Manchester City, the 115 charges and football's trust problem

I love football and, as a Reading FC supporter, I’ve experienced rather more of its ups and downs than I’d probably like. I’ve also spent a huge amount of the last 20 years watching the Premier League. The title races, relegation battles, Aguero in 2012, Leicester winning the league and plenty more besides have all been part of the experience.

That’s partly why the Manchester City case is so difficult to get your head around. The independent commission has now found City guilty of serious breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules, including using sham commercial arrangements and misstating accounts. Manchester City deny wrongdoing and are appealing the findings, so the process is not over yet.

Does that mean the football I watched and enjoyed over those years was somehow spoiled? I’m not sure I’d go that far. But it certainly leaves a sour taste in the mouth, and the research suggests football fans are feeling much the same.

What do football fans actually think?

YouGov surveyed more than 800 supporters of Premier League and EFL clubs in September 2026 and found that 86% believed Manchester City had broken the Premier League’s financial rules. That’s an extraordinarily high figure, and it has increased from 76% when YouGov asked football fans in 2023.

There is less agreement about what should actually happen to City. 71% of supporters think the club should pay compensation, 66% support a financial penalty and 63% support a points deduction. More severe punishments divide opinion: 45% support stripping titles and 42% would support expulsion from the Premier League.

For me, that distinction is interesting. Fans don't necessarily agree on what justice should look like, but there seems to be a strong feeling that there need to be meaningful consequences when financial rules are broken.

Perhaps the most worrying finding is that only 44% of supporters expected City to face serious repercussions, while 49% thought serious consequences were unlikely. In other words, fans overwhelmingly believe the rules were broken, but many don't necessarily trust the system to do much about it.

Football has a trust problem

As a researcher, this is the bit that interests me most. We spend a lot of time measuring trust in organisations, brands and institutions. It can take years to build and considerably less time to lose.

Sport relies on trust too. Nobody seriously expects Reading to have the same financial resources as Manchester City, Manchester United or Liverpool. Football has never been an equal contest financially. What supporters do expect, however, is that everyone is broadly operating under the same rules.

The Manchester City case creates an uncomfortable question around that. If one club gained an unfair financial advantage, how far did the consequences travel?

League positions determine prize money. They determine European qualification. At the other end of the table, a single position can influence relegation and the finances of clubs for years afterwards. Even Reading potentially feature somewhere in the margins of this story. One analysis estimated that the club could have received around £756,000 more in Premier League merit payments during the 2012/13 season if Manchester City were removed from the historic standings.

That isn't money Reading are officially owed and it isn't evidence of an established compensation claim. It's a hypothetical calculation. But it illustrates why the consequences of financial rule-breaking aren't necessarily limited to the club involved.

Can you really rewrite football history?

This is where I struggle with some of the proposed punishments. Manchester City's 2011/12 title is probably the obvious example. Sergio Aguero scoring in the 94th minute against QPR remains one of the most extraordinary moments I've ever seen in football. If a title were retrospectively removed, would everyone suddenly pretend that afternoon didn't happen? Of course not. Then there is the ripple affect. Had they not won that title, would they have attracted the same players in future transfer windows?

The same applies across more than a decade of football. You can't replay matches or recreate transfer decisions. You can't know whether a club would have qualified for Europe, signed a different player or avoided relegation if circumstances had been different.

That doesn't mean nothing should happen. Quite the opposite. It demonstrates why football needs to identify and deal with these problems much sooner.

A punishment delivered years after the events might provide accountability, but it can't completely repair what happened.

This goes beyond Manchester City

There are signs that football's trust problem is much wider than this case. The Government's Fan-Led Review of Football Governance received more than 20,000 survey responses. Only 6% of respondents believed the existing regulatory arrangements in English football were fit for purpose, while 89% supported greater regulation of club finances and 93% supported establishing an independent regulator.

There is an important research caveat here: the Fan-Led Review survey was self-selecting rather than a nationally representative sample, so those percentages shouldn't simply be treated as representing every football supporter in Britain. Nevertheless, alongside representative polling such as YouGov's, the direction is difficult to ignore. Fans want football to be properly governed and, crucially, they want to believe that the rules mean something.

We can't let it happen again

I don't know what the perfect punishment for Manchester City is, and the appeal process still needs to run its course. There will inevitably be arguments about points, titles, fines, relegation and compensation.

For me, the bigger issue is making sure English football doesn't find itself in this position again. The Premier League's appeal is built partly on uncertainty. Every point matters. A goal can be worth millions of pounds. One league position can transform a season. We buy into all of that because we believe the competition itself is legitimate. As a Reading fan, I'm under no illusions that football is financially fair. It isn't and probably never will be. And we have felt the burden of irresponsible owners which destroyed our women's team, enforced transfer embargoes and points deductions which brought us to the third tier. But there's a difference between inequality and a competition where supporters no longer trust the rules.

Maybe the biggest lesson from the Manchester City case isn't about trying to rewrite the last 15 years of football. It's about protecting the next 15. Because once fans stop trusting the competition, football has a much bigger problem than any points deduction can solve.