Premier League
Man City guilty on 114 of 115: nine seasons with an asterisk
An independent commission has found Manchester City guilty of 114 of the 115 charges the Premier League brought against them. The ruling landed on Tuesday 29 September, and it is the biggest story in European football in years, even though nobody yet knows what it will cost.
The number is worth getting right: 114 of 115, not all 115. The commission found all 80 financial charges proven and 34 of the 35 charges of failing to cooperate with the league’s investigation. It is reported by CBS Sports, NBC News, Goal and Al Jazeera. We crossed four outlets before writing a word, because the first signal reached us through an aggregator, and an aggregator is not a source.
What was found proven
The charges were opened in February 2023 and cover the seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18, nine in all. The commission concluded that the club inflated its revenue through sham sponsorship arrangements, where part of the money was in fact being put up by its own owner, and that it dressed up its accounts so that spending appeared to fit inside the league’s limits.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Charges brought | 115 (February 2023) |
| Charges proven | 114 |
| Financial charges proven | 80 of 80 |
| Failure to cooperate proven | 34 of 35 |
| Seasons covered | 2009-10 to 2017-18 |
| Punishment | not yet decided |
What is not decided, which is half the story
There is no punishment yet. It gets decided at a separate hearing that has not been held. Any headline today claiming City will lose points, go down a division or be stripped of titles is calling a decision nobody has made.
What can be said is that the range described by the press is wide, starting at a fine and going up from there, and that the club maintains the ruling contains clear material errors and has said it will appeal. According to CBS Sports, the deadline to do that falls on Friday 2 October. Until that plays out, the verifiable fact is the verdict, not the penalty.
What this does to anyone who keeps a table
Here is where the story stops being about Manchester City.
For nine seasons, millions of people took a league table at face value. They argued about it in group chats, they built office competitions around it, and they settled prediction leagues with it. Today that table carries a footnote it did not carry before.
It is not a sporting tragedy. The matches were played and the goals went in. But it is an uncomfortable reminder of something very concrete: a table is worth exactly what the data behind it is worth. If the data can be edited after the fact, so can the table.
And on a much smaller scale, that is the story of nearly every pick’em pool ever run by hand. One person keeps the spreadsheet. That person enters results manually, sometimes on Tuesday, sometimes on Thursday. If they get a scoreline wrong, nobody notices until somebody complains. If they fix it, nobody knows what it said before. It takes no bad faith at all for the standings to end up arguable. It only takes a table that depends on one person and their memory.
The fix is boring, which is why it works
The answer is not to trust people less. It is to take the scorekeeping away from people entirely.
In Quini the results come from the official live feed, so the table moves while the match is still being played. Nobody types in a scoreline. Nobody adjudicates a correction on Thursday. The rules you pick at the start are the rules that score every pick, and everybody in the group is looking at the same standings at the same time.
Two parts of that matter more than they sound:
- The rules get fixed before kickoff, not after. You choose which matches count, what each correct pick is worth and how ties break. Our guide to running a prediction pool with friends walks through the choices that cause arguments later.
- The deadline is per match, not per week. Picks lock five minutes before each kickoff, which removes the single most common dispute in a hand-run league. We covered the reasoning in when pick’em picks should lock.
If you run a survivor format instead, the one rule people always get wrong is what a draw does. In Quini a draw keeps you alive; you only lose a life on a defeat.
The Premier League is back on Saturday 10 October
The timing is almost too neat. The league whose nine-season table just picked up an asterisk returns from the international break with gameweek 6 on Saturday 10 October, ten matches running through to Monday the 12th, which is the next real chance to put a prediction league in front of your group. Read live from our own fixture data today.
While the break runs its course, the football that is actually on is the Nations League, and we wrote that up in the Nations League is playing through the international break.
FAQ
Was Manchester City found guilty of all 115 charges? No. The commission found 114 of the 115 proven: all 80 financial charges and 34 of the 35 relating to failure to cooperate with the league’s investigation.
Has Manchester City been punished? Not yet. Sanctions are decided at a separate hearing that has not taken place. Anything specific about points, relegation or titles is speculation at this stage.
Which seasons does the case cover? The 2009-10 season through 2017-18, nine seasons in total.
Can Manchester City appeal? The club says the ruling contains clear material errors and has said it will appeal. CBS Sports reports the deadline as Friday 2 October.
Does any of this change a prediction league I already ran? No. Results, scorelines and the points people earned are untouched. The case is about club finances, not about what happened on the pitch.
Set yours up before the 10th
Your table should not depend on anybody’s memory. Pick the matches, decide what each correct pick is worth and how ties break, then let the standings move on their own while the game is still going. Free pools run up to 3 players and PRO is a one-time unlock from USD 9.99.
Get Quini and have your group locked in before gameweek 6. The full walkthrough is in how it works.