Nasser al-Khelaifi was already preparing to speak in Copenhagen when Manchester City’s guilty verdict from the Premier League landed a fortnight ago, and he was not happy with the timing. Paris Saint-Germain then visited the Etihad Stadium for a Champions League game on Wednesday, putting the two clubs’ long, awkward financial history back under the spotlight.
The irritation made sense. Al-Khelaifi is not just PSG’s president; he also chairs European Football Clubs, and his keynote speech in Copenhagen came with Manchester City’s case hanging over it. Ferran Soriano sat in the front row before slipping away from television cameras, a small scene that captured how closely the club’s present dispute has become tied to its past.
That history runs back to 2014, when Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain were among the first clubs found to have broken Uefa’s financial fair play rules. Uefa investigators said PSG’s deficit between 2011 and 2013 was €218m and City’s was €188m, far above the €45m maximum permitted loss for a club in European competition. Both avoided charges by signing settlement agreements, but each was fined €20m and placed under tighter spending restrictions, with another €40m hanging over them if they breached the terms again.
The oddity is that Uefa later tried to close the book. In April 2017, it said both clubs had fully complied with all the requirements. Yet the story did not end there. Manchester City were suspended from the Champions League for two years in 2020 for overstating sponsorship revenue between 2012 and 2016, before the court of arbitration for sport overturned the ban and said most of the alleged breaches were either not established or time-barred. Paris Saint-Germain, meanwhile, were fined a further €10m in 2022, with another €50m suspended, for not complying with financial rules since 2018.
That is the friction at the heart of this week’s embarrassment for al-Khelaifi and City alike: one club was told in April 2017 that it had fully complied, only for later findings to point in the opposite direction, while the other kept running into fresh penalties. Last month, the Premier League said an independent commission had found Manchester City were significantly in breach of spending limits between seasons 2009-10 and 2017-18, and that they had filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of their finances. City have appealed, but there is no date yet for when that appeal will be heard.
Al-Khelaifi’s complaint was never only about City. It was about being forced to address one club’s guilty verdict while hosting a gathering built around governance and restraint, and doing so as PSG prepared to face Manchester City at the Etihad Stadium. The next real test is not another speech. It is whether City’s appeal changes anything substantial, and whether this latest verdict finally hardens into consequences rather than another chapter in football’s most expensive accounting feud.
