What actually happens when a football club is caught cheating

In May 1993, Marseille won the European Cup. Twelve months later, they were playing in the French second division.

Football can do that to a club. It can take away a title you have already won, send you down a division, or remove you from the league altogether.

Most of the time it does none of those things. It writes a fine, and the league table stays exactly as it was.

So what can football actually do to a club that cheats, and what decides which punishment it gets?

The answer is a range of possible punishments, from a fine at one end to losing your place in the league at the other. It is worth saying straight away that this is not a sequence. A club does not work its way up it. A club can be docked points without ever having been fined, and can be handed several punishments at once.

All of it has happened to serious clubs. Juventus had two Italian titles taken off them in 2006 and were sent down to Serie B. Bury were expelled from the English Football League in 2019, and were not allowed to use their own name again until 2023.

The question is live again because an independent commission has found Manchester City guilty of serious breaches of the Premier League's financial rules across nine seasons. The punishment has not been decided yet.

One thing to understand before any of this makes sense.

Football treats two kinds of rule-breaking very differently. The first is interfering with the football itself, by paying opponents to lose or leaning on referees. The second is breaking the rules about money, by spending more than you are allowed or making your income look bigger than it really was.

Both get punished. But almost every title ever taken away, and almost every forced relegation, came from the first kind. City's case is the second kind, and that matters a great deal for what happens to them.

Here are the punishments, from the mildest to the most serious.

A fine

The most common outcome, and usually the least painful.

UEFA fined Chelsea and Aston Villa in 2025 for spending too much of their income on players, and fined another group of clubs in 2026, including Newcastle. None of it changed a league table.

That does not make fines meaningless. They still take money out of a club, and for a smaller club the same sum can hurt far more than it would at Chelsea. But a fine does not cost points, and that is why football reaches for something else when it wants a punishment felt on the pitch.

Restrictions on signing players

Stopping a club bringing players in bites harder than taking its money.

These restrictions come in different forms. A transfer ban stops a club registering new players for a set period. UEFA can instead cut the number of players a club is allowed to name for European competition, or make it use a smaller squad. The English Football League regularly places clubs under embargoes when they fall behind on payments.

The common thread is that the club can still play, but it cannot strengthen. The drawback, from a supporter's point of view, is that it punishes next season rather than this one.

Points taken off

This is where a punishment becomes visible in the table, and English football has used it a lot lately.

Everton were docked 10 points in November 2023, which was cut to six on appeal, then lost another two later the same season. Nottingham Forest lost four points in that 2023/24 campaign. Leicester lost six in February 2026 after a commission found they had gone over the Championship spending limit by £20.8m.

Italy went further. In January 2023, Juventus were docked 15 points for inflating the value of players they traded, which made their accounts look healthier than they were.

What happened next is a useful lesson in how appeals work. The 15-point penalty was not simply reduced. It was thrown out entirely on appeal, the case was then reheard, and a fresh 10-point deduction was imposed in May.

According to CBS Sports, eleven club officials were banned alongside the club, including former chairman Andrea Agnelli for two years and former sporting director Fabio Paratici for 30 months. Juventus finished seventh, missed the Champions League, and denied wrongdoing throughout.

Losing a title you already won

Football hates doing this, which is why the few cases are never forgotten.

In May 1993, Marseille were going for a fifth French title in a row and preparing for a European Cup final against AC Milan. Six days before that final they played Valenciennes, and three Valenciennes players were offered money to take it easy.

One of them said no. Jacques Glassmann told his coach at half-time, and the investigation that followed took the French title away from Marseille.

It was offered to the runners-up, Paris Saint-Germain, who refused to accept it. So the 1992/93 season simply has no champion.

Marseille did keep the European Cup, because the match they fixed was a domestic one, but they were banned from defending it. Their president, Bernard Tapie, went to prison for two years in 1995.

Thirteen years later, Italian prosecutors released recorded phone calls showing a system for deciding which referees took which matches. This was a different offence from Marseille's. Nobody paid an opponent to lose. The complaint was that the appointment of referees had been influenced.

Juventus lost the 2004/05 title, which was never given to anyone, and the 2005/06 title, which went to Inter. They were not alone. Milan, Fiorentina, Lazio and Reggina were all punished. Milan had finished second but were docked 30 points, which is how the title ended up with third-placed Inter.

