirmed in October 2024, is that they are not .

The tribunal ruled that the Premier League’s exclusion of shareholder loans from the APT framework was unlawful. It distorted competition, the panel found, because it permitted one form of owner subsidy — the interest-free loan — while prohibiting another — the inflated sponsorship deal . The rules were discriminatory. The rules violated UK competition law.

The Premier League, in other words, had rigged the game. And an independent panel of judges said so.

The Logic of the Alleged Fraud

Now return to the central question. The one that the 115 (or 134) charges cannot answer.

If Manchester City needed their owners to subsidise the club — to fund the transfers, the wages, the infrastructure — why would they not simply use the shareholder loan mechanism that Arsenal, Brighton, Liverpool, and fourteen other Premier League clubs were using without sanction?

Sheikh Mansour is one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet, a member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family with an estimated personal net worth that dwarfs the GDP of many nations . He had already invested more than £1.3 billion directly into Manchester City by 2018 . The money was never the problem. The mechanism was never the problem. The legal route was always there.

The prosecution’s case rests on the premise that City chose to construct an elaborate, multi-year fraud — disguising equity investment as sponsorship income, falsifying contracts, deceiving UEFA and the Premier League — when they could have achieved the same financial outcome by simply calling the money a loan. A loan that would never be repaid. A loan that every other major club in the league was already using.

The emails published by Der Spiegel in 2018, obtained by convicted Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto through illegal computer access , appeared to show City executives discussing the routing of owner funds through sponsorship channels. City have always denied the charges and described the allegations as based on “illegal hacking and out of context publication” . The Court of Arbitration for Sport, when it overturned City’s UEFA ban in 2020, did not just let them off on a technicality. It provided eight separate grounds for its decision . Yes, it found that the charges relating to the £10 million-a-year Etisalat payments were time-barred under UEFA’s five-year prosecution limit. But crucially, the much larger £50 million-a-year Etihad deal was not time-barred. The Etihad deal was considered in full, on its substantive merits. And the CAS panel — reviewing all the leaked emails, all the accounting ledgers, and hearing cross-examination of high-ranking corporate officials — concluded by majority that UEFA simply had no evidence to prove the alleged conspiracy was ever executed. The emails showed plans; they did not show disguised payments. The core of UEFA’s case collapsed not on the clock, but on the facts.

But even setting aside the legal technicalities, the fundamental logic does not hold. The alleged fraud was not necessary. The alleged fraud was not rational. The alleged fraud was, if it occurred at all, the most unnecessarily complicated way of achieving something that could have been done legally, openly, and without any risk whatsoever.

The Verdict That Changed Everything

In October 2024, the independent arbitration tribunal delivered its judgment on Manchester City’s challenge to the Premier League’s APT rules . City had argued that the rules were fundamentally unfair and anti-competitive. The tribunal agreed on two crucial points.

First, the exclusion of shareholder loans from the APT framework was unlawful. The rules permitted one form of owner subsidy while prohibiting another, and that distinction was discriminatory and distortive of competition .

Second, the Premier League had failed to share relevant benchmarking information with City at an appropriate point in the process, denying the club the opportunity to respond before decisions were made .

The Premier League tried to spin the verdict as a victory, pointing to the eight areas in which City’s challenges had failed. But the core finding was devastating. The rules were unlawful. The rules had been designed, whether intentionally or not, to favour clubs that used shareholder loans over clubs that used commercial sponsorship deals. And the clubs that used shareholder loans were, overwhelmingly, the established English elite and their owner-funded satellites.

Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Brighton, and Brentford all gave evidence in support of the Premier League’s rules . They were, in effect, defending a system that benefited them. A system that allowed them to receive unlimited owner funding through one door while the door that City was allegedly using was locked and guarded.

The tribunal found the lock was illegal.

The Cost of the Closed Shop

This is the true cost of FFP and PSR. Not the charges against Manchester City. Not the points deductions handed to Everton and Nottingham Forest. The true cost is the systematic distortion of English football in favour of those who were already powerful.

The rules were introduced with the explicit aim of preventing owners from pouring money into clubs. They failed at that aim from the first day they were implemented, because the shareholder loan loophole rendered them meaningless for anyone willing to use it. The clubs that were willing to use it — the Brightons, the Brentfords, the Bournemouths, the Arsenals, the Liverpools — benefited enormously. The clubs that were not — the Sheffields, the Derbys, the Middlesbroughs — were left behind.

And the clubs that allegedly tried to use a different mechanism — one that, unlike the shareholder loan, was at least commercially structured and commercially justified — are now facing the most serious charges in Premier League history.

There is something deeply wrong with that picture.

Manchester City may be guilty. The 115 (or 134) charges may be proven. The independent commission may find that the emails were genuine, that the payments were disguised, that the accounts were falsified. All of that is possible. City have denied everything, and they are entitled to that presumption of innocence until the commission rules otherwise .

But even if City are guilty, the question remains. Why would they do it this way? Why would they take the risk when the legal route was open? Why would they construct a fraud when a loophole was available?

