The hearing was concluded in December 2024 after a court case that lasted longer than two years but a judgement is yet to given
Manchester City must be getting increasingly anxious as they await the outcome of the Premier League’s long-standing Financial Fair Play (FFP) investigation, football finance expert Stefan Borson has said.
The club remain in the dark more than six months after an independent commission completed a hearing into the 115 alleged breaches of Premier League financial rules spanning over a decade.
No verdict has yet been delivered, although City have consistently denied any wrongdoing. Borson, a former legal and financial adviser to City, said that while some delay is understandable for a case of this magnitude, the timeline is creeping toward a point where the club’s leadership may begin to fear the worst.
“I do think we are getting into the period where City will start to have some concerns about where the decision is,” Borson told Football Insider. “We are in that sort of early period still, but I think it will switch quite quickly into an area of concern for the club if it drags on closer to the start of the season.”
The hearing was concluded in December 2024 after a court case that lasted longer than two years. The Premier League charged City with breaches related to inaccurate financial reporting, failure to cooperate with investigations, and the concealment of sponsorship income, all of which the club have denied.
Expulsion from the Premier League is considered unlikely, with potential punishments expected to range from fines and points deductions to transfer restrictions.
“Clearly, as we get further into the deliberation period, or the drafting period, then you start to think that the extent of the judgment needs to be particularly carefully drafted to ensure that there are no challenges to very serious findings,” said Borson.
He warned, however, that the timeline may have been affected by the availability of the independent panel, saying that “we don’t know the details of the diaries of the panel who are deliberating.”
“It’s perfectly possible that they went straight into other work in the early part of this year,” said Borson. “So the decision was always going to take probably until at the earliest April.”
