They are the 100-plus charges heard around the world.
An independent commission ruled Manchester City had entered into a series of “sham” agreements with Abu Dhabi-based sponsors to circumvent financial regulations and inject more than £850million ($1.19bn) into the club over a nine-year period.
City have since appealed against the ruling, but the events over the past weeks have raised many questions regarding repercussions and potential consequences.
Where exactly the club’s women’s team factor into all this is one of those.
Below, The Athletic attempts to clear up what we know so far about what impact, if any, the Premier League charges and resulting judgment will have on the women’s side of the operation at City.
Are Man City Women directly affected by the charges?
This is the best place to start. And the key word here is ‘directly’.
Put simply, the Premier League charges concern Premier League financial rules which Manchester City, who compete in it, have been found guilty of contravening.
They do not concern Manchester City Women’s Football Club Limited, which – while owned by the same holding company (we’ll get into that in the next section) – is a separate legal entity within City Football Group (CFG) that competes in the Women’s Super League (WSL), a competition owned by WSL Football which operates independently of the Premier League.
Manchester City Women were not named in any part of the independent commission’s investigation or the judgments regarding the club’s “sham payments”. City Women were also not implicated in a UEFA investigation into City’s dealings six years ago.
As stated above, these were Premier League rules that were breached. And under its profitability and sustainability rules (PSR), spending on clubs’ women’s teams, academies, non-playing staff and infrastructure is explicitly exempt from the calculation that caps senior men’s first-team squad spending at 85 per cent of football revenue.
Further, during the period from 2009 to 2018 covered by City’s charges, the WSL was operated by the Football Association, and there were no financial regulations in place that City Women could technically be found guilty of breaching (only at the start of this season has WSL Football introduced such rules to which teams in the women’s game must adhere).
At the time of reporting, there’s no indication that an investigation is being launched into Manchester City Women by WSL Football regarding any financial wrongdoing.
How linked are the men’s and women’s setups?
Let’s start with a bit of history.
In 2012, four years after the takeover of Manchester City by Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), a formal partnership was established between City Women (then affiliated with the Premier League outfit but operating independently) and the club, eventually leading to the incorporation of City Women in 2014.
The incorporation of City Women created a separate legal entity, one that doesn’t sit under the men’s team (as many WSL clubs, such as the one at Arsenal, do) but rather alongside it. City Women have their own director of football (Therese Sjogran) and managing director (Charlotte O’Neill) but Manchester City Women’s Football Club Ltd is ultimately overseen by Khaldoon Al Mubarak, who is also chairman of Manchester City Football Club Ltd.
Put simply: the two setups at City overlap in the shared holding companies and the shared directors and decision-makers that sit atop them.
In 2018, for example, the directors of Manchester City Football Club Ltd – those implicated in the Premier League’s charges — were exactly the same for the women’s teams, with just one additional director on the men’s side.
Like most of the affiliated women’s teams in English football, including at Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United, the women’s operation at City uses much of the same infrastructure as the men’s one.
City Women do now have their own state-of-the-art training facilities worth over £10million, which are exclusively used by the first team. Previously, they had shared facilities with City’s youth academy at the Etihad Campus. They play matches at the academy stadium (known as the Joie Stadium since 2023). Use of team buses, physios, doctors and kitchen staff were all shared, alongside the boys’ academy teams.
It is important to note that the above is not out of the ordinary for women’s football teams affiliated with long-standing men’s clubs in England. In fact, most such women’s sides in the WSL remain reliant on their men’s team or parent company for facilities, infrastructure such as stadiums and overall financial support.
Like other clubs, City Women also share sponsorship and commercial affiliates with the men’s team, such as front-of-shirt sponsor Etihad Airways or clubwide sponsor Revolut.
So, did City Women benefit from the ‘sham’ payments if they do share links with the men?
The simple answer is… it’s not that simple.
Of the £921.4million in accounting irregularities alleged by the Premier League and agreed with by the independent commission, £830.7m of it was down to inflated revenues, where City booked hefty sums from ADUG as commercial income.
While all revenue streams have risen during ADUG’s time in Manchester, it’s the club’s commercial income which has soared, increasing by £300million between 2008 and 2025, over half City’s revenue growth in that time.