The accusers have never answered that question. They have never tried to answer it. They prefer the narrative of the guilty billionaire, the corrupt state, the cheating club. It is a better story than the truth.

The truth is that the rules were broken from the start. Not by Manchester City. By the people who wrote them.

PSR, Profit and Loans

The strangest part of the Premier League case against Manchester City is not the accusation. It is the maths.

Because buried in the club’s own publicly available accounts, filed at Companies House for anyone to read, sits a detail the Premier League either ignored or never properly considered in the first place.

Adjusted Earnings Before Tax

Under Rule A.1.5.a of the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules, clubs could exclude depreciation costs attached to fixed assets when calculating Adjusted Earnings Before Tax. In plain English, that means infrastructure spending such as the South Stand expansion or the Etihad Campus did not necessarily count against PSR calculations in the way critics like to imagine.

And City had plenty of allowable adjustments.

The allowable adjustments were all detailed in the club accounts:

£9.439m in 2013-14
£10.986m in 2014-15
£14.542m in 2015-16
£17.256m in 2016-17
£15.914m in 2017-18

That creates rolling three-year adjustments of:

£33.067m from 2013-16
£40.884m from 2014-17
£47.712m from 2015-18

Important point here. These adjustments were never actually needed at the time because City were not posting PSR losses anyway. The club recorded profits across the rolling periods. So the mechanism sat there unused, never triggered by the rules. Dormant. Yet fully available under the rules.

Which rather matters when people now attempt to retroactively construct a PSR breach.

City’s reported profits in the accounts were:

Loss of £22.929m in 2013-14
Profit of £10.160m in 2014-15
Profit of £19.589m in 2015-16
Profit of £104,000 in 2016-17
Profit of £10.438m in 2017-18

Aggregated across the relevant rolling cycles, that produced:

£6.82m profit from 2013-16
£29.853m profit from 2014-17
£30.131m profit from 2015-18

Now add the allowable PSR adjustments.

The numbers become:

£39.887m profit from 2013-16
£70.737m profit from 2014-17
£77.843m profit from 2015-18

Which is where the entire “inflated sponsorship” argument starts wobbling badly.

Because critics insist the Etihad and Etisalat deals should effectively be treated as worthless. Zero value. An extraordinary claim in itself considering Etihad put its name on the stadium, the shirts and the campus of an emerging global football brand. But let us indulge it for a moment.

At the time, those deals contributed around £50m annually combined. Remove them entirely and you strip £150m from each rolling three-year PSR cycle.

Even then the figures become:

– £110.113m from 2013-16
– £79.263m from 2014-17
– £72.157m from 2015-18

Only one of those periods breaches the £105m PSR threshold loss.

One.

And that is under the absurd assumption that the Etihad deal was worth absolutely nothing.

Nothing at all.

Manchester City’s previous shirt sponsor, Thomas Cook, paid around £1m a year from 2002-2006. So what exactly are we saying here? That over a decade later, with inflation, Premier League growth and City becoming a Champions League club, the sponsorship rights to naming the stadium and front of shirt were still worth zero compared to a shirt sponosorship deal worth £1m?

Come on.

Add back a token £2m annually and even the 2013-16 period drops inside PSR limits. Value the deal at a far more realistic £10m-£20m annually and the alleged breach disappears completely, regardless of the noise around Roberto Mancini or Yaya Touré payments.

And this is the point many miss. The infrastructure spending still had to be funded. Nobody disputes that. Yet City paid for much of it through revenue when they could just as easily have used shareholder loans, exactly as other clubs did at the time, including Liverpool.

Which raises the obvious question.

If Manchester City were supposedly engaged in some elaborate conspiracy to inflate sponsorship income and evade PSR, why choose the method that created scrutiny in the first place when an alternative funding route (now illegal) already existed under the rules and was being used by several other clubs?

The answer is probably the simplest one.

Because the story people want to believe about Manchester City and the reality of the accounting rules are two very different things.

A Verdict Still Awaited

As of May 2026, the independent commission’s judgment on the 115 (or 134) charges remains unpublished. The hearing ran from September to December 2024 — twelve weeks of evidence, argument, and counter-argument at the International Dispute Resolution Centre in London . Pep Guardiola said in February 2025 that he expected a verdict within a month . That month came and went. Then another. Then another.

The Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, has declined to give any indication of timing, citing the confidential nature of the process . The footballing world waits.

What it should be asking, while it waits, is not simply whether City are guilty. It should be asking whether the rules they are accused of breaking were ever legitimate in the first place. It should be asking why the clubs that lobbied hardest for those rules are the same clubs that benefited most from the loopholes within them. It should be asking why Bournemouth can have a £71.4 million shareholder loan written off with the Premier League’s approval, while Manchester City face expulsion for allegedly doing something that achieved the same economic outcome through a different mechanism.

It should be asking the simple question that everyone ignores.

Why would City cheat?

The answer, if you are honest about it, is that they probably would not. Not like this. Not when the legal alternative was sitting there, in plain sight, being used by over half the league.

The accountants’ league has its verdict ready. It just needs to explain why the rules only apply to Manchester City and not to clubs like Liverpool.