Man City and 114 Charges: When the Verdict Is Read Before the Court Rules

On Friday, when the news broke that Manchester City had been found guilty on all 114 charges, my first reflex was not to open social media. I opened my 2026 notebook. On that page I had drawn a single vertical arrow and written three words: "CAS, overturned." Six years later, the very door City once walked out of clean is the one people are waiting to see open again.

The ruling has not been published. No sanction has been decided. Yet the whole of English football has already split into camps before the court has even spoken. Half believe in relegation via a heavy points deduction or the stripping of titles. The other half believe in yet another successful appeal.

I have sat in press conferences like this many times. The atmosphere is always the same. The striking thing is not the number 114, but the fact that nobody — not even the reporters — has read the full ruling. We are debating a case whose file we have never seen. When everyone talks about something nobody has read, the hidden layer of truth usually lies elsewhere.

Context: the 2026 door and its shadow

To understand why an unconfirmed report carries such weight, you have to go back to the starting point. In 2026, UEFA found Manchester City in breach of financial fair play rules and imposed a two-year ban from European competition. City appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and won. The ban was overturned. That is the milestone every analysis today must anchor to, and it is the same door midfielder Rodri invoked in his press conference before Spain faced England in the Nations League.

This time the prosecutor is the Premier League, not UEFA. The number is 114 charges. They centre on the club failing to provide accurate information and details of payments to players and coaches, alongside breaches of financial sustainability rules. That is the core difference from 2026: UEFA's case was about FFP, while the Premier League's case is about the honesty of reported data across nearly a decade.

I have never seen a European football investigation run so long or accumulate so many threads. What draws my attention is not the number of charges but their nature. A mistake about a figure can be justified by accounting. A mistake about hiding a figure is far harder to justify. And one more thing: the sanction everyone talks about most — relegation — is not on the sports tribunal's table at all. It sits with an independent panel under its own rulebook, where the right of appeal is narrower than at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Rodri and the "identical process" argument

At the press conference Rodri said: "We went through an identical process in 2026. The club always reassured us that we would be cleared of wrongdoing, that we would face no penalties—because nothing improper had been done. We trusted the club, and ultimately, the club was acquitted."

He added: "I have faith that the club, which I know very well, will be cleared, given the reassurance they gave us back then that they had done everything by the book."

It is worth pausing on the word "identical." This is where I want to dissect, because Rodri's argument sounds very solid — but it is solid in the way an insider is solid, not an observer. And the distance between those two roles is greater than people think.

Rodri scored the winning goal when City won their only Champions League title in 2026, among 12 major trophies with the club. He has every right to defend the club that made him. But a player defending a club does not mean the club's financial system is clean. Those are two different layers. The upper layer is emotion, loyalty, the memory of having once been trusted. The lower layer is documentation, ledgers, payment structures — things no player can grasp even if he wanted to.

A dressing room's belief is not evidence

What Rodri offers is memory and loyalty, not legal evidence. It is the memory of a time the club told him everything was fine, and that time it turned out to be true. But generalising from one correct instance to another is the most basic logical error humans make. People are not cleared by belief; they are cleared by the file.

Players are the last people to know the truth about a club's finances. They know their own wages, their own bonuses, sometimes the payments routed through image-rights companies. They do not know the structure of the payment chain, how third parties were recorded in the books, who signed what, on which date, before or after a contract took effect. So when Rodri says "we trusted the club," he is telling the truth — but that truth proves nothing beyond the fact that he is a loyal player.

I know why he had to say it. At this level, a player's statement is part of the strategy. Not a strategy of lies, but a strategy of holding the dressing room together. When the whole squad believes the club is innocent, they play better. When they begin to doubt, the dressing room cracks. Rodri performs that captaincy very skilfully.

Why I look at this case from Hanoi

There is a reason I cannot read the Man City case as a plain European. I have lived in Vietnam long enough to see the same story through two different frames of reference.

In 2026, when the V-League season closed and the whole press corps praised a big club and its academy, I wrote a contrarian piece. I was not rebelling over one individual's story; I was rebelling against the way we look at numbers. When everyone stares at a league table, nobody bothers to stare at a balance sheet. Nine years later, the question remains the same.

Vietnamese football is also learning to live with numbers. V-League clubs wrestle with financial reports, with unpaid wages, with transfers recorded on paper that do not match reality. Here we do not yet have 114 charges, no Premier League adjudication, no Court of Arbitration for Sport. But the principle is the same: a club can win on the pitch and go broke in the books at the same time, and nobody in the dressing room knows.

When I write about a Vietnamese club's affairs, I deliberately refuse to side with the fans. A contract is only a promise framed, and the truth always lies outside the frame. The Man City case is the expensive version of the same story: a club so big that its irregularities become the norm.

