The U.K. government is happy to see Manchester City’s owners forced to sell the club if that is what the Independent Football Regulator (IFR), created in 2025 and empowered to intervene and act in situations like this, considers the correct thing to do.
City have been found guilty of almost all of the charges against them for breaching financial rules, following a multi-year Premier League investigation and hearing overseen by an independent commission. The club continues to deny wrongdoing and has filed an appeal, a process expected to conclude sometime in January 2027.
U.K. prime minister Andy Burnham has found it difficult to condemn Manchester City. In his former role as Mayor of Greater Manchester—office he held from 2017 until this past summer—he welcomed the impact of Abu Dhabi investment into his city beyond just the football club.
Even since the guilty verdict, which outlined “sham” contracts disguising owner investment to bump up spending against the rules, Burnham said he would be “really concerned” if Sheikh Mansour was forced to sell the club. “They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester and building Manchester City into the global force that it is.”
But Manchester City was built into that “global force” by orchestrated cheating for nine years. The club began cooking the books a year after the 2008 takeover and didn’t stop until City were in a position to dominate from a platform constructed through dishonesty.
This is not a case of low-level rule breaking, or even cheating on the field—the players themselves won match after match in good faith.
Independent Regulator Has Power to Remove Man City Ownership
Lisa Nandy, the U.K. government’s culture secretary, offers a harder voice than Burnham.
“I want to be crystal clear that, whilst we are really grateful to investors who come from all over the world to invest in our clubs and help to ensure their viability and their success, they are custodians, both of their clubs and of the game,” she told talkSPORT.
“They have a responsibility to play by the rules and uphold the rules.”
The government itself will not intervene in the process. The original guilty verdict has been made and it will now be for the appeal panel to preside over. Nandy is clear that the government’s only role is to ensure that integrity is respected and protected.
“That is the right and proper role governing, it’s to protect that integrity and put the fans back at the heart of football where they belong,” she added. “That’s what we’ve done with the Football Governance Act and the Independent Regulator, and it's now for football to step up and make a determination in this case, and really meet this moment.”
One of the jobs of the Regulator is to protect clubs from bad or rogue owners.
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“If the allegations are upheld [at appeal], the Independent Football Regulator can intervene. He can investigate the ownership and, at its most extreme, he can compel the owners if he believes they're not fit [to run] the club,” Nandy stated.
“We’re not there yet. It's absolutely right that Manchester City get the right to defend themselves and they do strongly refute the allegations. But in the event that they do not believe that a club is in safe hands, we’ve fought tooth and nail to give the Independent Regulator the power.”
Despite concerns from onlookers about the risk for soured relations between the United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates potentially leading to government intervention to soften the blow on Manchester City, there appears to be little appetite for it.
The Regulator, led by David Kogan, is confident that interference is not an issue and will use the full extent of the power it has if deemed necessary.
“The prime minister’s capable of saying whatever he wants to say,” Kogan told Times Radio this week. “You asked me whether we have had any interference politically in any of the judgments we’re making, and I’m telling you, categorically, we have not.
“We will take a judgment based on evidence. Once the appeal has been heard by the independent commission of the Premier League, we’re going to look at that evidence closely, we’re going to actually have powers of investigation ourselves, and that will be what governs what we [the IFR] do.”
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