Strip out the legal choreography and the Manchester City verdict says one thing: English football's financial rulebook is a document nobody fully trusts anymore. Not the champions it polices. Not the smaller clubs it bankrupts for a single misstep. Not the owners now heading for the exit. The commission's September 28 finding — that City was guilty of 114 of the 115 charges brought against it — should be a reckoning. Instead it looks like the opening of a years-long legal grind that will outlast the trophies in question.
City lodged its appeal on October 1, calling it comprehensive. Of course they did. A club with the resources to allegedly disguise more than £900 million in equity as sponsorship income over nine seasons is not going to accept a verdict quietly. The question isn't whether City fight. It's whether the Premier League has the institutional spine to make any penalty stick before the appeals process eats another two or three seasons.
Two breaches, two universes
The comparison that keeps surfacing is Everton. In November 2023, Everton were docked 10 points for a single breach of the Premier League's Profit and Sustainability Rules. One breach. Ten points. A relegation fight that defined their season. City now sit on 114 adverse findings covering nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18, and the sanctions menu — fines, points deductions, transfer bans, relegation, expulsion, and the possibility of stripped titles — reads like a threat the Premier League has to be talked into using.
There's a reason that gap feels obscene. Everton's punishment landed inside a season. City's charges were brought in February 2023 and only produced a first-instance verdict in September 2026. Three and a half years. An appeal still to come. The trophies in question were lifted the better part of a decade ago. Whatever the final ruling, nobody is handing back a 2018 Premier League medal in 2027 and pretending the sport is clean.
This is also not City's first dance. UEFA found the club guilty of FFP breaches in February 2020, imposing a €30 million fine and a two-year Champions League ban. Five months later the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned the ban and cut the fine to €10 million, concluding most of the alleged breaches were "not established or time-barred". That phrase — time-barred — is the ghost in the current proceedings. City's lawyers will try to summon it again.
Why owners are heading for the door
Then there's Everton. On October 9, 2026, The Friedkin Group confirmed it is exploring a sale of the club, less than two years after buying a 94.1% stake from Farhad Moshiri in December 2024 for a reported figure north of £400 million. The reasoning, per The Guardian, is a blunt mix: the capital Everton still needs, and the Premier League's restrictions on multi-club ownership — Friedkin also owns Roma and Cannes.
Read that alongside the City verdict and a pattern emerges. The clubs sanctioned hardest under the current rules are the ones without sovereign-scale backing. The owners walking away are the ones who did the math on what it actually costs to compete inside the rulebook. The clubs appealing from a position of strength are the ones accused of ignoring the rulebook for a decade.
This is roughly the critique that has calcified across football's commentariat: FFP, in its current form, functions less as a guardrail against reckless owners and more as a ceiling on ambitious ones. You can disagree with the framing. It's harder to disagree with the pattern.
The rules are already changing, which is the tell
The Premier League isn't waiting for the City appeal to redesign the system. A new Squad Cost Ratio will cap on-pitch spending — wages, amortised fees, agent costs — at 85% of football-related revenue plus net profit on player sales. It's a UEFA-style model, imported partly because the current Profit and Sustainability Rules have produced exactly the two-tier enforcement everyone can see.
A tidier rulebook won't retroactively fix the mess. If City win on appeal, the Premier League looks toothless after a three-year prosecution. If City lose and get hit with a points deduction or a title stripping, half the league will argue the punishment arrived a decade late and the other half will argue it isn't enough. There is no outcome where this ends cleanly.
The honest reading is that the sport has spent a decade building a governance system that cannot credibly police its biggest clubs or protect its mid-sized ones. Everton got ten points for one breach. City got a verdict and an appeal window. Friedkin got out. The scoreboard, in the end, is the one that matters.
