Soriano, 114 Charges and an Unopened Drawer: Manchester City Living in Limbo

I read the Reuters report twice, then wrote the shortest possible line in my small notebook: “Soriano told the EFC board that no decision has been made public.” Fourteen words. Enough to keep me sitting for nearly two more hours after the screen went dark. In thirty years of following football teams with a pen in hand, I learned one thing: the shortest sentences are usually the heaviest. And this one is heavy because it isn't about a match, isn't about a goal — it is about a gap. The gap between an accusation that has already spread across every newspaper and a verdict still sitting in an unopened drawer. An interview is not for asking questions; it is for catching the heartbeat of the person in front of you. But some heartbeats I cannot catch directly — I can only infer them from the breathing of an entire system. The Manchester City case is one of those heartbeats. Ferran Soriano, the club's chief executive, has just told the board of the European football clubs association (referred to in the source as EFC) that, regarding the club's financial file, no decision has been made public. He did not say the club is innocent. He did not say the club is guilty. He said only one procedural thing: nothing official has happened yet. At the same time, however, reports state that Manchester City is alleged to have breached 114 of 115 Premier League financial charges. That number has lived a life of its own on social media, in forums, in heated timelines. But remember: it is the number of the press, confirmed by an unnamed source, not of an official published decision. Legally, the correct status of the story is “reported”, not “officially settled”. This is an off-field story. No formation diagrams, no xG, no high pressing. But for a beat keeper like me, the off-field story matters as much as the on-field one, because it decides which squad runs on the field, with which players, for how many years. A sanction published at the right time changes a transfer plan. A sanction suspended for months changes how a club sees its own future. The beat keeper stands behind the fence, yet the whole formation runs to his rhythm. And this time, the “beat keeper” is not a coach — it is a legal process. An entire giant club is running to the rhythm of an unopened drawer. To understand why this story matters beyond Manchester City, it must be set in the wider context of European football in recent years. For a long time, the Premier League has operated its own financial rulebook, commonly known as PSR — Profit and Sustainability Rules. Put simply, clubs are limited in the losses permitted over a multi-year cycle, with a reference figure often cited as 105 million pounds over three years. Exceed the threshold, and a club faces disciplinary measures, including points deductions. Those punishments are no longer hypothetical. Everton was docked points for breaching PSR, then had the penalty reduced on appeal, then was docked again in a separate case. Nottingham Forest was also docked points for a similar breach. These are real, concrete, measurable precedents. They show one thing: in this league, financial rules no longer live on paper. They live in the table. Meanwhile, at the European level, the association of European football clubs is a collective voice of clubs. Its General Assembly brings together roughly 500 of 850 members — a figure showing this is no small meeting, but a collective force strong enough to pressure regulators. Its chairman is Nasser Al-Khelaifi, tied to Paris Saint-Germain. Its board includes Ferran Soriano, chief executive of Manchester City. In other words, the very people representing a bloc of clubs demanding governance reform are also the people with their own files before the regulator. That is a structural paradox I will return to later. At the top, FIFA — under president Gianni Infantino — has just seen a private-investment plan collapse, and afterwards proposed an external governance review. An organisation reviewing others while itself under review: that picture alone shows football governance is in a phase of self-examination. And Manchester City sits at the intersection of all these lines. An elite club with major financial power, whose chief executive sits on the board of the clubs' representative body, while also being the focus of an unresolved financial case. At this point we must clearly separate two things the press often blends together: accusation and verdict. An accusation is what people say. A verdict is what people sign. Between the two lies a gap, and that gap is exactly where the entire work of a beat keeper like me takes place. Based on my experience following matches and governance files, I always apply one principle: a transfer judgement needs at least three numbers, and a legal judgement needs at least three time markers. Let us reconstruct those markers. The first marker is when the accusations were filed. The second is when the regulator publishes an official decision. The third is when the appeal is resolved. Only when all three close does the story truly end. Right now, we are somewhere between the first and the second. That is why Soriano's statement carries a clear procedural meaning: no decision has been made public. It is the kind of wording any lawyer would advise a client to use. It neither denies the nature of the file nor admits its outcome. It simply describes the file's current status. That status can be called “liability without amount”. A club is alleged to have a problem, but the price of that problem has not been written down. In the economics of football, once the price is unwritten, every plan must be built on assumptions. And assumptions are always more expensive than certainty. Let us measure it in the language of a sports scientist like me. A title-winning team can tolerate load up to a certain threshold and recover within a certain number of days. A big club is the same: it plans spending, renewals, and recruitment on a degree of certainty about what English calls the “cushion” — the financial buffer it can afford. When a potential sanction hangs in the air, that buffer is eroded not by a shock, but by daily wear. There is a precedent worth examining. When a club is docked points, the damage is not only the points deducted. It is also the league position, the European qualification, the broadcast revenue, the club's voice in the transfer market, and even the ability to convince a young player that