Sport / Football

Guilty on 114 charges, and now Manchester City's auditors are in the frame too

Britain's accounting watchdog has taken over inquiries into Manchester City's accounts and the audits behind them. City, top of the league and winning, deny wrongdoing and have appealed. The case around the club keeps widening.

Manchester, England · October 20, 2026

On the pitch, Manchester City look like the one part of this story that is simple. They sit top of the Premier League, they beat AEK Athens 5-1 in the Champions League on Tuesday night with a Phil Foden hat trick, and manager Enzo Maresca says the noise has only pulled his squad closer together. Off the pitch, the independent commission that found City guilty on 114 of the 115 charges brought by the Premier League has set off a second wave, and this week it reached the people who signed off the books.

The Financial Reporting Council, Britain's accounting watchdog, has confirmed it is examining the commission's published findings as they relate to City's financial statements and the statutory audits carried out by BDO, the club's auditors since 2007. The FRC took over regulatory consideration of the case from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales on September 30, a day after the findings were published, and it is now making preliminary enquiries to decide whether a formal investigation follows. No formal investigation has started yet. The commission itself found that sham commercial deals inflated City's revenue by more than 900 million pounds across the years in question, and that the club gave a misleading impression of a scheme to disguise shareholder funds, one its auditors were unaware of.

The political pressure arrived in writing. Labour MP Liam Byrne, who chairs the business select committee, asked the FRC how the audit system failed to uncover misstatements of this scale over nine years, and afterwards said the regulator's reply exposes gaps in its ability to compel evidence from the club and pursue directors who fall outside its disciplinary rules. City, for their part, dispute the findings entirely and have appealed, arguing the commission's decision contains material errors of law, principle and fact and is unsafe. The appeal is expected to be heard in the New Year, and football finance expert Stefan Borson expects the club to argue that no punishment should land until it is finished, while the Premier League is reported to want the sanction settled sooner.

Our call is that the FRC's arrival matters more than its powers suggest, because it changes who this case belongs to. Until now it was football judging football, and football has a long record of going quietly when the trophies are shared out. An accounting regulator asking how audited statements held up for nine years is a question about the credibility of every set of books in the Premier League, not just City's, and regulators who ask questions in public rarely enjoy dropping them in private. The sanction most often reported, a points deduction large enough to guarantee relegation plus a heavy fine, still runs through the appeal first. We think City keep winning through the winter and the deduction fight lands in the spring, which is precisely the outcome the league fears most: a title race with an asterisk already printed on it.