Manchester City’s legal and regulatory problems have moved into a more serious phase. According to the Mail, the chair of the Independent Football Regulator has made it clear that the body has the authority to force a sale of the club if it concludes the owners have failed the standards required under the law. That is not background noise. That is the regulator stating, in plain language, that ownership itself could come under review.
The key point here is simple. The Independent Football Regulator, created last year and operating under the 2025 Football Governance Act, can do more than issue warnings. It can remove owners, suspend licences and revoke them if the wrongdoing is serious enough. In Manchester City’s case, that matters because the Premier League case has already delivered a damaging first verdict, even if the appeals process is still to come.
City were found guilty last month on most of the charges brought against them over alleged financial wrongdoing. The ruling said the club disguised payments worth £900 million over a nine-year period and described a number of arrangements as sham deals. The findings also stated that sponsorship values were artificially inflated and that money from Abu Dhabi ownership was fed into the club through disguised payments to get around Premier League spending controls. City have appealed, and that appeal is central to what happens next.
David Kogan, the regulator’s chair, did not dance around the scale of the powers available. “We have the power to ask an owner to step away from a club if we believe that they run a club in a way that is neither fit, fair or done with propriety,” he said. When asked whether an owner could simply refuse, his answer was direct, “No, we’ve got absolute power to do so.”
Independent Football Regulator Steps Into Focus
This is where the story becomes bigger than Manchester City alone. English football has never really had a regulator with this sort of reach. The Premier…
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