Manchester City’s case began with leaked emails. Eight years later, reports say a Premier League panel has upheld 114 of 115 charges — but the judgment explaining why remains under wraps. Before anyone treats that reported tally as the final word, they should ask a basic question: how strong is the evidence behind it? City deny wrongdoing, and the process is not over.
The original disclosures came through Football Leaks. Its founder, Rui Pinto, was later convicted in Portugal of offences including illegal access to data and breach of correspondence, and given a four-year suspended sentence. That does not prove every document about City was obtained unlawfully but it does suggest the origins of this affair demand careful scrutiny. Someone’s benefited from it. But who?
The lawyers’ phrase is “fruit of the poisonous tree”: evidence found through unlawful conduct can itself be tainted. It is chiefly an American criminal-law doctrine, not a magic rule that throws out the Premier League’s case. But as a warning about the strength of a finding, it matters. A stolen email might be genuine, incomplete, stripped of context — or an accurate lead to other evidence. Which is it here?
City’s earlier fight with UEFA shows why that question cannot be waved away. The Court of Arbitration for Sport admitted leaked emails in that separate case, yet found them insufficient to prove UEFA’s central allegation that owner funding had been disguised as sponsorship income. It also found City had failed to cooperate with investigators. Neither conclusion settles the Premier League charges. Both show the difference between having a document and proving what happened.
So let us see the commission’s reasoning. Were the messages matched against full correspondence, accounts, contracts and payments? Which allegations rest on independently verified records, and which lean heavily on the leaks? Until the written judgment is public, neither City’s supporters nor their fiercest critics can properly test the reported findings.
Meanwhile, as football has waited on a verdict, the club has kept on winning. Since the 2018 revelations, City have completed a historic Treble, lifted the Champions League and secured an unprecedented fourth successive Premier League title. Whatever follows, those moments cannot be dismissed.
Now rival clubs are seeking legal advice about possible compensation for lost prize money and European opportunities. City are expected to appeal. But it’s not hard to imagine some envious administrators drooling over the prospect of putting one over an investor that they see, not as the benefactor Manchester has known, but as someone from whom they can lift some cash to tide themselves over.
All this needs a health warning. If it turns into years of appeals and court fights over which clubs deserve some sort of compensatory top-up, the damage could outlast any points deduction: every title, qualifying place and payout may become another argument between lawyers.
The answer is not to excuse City or to dismiss the leaks. It is to publish a decision whose evidence can withstand scrutiny and whose implications do not undo years of good done to football and the city of Manchester— before English football spends another eight years fighting over it.
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