'Business as usual' - Man City keep buying, selling and earning three years since 115 charges dropped

Manchester City have waited three years for a verdict into serious allegations that they deny, but they have been busy in the meantime, buying and selling players as well as making sponsorship deals.

Pep Guardiola used his platform in his press conference on Tuesday to go well beyond Manchester City, football, and sport. Choosing to speak out on some of the biggest - and most divisive - world issues including US and Middle Eastern politics meant his words and his face were catapulted across the internet to many millions more than would be interested in Phil Foden’s form.

That meant that also winging its way around the world on everyone’s screens was a bottle of Lucozade next to Guardiola, a result of the multi-year partnership with the club that had been announced that morning. City have been paid very good money by the UK’s number one sports drink brand and, judging on day one alone, have already shown they are capable of giving brand exposure that few clubs in world football can.

There is a vanishingly small number of people who could have expected such a scene as we reach three years since the Premier League rushed out over 100 breaches of their competition rules that threatened to rip apart the foundations at the Etihad. It was expected that such serious allegations - effectively accusing the Blues and their auditors and partners of fraud - would not be made lightly and many in the game who had grown jealous and tired of the formidable houses built at City under their Emirati owner licked their lips at the prospect of it all crumbling to sand.

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It may well yet, but three years on, we still await an outcome. It is 15 months since the three-man independent panel who will give the verdict finished hearing all of the evidence, yet nobody has a clue about when a decision will be made despite many people committing guesses to print.

In that void, City have angered rivals even more by winning the Treble in 2023 and then making history the following year by becoming the first team in English history to win four consecutive league titles. There has even been time for some of that bad blood to dissipate, with Liverpool - who felt most aggrieved at missing out on titles in the era of Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp - enjoying the catharsis of a title win in 2025 and a parade to go with it.

Yet there is still a lingering stain around City that crops up whenever they sign players or enjoy success, as if they are still benefitting at their own expense of others from old practices that people just assume or hope were illegal. The unproven charges have become a convenient excuse for anyone associated with rivals to explain away shortcomings at their own clubs.

There was once giddy hysteria that City would be instantly ruined, with Guardiola, Erling Haaland and the rest deserting a sinking ship. It even got to the embarrassing point where departures of kitmen were treated as the smoking gun that City ‘insiders’ knew they were guilty.

The depressing reality for such fantasists is that none of that has happened. City have refused to comment on the allegations beyond an initial statement but one phrase that has come out of the Etihad from the very first week everything changed in February 2023 is that it has been ‘business as usual’.

Their summer transfer window that year was a bit of a mess, not because of the charges but because of the Treble. The year after, they barely spent any money, not because they were stockpiling cash for an imminent expulsion from the league but because Guardiola trusted the squad that he had.

The arrivals of Marc Guehi and Antoine Semenyo last month take City’s spending over the last three windows to around £430m - and nearly £700m since the charges were announced - not because they are trying to beat a transfer embargo but because Guardiola’s call in 2024 went spectacularly badly and a whole team had to be replaced.

It's the same with sales. Cole Palmer (£42.5m) and Julian Alvarez (£64m rising to £82m) were sold in the summers of 2023 and 2024 because they wanted more playing time, and Kyle Walker, Jack Grealish and Kevin De Bruyne are among the big earners to have moved on (at least on loan if not permanent) at a natural point in their playing career rather than drastic decisions. Just as City have spent in these three years, they have also recouped £474m in sales to make for a net spend that is among the biggest but nowhere near the top in the Premier League.

As well as bringing players in who seemingly aren't fussed about the charges, City have also handed out a number of contract extensions. Guardiola was a major coup in November 2024 and two months later Haaland agreed a groundbreaking new deal that keeps him at the Etihad until 2034.

"I haven't thought of that or anything," the Norwegian superstar said when asked about the potential consequences of the charges. "I am confident that the club know what they are doing and I really don't think I should speak too much about this."

Nowhere has business appeared more like usual than in the commercial side of the club. A new kit deal with current sponsors PUMA in 2025 will earn City a record £1bn over the next ten years, while other major sponsors including OKX and Asahi have extended their partnerships; baby brand Joie became exclusive sponsors of the women's team stadium in September 2023 and Hytro and Revolut have also signed up to partner the Women's Super League leaders.

Just as Guehi and Semenyo have not been put off by the threat of the charges despite the fact the verdict is inching ever closer, neither have City's existing partners or new ones like Lucozade. More negotiations on both sides of the business continue, and City's victory over the Premier League regarding Associated Party Transactions opens the gates for some serious money to come in on top of revenue that, at around £700m, is already one of the biggest.

When the verdict does arrive, it will surely be catastrophic for one party. However much both try to spin it, there will be a loser determined by the outcome of the most serious charges; as football finance expert Kieran Maguire told the Manchester Evening News on the day the allegations were first made back in February 2023, it is grave enough that senior executives must leave whichever side loses that battle.

However seismic that day could be at the Etihad, for the last three years the club have done exactly what they said they would and carried on as normal. If things go well enough on the pitch in the next few months, that could even mean a return to silverware.