The counterintuitive point: confidence itself is the biggest risk

This is where I want to go against the crowd. When City say "we have won at the Court of Arbitration for Sport before," they are telling the truth. But that confidence can be a double-edged sword.

The 2026 case was won for a specific reason: the charges had insufficient evidence and some were time-barred. That does not mean the club had nothing to hide. It only means the prosecutor lacked enough proof within the permitted window. The Premier League's case this time differs in structure. It is a long-running investigation, accumulating data across years, and the prosecutor knows the door City once walked out of. They have learned from that lesson.

When a club relies on a past overturning to read the next case, they are reading history, not the file. And history, as I once wrote after a night in Kazan, protects no one. The philosophy did not die in Kazan; it died long before — we simply did not see it. The same applies here: if there is a disease in City's financial system, it was not born in the courtroom. It was born in the years when the success story was too beautiful for anyone to question.

I also do not believe the chain reaction that says "if City are guilty, then every big club is guilty." That is a fallacy of the crowd. But I do believe something else: if a club builds an empire on murky contracts, then every trophy it wins becomes unverified data. Unverified does not mean wrong. But it does mean it cannot yet be worshipped.

And this is the part I want to make clear to those reading with emotion: what needs protecting is not a club, but the integrity of the playing field. If the field is not transparent, then the title your beloved team won loses its absolute value too. A supporter who truly cares wants their club's trophies earned in sweat, not through blank lines in the ledger.

On Rodri, the Ballon d'Or and what stands off the pitch

Since we are on Rodri, I want to raise something few mention amid the noise. He is 30 this year, a Ballon d'Or candidate, and he has declared he has no intention of openly campaigning for the award. "Do you think I don't want to win it?" he said. "I know it's an award that doesn't depend on what you say publicly. It depends on what you've shown on the pitch… Individual titles are a reward for collective effort… nothing players like me have achieved makes sense without teammates."

That is a clever answer, but also a safe one. He says he does not need to campaign publicly, while other contenders such as Kylian Mbappe or his international teammate Lamine Yamal still let their media machines run. Both schools are legitimate. But something more interesting lies here: in the days when the club's story is being questioned, it is the star player who steps up to defend it. Rodri does not need to campaign for himself. He is campaigning for the team.

And that is where the experiment becomes interesting. When a club is pushed to the wall, you learn what the players really think. At 59, I am not wiser than anyone; I am merely less afraid of headlines. I have learned to read a player's answer like a trace: what do they say when no league table is protecting them?

On the Ballon d'Or itself, I have a personal view. In Rodri's position — a defensive midfielder, someone who does the work rarely recorded in the stats — winning it in 2026 after the Euro title was a rare occasion. I like that, because it breaks the usual order in which only strikers are worshipped. But I also know that individual awards are a media brokerage more than pure football. There is nothing wrong with that. It is simply not the only measure.

From Wembley: the stadium as a laboratory

Spain's Nations League meeting with England takes place before 90,000 at Wembley. Rodri says Spain "are hungry for more" after two major tournaments in two years.

I wonder about the empty stands of 2026 that once obsessed me. The empty stands of 2026 were not a laboratory; they were where football confessed. When there are no 90,000 people to scatter your attention, you hear the ball clearly, the breathing, and the truth. Football today has its crowds back, its roar back. But whenever a club is put to the test, the blazing moment at Wembley and the silent moment in the courtroom are two faces of the same thing: the moment football is forced to look itself in the eye.

I have stood in crowded stands and told myself: the bigger the crowd, the easier the truth is buried. The 90,000 at Wembley do not make a contract any cleaner. On the contrary, they make concealment easier, because the sound of victory is always louder than the sound of the ledger.

Lessons from a man who is not a fan

I was born in Argentina, I work in Vietnam, and every time English football puts itself on trial, I see an experiment no laboratory could create. That experiment taught me that a club can win with unverified numbers, so long as nobody checks. It also taught me that a successful player can believe in his club with all his heart, and that does not make the club right. And it taught me that a football nation can grow so large that the heaviest sanction becomes a single line in a press conference.

Looking ahead

So what do I predict? Not a prophecy about the sanction. I predict the final decision will not be read on the pitch, but in the hearings that follow. And whatever the outcome, one thing has already changed: viewers' faith in the transparency of the giants is no longer intact as before. No court can restore that.

As for Vietnamese football, I ask myself one question. If tomorrow a V-League club were put on the scales with 114 similar charges, who would write the piece defending the logic that "we trust the club"? And who would write the contrary piece? I know which side I would write. I write long pieces to say something short: football is never what you think it is. After the night in Kazan, I no longer believe in philosophy — I believe in what my eyes see. And what my eyes see in this case, until the court rules, is still an empty report being called the truth.