his future will be brighter elsewhere. The three numbers in this case are: points deducted, position lost through the deduction, and the revenue tied to that position. All three are real, but all three are waiting for a window to open. In Manchester City's case, the club's expected appeal makes the story drag on even longer. An appeal is a right, and also a tactic. People do not appeal only to win. People appeal to buy time, to negotiate, and sometimes to exhaust every party before a conclusion is reached. One thing I always remind younger colleagues in the press room: when a legal file drags on, you must distinguish two kinds of time — the time of the court and the time of the market. Court time can be measured in days and months. Market time is measured in transfer windows, in seasons, in contracts about to expire. A file that drags on two seasons can cost a club an entire building cycle. I once witnessed this at a smaller scale. During my years covering Chinese football, I remember a transfer window in which a whole club waited for news of an administrative decision unrelated to tactics. The result: the club missed two targets because rivals knew it was hanging in limbo. Waiting does not appear in the stat sheet, but waiting decides the stat sheet. Back to Manchester City. If the charges are confirmed and a sanction published, the most logical scenario — based on precedents from earlier financial cases — is a penalty both sporting and administrative, such as a points deduction, a transfer restriction, or both. Each of these hits a different group. A points deduction hits league position. A transfer restriction hits squad planning. And both hit sponsor confidence. This is the point where I want to pause, because I see few people writing about it. The Reuters report frames Manchester City's case as a “backdrop” to the EFC General Assembly. But on a closer look, this is not merely a backdrop. It is another axis of the same story. The common outside reading works like this: there is a rich club, there is a financial rulebook, there is an accusation, and eventually there will be a sanction. The story is read as a moral tale in which justice finally wins. All attention converges on the outcome: is this club guilty or not, and if so, how much will it be punished. But the blind spot lies elsewhere. It lies in the fact that those debating European football governance reform are themselves the people with files before the regulator, or standing in positions of perceived conflict of interest. Soriano sits on the board of the European clubs' body while his club is the focus of a financial case. Al-Khelaifi leads that body while tied to a state football project. And above them, Infantino proposes an external governance review after a private-investment plan collapsed. When every key figure is at once the one demanding reform and the one being asked to reform, the story is no longer “who is guilty”. It becomes “who has the right to write the rules for others”. This is the paradox I have yet to see analysed thoroughly: at the same moment, European football both wants a stricter governance system to protect competitive balance, and needs the big money from the very owners under pressure from that system. You cannot call them the capital you need and the danger you must control without contradicting yourself. And this is where I see the contrast with Vietnam, where I was born, and with China, where I work. In many developing football nations, governance is often seen as a technical problem: how to have rules, how to have a supervisory body. In Europe, the story has moved further: the rules exist, the body exists, and the problem now is that the rule-makers themselves are in a position where they must prove they stand above the rules. I remember an afternoon in Madrid in the late 1990s, when I was just starting out. A veteran reporter told me something I have carried through my whole career: “Never ask who won or lost. Ask who is responsible when the rules change.” That holds for a match, and holds even more for a boardroom. So what should readers watch? And here I leave the role of reporter to step into the role of beat keeper. I am not a fast reporter; I am the one who records the breathing of matches. In this file, that breathing has four phases worth listening to. The first is timing. A sanction, if it comes, will not be read only as a verdict. It will be read as a signal of how far the regulator is willing to go with an elite club. When it is published matters as much as what is published. A sanction issued mid-season carries different weight from one issued when the title race is already settled. The second is the shape of the appeal. If the club's appeal focuses on procedure, the spotlight will be on process. If it focuses on substance, the spotlight will be on evidence. These two paths lead to two completely different media stories. The third is the reaction of the transfer market. This is where a beat keeper's eye is most useful. When a club hangs in legal limbo, rivals adjust strategy: some will rush to sign shared targets, others will wait to squeeze the price. Just by watching unusually early signings over the next few windows, we can infer what the boardroom has not said aloud. The fourth, and perhaps most important, is the governance-reform story at the European level. If the EFC General Assembly can push a genuine reform process, Manchester City's case becomes a catalyst rather than merely a defendant. If that process stalls, the case returns to where it belongs: an individual legal file. In all four phases, there is one thing I want you not to forget: what is happening is not in the table, but it will help decide who tops the table in the coming seasons. Modern football is decided by two things at once: what happens in the box, and what happens in the offices. I have spent thirty years covering both sides of the pitch. Someone told me Soriano was just saying something meaningless, a reassurance. I don't think so. In this sport, reassurance is also a data point. When the head of an elite club chooses to tell the board of an entire European clubs' bloc that “no decision has been made public”, he is speaking to two audiences at once: to the regulator, that the club will follow procedure, and to his peers, that the club remains in the collective game. With a sentence like that, no one has won, and no one has yet lost. Only one thing is certain: the drawer is still unopened, and an entire formation is running to its rhythm.