Etihad, Mancini and Project Longbow: Inside Man City’s 115 charges

Manchester City’s 115 Premier League charges became one of the biggest off-field stories in football long before a verdict was reached.

Now, with The Athletic’s David Ornstein reporting that City have been found guilty on all but one charge, the obvious question is, what exactly were they accused of?

The answer is more complicated than the headline number suggests.

The charges were not 115 entirely separate scandals. They covered alleged breaches of Premier League rules across different seasons, broadly involving five areas: inaccurate financial information, undisclosed manager and player remuneration, breaches of UEFA financial rules, breaches of the Premier League’s own spending rules, and failure to cooperate with the league’s investigation.

At the heart of the case were allegations first brought into public view by German magazine Der Spiegel in 2018 after it obtained internal emails through the Football Leaks cache.

City have consistently denied wrongdoing and said the leaked material was obtained unlawfully and presented out of context.

What Did the Premier League Charge City With?

• 54 alleged breaches relating to the accuracy of financial information supplied between 2009-10 and 2017-18.

• 14 alleged breaches relating to the disclosure of manager and player remuneration.

• Five alleged breaches relating to UEFA financial regulations.

• Seven alleged breaches of the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Regulations (PSR).

• 35 alleged breaches relating to cooperation with the Premier League investigation.

The Premier League’s original notice said clubs were required to provide financial information giving a “true and fair view” of their position, particularly in relation to revenue, including sponsorship, related parties and operating costs.

It also alleged that City failed to include full details of manager and player remuneration in relevant contracts.

The most prominent allegations concerned City’s sponsorship income.

Der Spiegel alleged that some sponsorship income attributed to Abu Dhabi-linked companies was in fact supported by money originating from City’s owner or associated entities.

The Guardian, reporting on the leaked documents, said one email concerning City’s 2015-16 Etihad Airways sponsorship appeared to show that of a £67.5 million payment, only £8 million was to be funded directly by the airline, with £59.5 million coming from the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), Sheikh Mansour’s investment vehicle.

Similar emails relating to earlier seasons were also reported.

City disputed that interpretation and maintained that the sponsorship arrangements were genuine.

Senior Etihad figures later told CAS that the airline had funded the sponsorship in full, and CAS ultimately found UEFA had not established the disguised-equity allegation to the required standard.

Financial-control rules were designed to restrict the extent to which clubs could simply cover large losses with unlimited injections from their owners.

Genuine commercial sponsorship counts as club revenue. Direct owner funding is treated differently.

So if owner money had been presented as sponsorship income, as Der Spiegel alleged, it could have increased the commercial revenue recorded in City’s accounts and improved their position under Financial Fair Play rules.

The significance was heightened by the fact that City had already been sanctioned by UEFA for breaching Financial Fair Play rules in 2014, accepting restrictions on their Champions League squad, transfer spending and wage bill as well as a financial penalty.

The later leaks therefore raised questions not simply about City’s finances, but about information supplied during a period when their compliance with UEFA’s rules was already under scrutiny.

Another eye-catching strand involved former City manager Roberto Mancini.

The Guardian, citing Der Spiegel’s reporting, said Mancini had a separate consultancy agreement with Al Jazira in Abu Dhabi worth about £1.75 million a year while his basic City salary was around £1.45 million before bonuses and incentives.

Der Spiegel further alleged that ADUG money was routed through Al Jazira and then paid to Mancini via Sparkleglow Holdings, an offshore company in Mauritius.

The Guardian said it had not independently seen or verified the leaked documents behind that allegation. City did not address the Mancini allegation specifically, instead maintaining its broader position that the Football Leaks material had been hacked or stolen and presented out of context.

The Premier League charges alleged that City failed to include full details of manager remuneration in the relevant contracts between 2009-10 and 2012-13.

The central issue, therefore, was whether all remuneration connected to Mancini’s employment had been properly disclosed -- not merely whether the Al Jazira consultancy agreement existed.

The Premier League also charged City over whether full details of player remuneration were included in contracts between 2010-11 and 2015-16.

One strand of Der Spiegel’s reporting concerned an image-rights arrangement involving Fordham Sports Management.

According to Der Spiegel, the arrangement was known internally as “Project Longbow”. Fordham allegedly paid players for image rights while ADUG reimbursed Fordham by about £11 million a year.

Der Spiegel described it as a “closed payment loop” that allowed player image-rights costs to sit outside City’s books.

The Guardian also reported that UEFA had already examined the Fordham arrangement and did not allow City to use it to reduce their wage bill for Financial Fair Play purposes.

However, because the Premier League has not published the independent commission’s detailed ruling, it would be wrong to assume that every player-remuneration charge depended on Project Longbow or the Fordham arrangement.

Five charges related to alleged failures to comply with UEFA regulations between 2013-14 and 2017-18.

Another seven concerned alleged breaches of the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Regulations between 2015-16 and 2017-18.

Those allegations sat within the broader case over whether City’s financial information accurately reflected their revenue and costs.

The final major group concerned City’s conduct during the Premier League investigation itself.

The league alleged that City failed to cooperate fully between December 2018 and the filing of the charges in February 2023, including by not providing documents and information as required.

Its original notice specifically cited rules requiring clubs to cooperate with and assist investigations and provide information in the “utmost good faith”.

Those cooperation allegations accounted for a large share of the overall case.

City rejected the allegations and maintained that it had engaged appropriately with the process.

Didn’t City Already Win This Case Against UEFA?

The UEFA case and the Premier League case overlapped in important ways, but they were not the same case.

UEFA banned City from European competition for two seasons and fined them €30 million in 2020 after concluding that the club had overstated sponsorship revenue and failed to cooperate with its investigation.

City appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

CAS overturned the European ban and reduced the fine to €10 million.

In its published award, CAS said UEFA’s main allegations of disguised owner funding through Etisalat and Etihad had to be dismissed. The Etisalat allegations were time-barred, while the Etihad allegations were partly time-barred and, in any event, had not been established to the panel’s required standard.

That did not mean CAS found every allegation arising from the Der Spiegel material to be false.

CAS also said UEFA had “by no means filed frivolous charges” and that there had been a legitimate basis to prosecute City, although the evidence before the panel was insufficient to establish the disguised-equity case.

City were still found to have failed to cooperate with UEFA’s investigation.

The CAS ruling is sometimes described simply as City having been “cleared”, but the judgment was more nuanced.

The Premier League case also covered additional alleged breaches and was not constrained by UEFA’s limitation provisions in the same way.

So What Did the Case Really Boil Down To?

Strip away the 115-count headline and the case centred on a relatively straightforward proposition.

The Premier League alleged that City had, over several years, provided financial information that did not accurately reflect aspects of their revenue and expenditure -- particularly sponsorship and remuneration -- and then failed to cooperate fully when the league investigated.

The Der Spiegel leaks supplied much of the original public evidence behind those suspicions, including emails concerning sponsorship funding, Mancini’s remuneration and players’ image rights.

But those leaks were allegations and evidence to be tested, not themselves proof that City had broken Premier League rules.

City denied the allegations and maintained that they possessed extensive evidence supporting their position.

The Athletic now reports that an independent commission has found City guilty on 114 of the 115 charges, although the Premier League has not published the detailed ruling and sanctions have yet to be decided.

Until that judgment becomes public, it is also impossible to know precisely which evidence the commission accepted, how it interpreted the individual allegations or which single charge City were reportedly cleared of.

That makes the next question particularly significant: what punishment can the commission impose, and how much scope does City have to challenge it on appeal?

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