This is where it’s beneficial to look at City Women’s commercial income within that timeframe.
According to public financial records, City Women recorded revenue of £562,000 in 2015, £192,000 (34 per cent) of which was commercial income. By 2024-25, the women’s team were recording total revenues of £10.6million, with £6.9m (65 per cent) from commercial deals.
According to Deloitte’s most recent annual review, the attribution of commercial revenue to women’s clubs from shared deals with men’s setups “remains inconsistent”, something WSL Football is hoping to address via its new Financial Sustainability Regulations, which have come into effect this season. It is an issue at City too, where the women’s team accounts for a share of CFG’s commercial agreements that isn’t explicitly disclosed in the accounts.
It can, however, be inferred from some balance-sheet movements, with £4.4million (64 per cent) of that £6.9m commercial income in 2024-25 assumed to stem from CFG-wide deals.
It should be noted that commercial revenue remains the single largest and fastest-growing driver of income for WSL teams.
According to Deloitte, in 2024-25, the league’s 12 clubs generated revenue of £90million, a 39 per cent (£25m) increase on the previous season (£65m). Commercial revenue rose by £15m to £41m in 2024-25. Chelsea (£16.0m) contributed 40 per cent of this total, with five other teams, including Arsenal and City, also reporting commercial revenue exceeding £1m.
Over recent seasons, City have developed commercial partnerships specific to the women's team.
In 2018, City Women became the first WSL side to secure an independent sleeve partner, QNET. In 2023, they agreed a landmark stadium naming-rights partnership with Joie, a baby-gear company. This deal was distinct to the women’s team and represented the first time a WSL club had secured such a package. Other women’s team-specific commercial partnerships include wealth management firm Evelyn Partners in 2025 and Snuggs becoming the club’s official Period Underwear Partner.
A worthwhile exercise is comparing how their commercial revenue compares to WSL competitors. This figure for City Women in recent seasons has actually paled in comparison to their nearest rivals, not even reaching half that of Chelsea’s in 2024-25.
Financial data for WSL clubs isn’t the best, but the general theme across clubs is that City Women don’t look to have substantially inflated commercial dealings in the same way the club’s men’s side did. And due to the relatively smaller sums of money City Women were dealing in (barely even tens of millions, as opposed to hundreds for the fellas), the scope for such inflation within reported revenues was limited anyway.
That is not to say City Women haven’t benefitted from the on-pitch success of the men's operation, as influenced by off-pitch charges.
It was a £256,000 donation from Manchester City Football Ltd in 2013, as well as access to the club’s wider infrastructure and facilities, that were instrumental in proving that the newly-created City Women’s team was financially stable enough to be granted a licence by an independent panel to compete in the FA’s newly-created WSL top flight for the 2014 season.
City’s licence came at the expense of historic women’s club Doncaster Belles after an independent panel controversially concluded that the Yorkshire side, who had competed in the English top flight for 22 years having been one of its founding members, failed to meet the minimum criteria.
In May this year, City opened that new state-of-the-art training facility mentioned earlier — a venture built and financed through the club's corporate-investment structure and parent-group backing rather than external grants. It’s one of the largest single infrastructure investments ever made specifically for a women's first team.
Since 2014, City Women have ultimately remained financially dependent on CFG. In their most recent filings for the year ending in 2025, it states: “The company will continue to be funded by equity from its parent company until it becomes self-sustainable.”
Have City Women been big spenders, like the men’s team?
As highlighted in this article, City fundamentally transformed the financial landscape of the men’s global game with help from their disguised commercial income.
While describing City Women as frugal spenders in their version of the sport would be disingenuous, their influence on the wider financial ecosystem isn't as seismic as on the men's side.
That's not to say City haven't spent. In their first season after gaining entry into the WSL, they paid out a total of £22,525 in transfer and agent fees as they brought in established England internationals including Steph Houghton from Arsenal and Everton duo Jill Scott and Toni Duggan, along with England Under-23s star Izzy Christiansen. While a drop in the ocean in men's football, it was a heady sum for the women's game back then and helped give City a foothold in the league. They eventually won the 2014 League Cup, and their first WSL title two years later.
