Man City Premier League charges explained: What are they? What could punishment be? What's the timescale?

Manchester City have been charged with alleged breaches of financial rules by the Premier League - but what are they? How serious are the charges? And how long will this process take? Sky Sports News' chief reporter Kaveh Solhekol explains...

Manchester City have been charged with breaking financial fair play rules around 100 times over a nine-year period, which starts in 2009 and goes on until 2018. You have to bear in mind that, during the period, Man City won the Premier League three times.

The Premier League's financial fair play rules are designed to ensure clubs pretty much spend what they earn. You can get around that potentially by inflating how much you're earning or hiding how much you are spending.

According to the Premier League, Man City allegedly broke the rules over nine seasons. They allegedly didn't provide accurate financial information.

Allegedly, they did not fully disclose the financial remunerations that were made to one of their managers over a four-year period. The suggestion is that there was a secret contract so one of the managers was getting paid much more than officially stated.

The Premier League also allege Man City didn't comply with UEFA's financial fair play rules over a five-year period. They also allege that Man City have not fully co-operated with the Premier League's investigation.

This is a very serious matter for Man City.

In the past when they've been investigated by UEFA, Man City have always insisted they have done nothing wrong. In February 2020, they were banned by UEFA from European competition for two seasons and also fined €30m (£26.8m).

Crucially, Premier League rules do not include time bar so when Man City defend themselves, they cannot say these alleged offences took place too long ago for you to be able to do anything about them.

"The main difference between the Premier League and UEFA is UEFA have a statute of limitations, which limits the availability of evidence to five years. The Premier League does not have that.

"UEFA have rules in regards to where evidence comes from and it can't come from illegal sources. If you take a look at the Premier League handbook, it states that the source of data and evidence is an irrelevance as far as they are concerned, although this might form part of Man City's defence that some of the evidence which is going to be provided by the Premier League has come from inappropriate sources and there is a lack of credibility with that evidence.