Juventus have never accepted it. They still count 38 league titles where the official record says 36, and have spent years pursuing damages through the courts.

Being sent down a division

Both of those scandals went beyond the trophy cabinet. Marseille were relegated to the French second division in 1994. Juventus were sent to Serie B in 2006 with points deducted on top, while Fiorentina and Lazio were going down too before they won their appeals.

What makes this the most serious punishment football has actually imposed for cheating is everything that comes with it.

A relegated club earns far less from television. Sponsorship deals are often written to shrink when a club goes down. Players with release clauses or relegation clauses can leave, and the ones who stay are usually on wages the lower division cannot support. The squad that got punished is rarely the squad that has to serve the punishment.

Both clubs recovered. Juventus came straight back up at the first attempt. Marseille took longer, and have never won another European Cup.

When a club loses its place in the league

The most serious outcome of all is a club losing its league membership. It is also the one people most often misunderstand, because it usually has nothing to do with cheating.

Bury were docked 12 points in 2019 for going into insolvency, which means being unable to pay what you owe. They were then expelled from the English Football League on 27 August that year, after failing to show they could pay their creditors.

ESPN reported at the time that they were the first club removed from the Football League since Maidstone United in 1992. EFL executive chair Debbie Jevans called it one of the darkest days in the league's recent history.

Supporters formed a new club, and the Bury name was not permitted again until 2023, in the ninth tier of English football.

Rangers belong here too, though not for the reason most people assume. In 2012 the company that ran the club went under owing around £9m in tax. Its assets were sold to a new company, which asked to take Rangers' place in the Scottish top flight. Ten of the twelve other clubs voted against, and Rangers restarted in the fourth tier, climbing back to the top division by 2016 and winning the league in 2021.

Neither of those is a punishment for cheating. Bury could not pay their bills. Rangers' old company collapsed, and the other clubs declined to hand its replacement the league place. A club can suffer the worst outcome in the game without anyone ever accusing it of cheating.

So what happens to Manchester City?

Nobody knows yet, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing.

What is known is what the commission found. According to the Premier League, City were found guilty of all charges relating to serious breaches of the financial rules between 2009/10 and 2017/18, and of most of the charges about failing to co-operate with the investigation.

The detail is striking. The commission found that City arranged sham contracts with sponsors as part of a disguised funding scheme, in which those companies paid only part of the sponsorship fee and the club's owner, Abu Dhabi United Group, quietly funded the rest. The effect was to inflate the club's income and reduce its costs by more than £900m across those years.

The commission also found that City filed misstated accounts and hid the true state of their finances from their auditors and from football's regulators, and concluded that the club clearly intended to get around the rules. Richard Masters, the Premier League's chief executive, called it the most significant disciplinary decision in the competition's history.

It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean. The club has been found guilty. It has not yet been punished. The sanction goes to a separate hearing, held in private, and City had until 2 October to appeal the findings.

The process explains why this has taken so long. The Premier League began investigating in December 2018 and issued its complaint in February 2023. An independent commission, drawn from a panel of legal and financial experts, then held a 42-day hearing that finished in December 2024. The commission is independent of the league, and either side can appeal its decision to a separate appeal board, which can uphold it, overturn it or change it.

As for the punishment itself, the Premier League's rules give the commission wide discretion. Fines, points deductions and other sporting sanctions are all available to it.

The history offers a guide rather than an answer. Money cases have generally brought fines and points deductions. Stripped titles and forced relegations have followed the other kind of cheating, where results were interfered with directly.

City's is a money case. But it is not the same as Juventus in 2023, which was about inflating transfer values. This one involves sponsorship arrangements, misstated accounts and a finding that the club obstructed the investigation, across nine seasons. There is no precedent of this size in English football, which is precisely why nobody can tell you what comes next.

One last thing, because it tends to surprise people. Clubs come back. Juventus returned to Serie A at the first attempt and have won the league plenty of times since. Rangers went from the fourth tier to a title in nine years. Marseille are an established French top-flight club again.

What does not come back is the record. Marseille's 1993 title still belongs to nobody, and the French champions list for that year is simply blank. Juventus's 2005 scudetto was never handed to anyone either, and the 2006 one sits in Inter's trophy room, won on a league table that was rewritten after the season had finished.

Football punishes a club, and the club usually recovers. The record books are the part that stays changed.