Innocent Until Proven Guilty. Then What?

On September 25, 2026, an independent commission found Manchester City guilty of 114 of the 115 charges brought against them by the Premier League — charges covering financial rules, disclosure obligations, and cooperation, stretching back to the 2009–2018 period. City are appealing.

I should say upfront: I support Manchester United. There is an obvious, easy version of this piece where a United fan sees a guilty verdict against City and writes something gleeful. That is not what this is. If anything, I've hesitated to write about this at all, because "we told you so" is the most boring possible reaction, and because the actual thing worth talking about here has nothing to do with which shirt I wear on a Saturday.

It's this: what happens to a principle the moment it stops being convenient?

The Standard That Only Works One Way

Pep Guardiola, defending his club publicly in 2024, said something that on its own is unimpeachable: "Everyone is innocent until proven guilty." It's a real legal standard, and a fair one. Nobody should be treated as guilty before a process has actually run.

But a standard like that only means something if it applies at both ends. It's easy to believe in "innocent until proven guilty" when you're the one waiting for proof. The actual test of whether you believe in it is what you say once the proof arrives and it doesn't go your way.

That's the moment this piece is actually about. Not the years of "let the process play out." The next sentence. The one that comes right after the verdict, when "innocent until proven guilty" quietly turns into "the process got it wrong."

This Isn't Really About Appeals

To be clear: appealing a verdict is not, by itself, dishonest. It's a normal part of any legal process, and City are entitled to use it. Nobody should be criticized simply for exercising a right that exists precisely for cases like this.

What's worth noticing is the pattern, not the mechanism. Before the verdict: patience, calm, "trust the process," a standard invoked with total confidence. After the verdict: the same process — the one just invoked as fair — is suddenly described as having gotten it wrong.

You've probably seen this exact shift somewhere that has nothing to do with football. The employee who says "let HR investigate properly" right up until HR's finding doesn't go their way, at which point HR is suddenly biased. The defendant's family who insists "let the court decide" until the court decides, at which point the court didn't understand the full context. The teenager who wants a strict rule enforced "fairly" until it's enforced on them, at which point the rule is unfair.

None of these people are lying, exactly. They usually believe both things sincerely — the belief in the process, and the objection to its outcome. That's what makes it worth paying attention to rather than dismissing. It's not hypocrisy in the cartoon sense. It's something quieter and far more common: we are all fairer in principle than we are in the specific moment the principle costs us something.

There's a version of this that's even harder to catch, because it doesn't announce itself as a double standard at all. It's the version where you genuinely can't tell, from the inside, whether you're appealing because the process failed or because the outcome hurt. Those two feel identical in the moment. Only time, and what you do next, tells them apart.

What This Actually Cost, If It's True

Here's the part that's easy to skip past if you're not the one it affects.

The charges span 2009 to 2018. In that window, Manchester City won three Premier League titles. Manchester United finished runner-up to them twice. Arsenal and Liverpool also finished as runners-up in seasons City won the league. In Europe, City built the squad and results that eventually delivered the Champions League in 2023 — a trajectory that started with the financial foundation this commission has now ruled was built on breached rules.

If the findings hold, this isn't an abstract regulatory matter. It's a decade in which specific clubs lost specific things — titles, European qualification, managerial jobs, players' peak years spent competing against a version of City that wasn't playing by the same financial rules as everyone else. In 2024, four clubs — Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool, and Tottenham — served legal notices reserving their right to seek compensation for exactly this: the competitive disadvantage they say City's breaches caused them.

Legal experts are broadly skeptical that any of those clubs will actually collect anything. Proving that a specific title or a specific European spot was lost because of City's specific financial breaches — rather than a hundred other footballing variables — is an extremely difficult thing to establish in court. That skepticism is probably well-founded as a legal matter. I'm no legal expert, and this piece isn't trying to be a legal argument — I'm just a fan concerned with the voice of it, the plain unfairness a supporter feels watching this play out, whatever a courtroom ultimately decides.

But legal difficulty and actual unfairness are two different things. A wrong doesn't stop being a wrong just because it's hard to put a number on it in a courtroom. Something happened to those clubs, those managers, those players, across a decade of competing in conditions that — if the commission is right — weren't level. The fact that no court will ever cleanly quantify it doesn't mean nobody paid for it. It means the cost was real and the bill will never be presented.

This is the quiet cruelty of any rules violation that plays out over years instead of one moment: there's no equivalent of a disallowed goal. Nobody replays the 2011–12 title race and hands it to someone else. The trophies stay in the cabinet. The seasons stay in the record books. The only thing that changes is what we now know about how they were won — and knowing doesn't undo anything. It just sits there, permanently unresolved, next to the trophy.

The Punishment Nobody Can Agree On

From where I'm sitting, this has to be one of the strangest positions football has ever put itself in. A club found guilty on 114 of 115 charges, spanning nine years, and the actual consequence is still an open question. Some of the game's more notable pundits and podcasts have made the same point in different words: football has never really decided what a verdict like this is supposed to cost.

There's real precedent for going hard. Juventus were stripped of a title outright over Calciopoli in 2006, with the vacated title eventually handed to Inter Milan — Italian football decided that some breaches are severe enough that the record book itself has to change. On the other side, voices closer to the English game — EFL chairman Darragh MacAnthony among them — have pushed back on that comparison, calling talk of relegation or stripped titles "nonsense," arguing you can't rewrite the past and that City are simply "an easy target" for the more dramatic headlines.

Both of those can't really be true at once. Either the breaches were serious enough to change what happened on the pitch, or they weren't. Everything in between — a fine, a suspended points deduction, a slap that fades from memory within a season — is football trying to have it both ways: acknowledging the guilt without accepting what the guilt should actually mean.

The Premier League has already set its own scale for this, whether it meant to or not. Everton lost 6 to 10 points for one season's overspend. Nottingham Forest lost 4 for the same thing. City's case is nine seasons and 114 proven charges — and if the punishment for that doesn't scale well past what a single bad season cost Everton, the number itself becomes the tell. It would be an admission, in points, that the scale of the breach was never really the point.

That's the part that should worry anyone who cares about the sport, regardless of which club they support. A guilty finding that doesn't change anything sends a clearer message than any punishment could — that breaking the rules is a reasonable bet, as long as you can afford to lose the case later.

The Actual Question Worth Asking

The instinct to appeal isn't the problem. Believing in "innocent until proven guilty" isn't the problem. The problem is treating the appeal as a neutral continuation of that same standard, when it isn't — the standard already ran its full course. An independent commission heard the case and reached a verdict on 114 of 115 charges. That is what "innocent until proven guilty" was building toward the entire time. It happened.

What comes after isn't a defense of the principle. It's a test of something else — whether the acceptance of a process only ever extended as far as the outcome you expected.

The real measure of whether you trust a system isn't how gracefully you accept the verdicts that go your way. It's what you do the moment one doesn't.