Still, other clubs were spending similar amounts, if not more, around that time: Chelsea Women set a British record with their signing of Fran Kirby from Reading for a reported fee between £40,000 and £60,000 the following year.
City did make a historic mark on the transfer market in 2023 when signing Wolfsburg midfielder Jill Roord for a British women’s record fee of around £300,000. Yet Arsenal’s acquisition of Kyra Cooney-Cross from Hammarby (a reported initial fee of £140,000, with add-ons potentially taking it to £250,000) and Manchester United’s of Geyse Da Silva Ferreira from Barcelona (also around £250,000) in the same year were not far behind.
And in the windows that followed, it was Chelsea, Arsenal and London City Lionesses who rewrote the WSL’s rules of engagement in the transfer window.
There was Chelsea’s $1.1million (£830,000 at the current rate) move for United States defender Naomi Girma in January 2025, Arsenal’s record £1m addition of Canada winger Olivia Smith that July, followed by Chelsea and London City spending more than £1m each on Alyssa Thompson and Grace Geyoro respectively before the summer window's closure in early September.
City’s highest outgoing fee remains the £650,000 paid to Portland Thorns for USWNT midfielder Sam Coffey in January this year.
Their wage bill is not meagre by any stretch, sitting at £8.49million (up from £7.04m the year prior), according to the most recent financial accounts, which are for the 2024-25 season. That is nearly £3m higher than neighbours United, yet still significantly less than the figures for Arsenal (£11.32m, up from £9m) and Chelsea (£14.52m, up from £10.29m).
How that ranking will look in the coming year remains to be seen, following Khadija Shaw’s new four-year contract that will see the Jamaica striker earn a minimum of £1.6million per season, as well as the additional salary of England winger Beth Mead, who joined from Arsenal as a free agent in the summer.
Would any sporting sanctions against City affect the women’s team?
In the most direct sense, no. Again, any sporting sanctions that arise from the guilty judgments would be levied by the Premier League and thus impact City’s operations and dealings in the Premier League.
City Women are in the WSL, outside the jurisdiction of the Premier League and under the banner of WSL Football.
That said, there are WSL rules about which City Women will need to be mindful, such as the potential for a points deduction where a 'group undertaking' of a women's club suffers an insolvency event. While insolvency doesn’t look to be on the table, it shows how events elsewhere across a stable of ownership can potentially matter under women's competition rules.
What about financial sanctions?
In a direct sense, no.
But indirectly? Sure.
Again, City Women are not self-sustainable and, as explained above, they share the same holding company as the men. While financial sanctions would not be imposed directly on the women’s team, they would be felt across the club. That includes the women’s setup.
We’ve seen across the football ecosystem over the past decade that when clubs are struck by crises, the women’s side of their wider operation tends to be one of the first areas to feel the financial crunch.
Is there concern over potential long-term impact on the women’s team?
This is the greatest concern among those affiliated with the side, particularly the long-term impact this saga may have on the women's team's reputation. City Women, the current WSL champions and league leaders, play wearing the same club badge as the men, a badge which is now associated with being found guilty on more than 100 charges of financial wrongdoing. The damage to their standing in the women's game could be significant.
How might that damage manifest itself? Well, for a start, will players want to join while there is uncertainty about what the future might bring? Will sponsors want to do deals with City Women, given the team are part of the broader Manchester City brand?
Then, of course, there are the internal dynamics among current players and staff, how they deal with the situation and how it affects them as individuals.
What have those within the women’s team said?
City CEO Ferran Soriano visited the women’s team’s training facility early last week to reiterate the message that has been shared across the whole club: that they will continue to plead their innocence and that everyone working there should carry on their day-to-day duties as normal.
And that is precisely what they are doing, not least for a lack of other options.
News of the commission's ruling, first broken by The Athletic, arrived during the men’s game's recent international break but the women’s team had to continue competing in the WSL and Champions League, winning two of their subsequent matches and drawing the other.
Their head coach Andree Jeglertz described the situation in a pre-match press conference, a few days after the story emerged, as “business as usual”.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Manchester City, Manchester City WFC, Sports Business, Women's Soccer, Women's Super League
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