The chair of the Independent Football Regulator (IFR) has confirmed it has the ‘absolute power’ to force Manchester City’s owners to sell the club if they are found to have run the club improperly.
Man City were last month found guilty of the vast majority of charges brought against them by the Premier League for financial wrongdoing. The club have since appealed.
An independent commission ruled Man City had disguised payments worth £900million in a nine-year period peppered with ‘sham’ deals.
Man City were found to have artificially inflated sponsorship agreements and pumped money into the club from its Abu Dhabi owners via disguised payments in a bid to swerve Premier League spending rules.
The IFR, which was founded last year, has permission to remove club owners and suspend or revoke licences if they deem the wrongdoing by said club to be sufficiently serious under the 2025 Football Governance Act.
David Kogan, the chair of the IFR, confirmed to the Rest is Football podcast that the body would have the power to force Man City owner Sheikh Mansour to sell the club if it were deemed appropriate.
The chair of the Independent Football Regulator says it has the ‘absolute power’ to force Manchester City’s owners to sell the club if they are found to have run the club improperly
‘We have the power to ask an owner to step away from a club if we believe that they run a club in a way that is neither fit, fair or done with propriety,’ Kogan said.
When asked if an owner can refuse, Kogan responded: ‘No, we’ve got absolute power to do so.’
Kogan said that the IFR’s role would be to judge individuals against the Premier League’s owners and directors’ test.
The IFR chair stressed it would be premature to discuss what action the body might take, with Man City having appealed the commission’s verdict and with several findings having been redacted in the 40-page document.
‘There are two further elements that might come up before the appeal that we don’t know,’ Kogan said.
‘One is: what are the sanctions? Nobody knows this yet. The other is that we have only seen a redacted version of the findings, we have not seen an unredacted version. The point about the unredacted is the evidence behind the unredacted, which may throw up any number of things.
‘I am not going to get pushed into making any judgement on this until we’ve seen all of those questions being answered and then we will have to decide whether we’re going to mount our own investigation and come to a conclusion on that and what we’re going to do.
‘And pre-empting that would be a colossal mistake.’
IFR chair David Kogan stressed the body will not pre-empt the ultimate outcome of Man City’s case, but could later launch its own investigation into individuals
Kogan last week reiterated that he would immediately resign from his role if there were any political interference.
‘I made it very clear last year that any form of political interference in the way we operate is going to result in my resigning from this role, and I stand by that completely,’ Kogan said.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham previously said that he would be ‘concerned to lose’ Man City’s Abu Dhabi owners from the Premier League, and the United Arab Emirates government has warned the PM that they could yet withdraw billions of pounds worth of funding over the ruling.
Kogan has said the regulator had come under ‘absolutely no political pressure whatsoever on this or any other topic’.
Insiders tell me Man City are set to face huge points deduction which will guarantee relegation – but they won’t be sent down to League Two. And that seems fair, writes OLIVER HOLT
