You can't have fair competition without trustworthy information

I started thinking about Manchester City’s £900m financial case in the simplest possible way. £900m is an extraordinary amount of money. You could buy two elite football teams with it.

But the more I looked at what the independent Premier League commission actually found, the more I thought that was the wrong way to understand why this case is so serious. The issue isn’t that Manchester City had a secret £900m transfer budget. It is that, according to the commission, the financial information being presented by one of the biggest organisations in English football did not accurately represent the underlying economic reality.

Once that happens inside a competitive system, the consequences travel much further than the accounts.

£900m is not a transfer budget

On 29 September, the Premier League confirmed that an independent commission had found Manchester City guilty of all the charges relating to serious breaches of its financial rules across nine seasons from 2009/10 to 2017/18, as well as the majority of charges relating to failure to cooperate with the investigation. City strongly rejects the findings and intends to appeal, so the legal process is not finished. The Premier League statement sets out the commission’s finding.

The detail is what makes the case extraordinary. The commission found that City used what it described as “sham” commercial arrangements to increase reported revenues and reduce reported costs. Reuters reports that the total distortion exceeded £900m, with other reporting putting the figures at roughly £855m of overstated income and £66m of understated expenses.

One of the most striking findings concerns sponsorship. Across the nine seasons, City reported almost £950m from a group of Abu Dhabi sponsors. The Guardian’s account of the judgment says the commission concluded that only about £119m came from those sponsors, with about £831m ultimately coming from Abu Dhabi United Group, City’s owner. City disputes that conclusion and says the evidence does not support it.

It would still be too simplistic to say: City cheated by £900m and therefore bought £900m more footballers. That isn’t how football finance works. The more important question is what those numbers allowed the organisation to appear to be.

The numbers determine what you can do

Financial regulation turns information into permission. A club submits its revenues, costs, losses and other financial information, and the regulatory system uses that information to determine whether the club is operating within the rules.

Those aren’t abstract accounting decisions. They eventually affect football decisions: how much can we spend, can we sign another midfielder, can we increase the wage bill, do we need to sell somebody before the accounting deadline, and can we afford to retain this player rather than accepting an offer?

We’ve already seen what those constraints look like elsewhere. Newcastle United are backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Their owners are hardly short of capital. Yet in June 2024 the club needed to raise around £60m as the PSR deadline approached, with the possibility of a points deduction hanging over them. Elliot Anderson went to Nottingham Forest and Yankuba Minteh to Brighton. At one stage Newcastle were even considering selling Anthony Gordon to Liverpool. The Guardian reported on how close those financial constraints came to changing the squad further.

Aston Villa had just qualified for the Champions League when they sold Douglas Luiz to Juventus for £42.4m. The sale, alongside other player trading, was made in the context of the club needing to comply with the Premier League’s financial rules. The Guardian reported the transfer as part of Villa’s effort to satisfy PSR.

There are arguments about whether those rules are sensible and whether they protect established clubs by making it harder for ambitious challengers to invest their way upwards. Those are legitimate arguments, but they are separate from this one. Whatever the rules are, they only work as a competition rule if everybody’s financial information means roughly the same thing.

This is where the competitive distortion happens

Imagine two clubs both want to sign a £70m player. The first looks at its numbers and realises the transaction would push it outside the permitted financial limits. It might sell somebody, wait, sign a cheaper player or decide the existing squad will have to cope.

Those compromises are part of the competitive environment. They affect the quality and depth of the team that eventually walks onto the pitch.

Now imagine another club’s reported revenues are substantially higher than the underlying economic reality because, according to the regulator, owner funding has been presented as commercial income. That club appears to have more room, and the difference doesn’t have to manifest itself as one enormous transfer.

It can compound through dozens of decisions: another player retained, an expensive reserve kept, a contract renewed rather than a player sold, a weak position strengthened six months earlier, or a squad built with enough depth to absorb three injuries instead of one. It can mean having enough quality to compete for the league, domestic cups and Europe simultaneously.

Over nine seasons, differences in financial capacity can accumulate into a very different sporting organisation. That still doesn’t allow us to rerun history and establish which matches, titles or trophies would have gone differently. Football contains far too many variables for that.

But it does explain why financial information is part of competitive integrity rather than some administrative activity happening away from the football. The accounts help determine the team.

Information is part of the infrastructure

This is the part I find more interesting than the usual football argument about whether titles should be stripped or how many points should be deducted. A competitive system depends on shared representations of reality.

The league table represents what happened on the pitch. Player registrations represent who is eligible to play. Drug tests represent whether athletes are competing within agreed physiological rules. Financial accounts represent the resources an organisation is using and where those resources came from.

None of those things are reality itself. They are information systems designed to make reality legible enough for a governing body to operate. If one of those representations becomes unreliable, the problem isn’t simply that a document contains the wrong number. The system starts making decisions against a false model of reality.

That is why the £900m matters.

Bad information changes other people’s decisions

I keep returning to versions of this problem in my own work. Organisations increasingly talk about evidence, dashboards, customer insight, AI systems and data-driven decision-making. The assumption underneath all of them is that more information creates better decisions.

It doesn’t necessarily. A beautifully constructed dashboard built from the wrong metric can make an organisation confidently wrong. Customer sentiment built from an unrepresentative group can move investment towards the wrong problem. An AI system retrieving outdated or weak evidence can produce an extremely convincing recommendation that should never have been made. An executive report can be numerically accurate while framing the organisation in a way that conceals what is actually happening.

The failure isn’t confined to the information layer because other things act on that information. Budgets move, people get hired, products get killed, strategies change and footballers get sold.

That is why evidence is not simply something you attach to a decision after somebody has made it.

Evidence is part of the machinery that produces the decision.

The counterargument matters

There is an obvious objection here. Financial rules themselves can distort competition. If Newcastle’s owners want to invest more money into Newcastle, why shouldn’t they? If Aston Villa qualify for the Champions League, why should a financial framework contribute to them selling an important player rather than strengthening the squad?

You can make a reasonable argument that financial sustainability rules privilege clubs with historically large revenues. The biggest incumbent clubs can spend more because they already earn more. But if that criticism is right, the answer has to be to change the rules rather than let every participant privately construct its own version of them.

A bad shared rule can still be debated and replaced. A system in which the underlying information cannot be trusted is much harder to govern at all.

The real £900m question

Manchester City will appeal. The club says the commission’s conclusions contain serious factual and legal errors and rejects the central claim that owner money was disguised as sponsorship. That matters, and the eventual outcome of the appeal matters. Reuters’ report includes City’s rejection of the commission’s conclusions and its intention to appeal.

But taking the commission’s current findings on their own terms, the most interesting question isn’t what players did £900m buy? It is what decisions became possible because the system believed those numbers?

That question reaches beyond football. Every organisation now has increasingly sophisticated systems for turning information into action. AI will accelerate that further because it makes it easier to retrieve evidence, connect it and recommend what should happen next.

That makes the integrity of the layer underneath even more important. Because once information becomes infrastructure, inaccurate information does more than tell the wrong story.

It changes what the system allows people to do.