Football Regulator Claims Power to Force Sheikh Mansour to Sell Manchester City

The Independent Football Regulator (IFR) has told the world it holds the ultimate sanction against Manchester City's owners, the power to force a sale. Chair David Kogan said the watchdog has "absolute power" to compel Sheikh Mansour's group to divest if City are ultimately found to have run the club improperly, in comments that mark the boldest public statement yet from the new regulator about its own reach.

But Kogan was equally careful to say the IFR has made no decision, opened no investigation, and will not pre-judge anything while City's appeal against their Premier League guilty verdict remains unresolved. That gap, between the rhetoric of absolute power and the reality of a process that hasn't even started, is the real story here.

What Kogan actually said, and what he carefully avoided saying

Speaking on the podcast The Rest Is Football, Kogan was unambiguous about the scope of the IFR's legal authority. The Guardian reported that when asked directly whether an owner could simply refuse to divest, Kogan replied: "No, no, no. We've got absolute power to do so."

"We have the power to ask an owner to step away from a club if we believe that they run a club in a way that is neither fit, fair or done with propriety."

That is the headline claim. ESPN corroborated the same quotes from the podcast appearance, confirming there is no daylight between outlets on what Kogan said or how he framed it ESPN reported. Both accounts agree on the substance: Kogan asserted the power exists in statute, full stop.

The caveats that undercut the headline

What Kogan did not do is commit the IFR to using that power, or even to investigating City at all. Asked directly about the prospect of an IFR probe into City, he said it would be premature to discuss, telling the podcast:

"I am not going to get pushed into making any judgement on this until we've seen all of those questions being answered. Then we will have to decide whether we're going to mount our own investigation and come to a conclusion on that and what we're going to do. And pre-empting that would be a colossal mistake" per the Guardian.

Kogan has also already pledged to resign if politicians interfere in any investigation the IFR might run into City, a statement that only makes sense if he already anticipates political pressure, given the diplomatic sensitivity of the United Kingdom's relationship with the United Arab Emirates.

The £900m verdict City are appealing against

The context behind Kogan's comments is the independent commission ruling handed down on September 29, which found Manchester City guilty on more than 115 charges of breaching Premier League rules. The commission concluded the club set up "sham" commercial arrangements designed to inflate revenues or reduce costs by more than £900m across a nine-season period as the Guardian reported at the time.

Obstruction findings add to the severity

Beyond the financial breaches, the commission also found City made "concerted efforts" to "stop and frustrate" the Premier League's investigation into those arrangements. That obstruction finding matters for Kogan's framing, because the IFR's fit-and-proper test for owners is explicitly concerned with propriety, not just financial rule-breaking.

• 115+ charges found proven by the independent commission
• £900m+ in alleged inflated revenue or reduced costs over nine seasons
• Findings that City obstructed the Premier League's own investigation
• City have formally appealed, calling the verdict "unsafe" and containing "material errors"

City's appeal argues the verdict "contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe," and that challenge is still working its way through the process. Nothing Kogan said changes the fact that, legally, City remain in an appeal period with no final resolution.

Why forcing out Sheikh Mansour is a political, not just legal, question

The IFR was created in statute in the wake of the aborted 2021 European Super League breakaway and the subsequent government white paper on football governance. Its stated purpose is straightforward: stop another Bury or Derby, the clubs whose financial collapses exposed the lack of any independent check on ownership and sustainability in English football. Its powers include club licensing, an owners' and directors' fit-and-proper test, and oversight of financial sustainability.

A test unlike anything the Premier League has faced before

Previous profit-and-sustainability-rule cases against Everton and Nottingham Forest resulted in points deductions, painful but survivable sanctions that left ownership untouched. Forcing a sale of the reigning dominant force in English football, owned by a sovereign-linked Gulf investment vehicle, is an entirely different order of magnitude. It would be the toughest ownership-fitness test English football regulation has ever faced.

Kogan's resignation pledge over political interference is the clearest signal of how aware he is of that difference. A forced divestiture from Sheikh Mansour's group would not stay confined to a football story; it would touch UK-UAE trade and investment ties at a moment when the Gulf state's capital is woven through British infrastructure, sport and business. The IFR having the legal power on paper is one thing. Having the political insulation to actually exercise it against a state-backed owner is the open question nobody, including Kogan, has answered yet.

What a forced sale would actually mean for Manchester City and the Premier League

None of this is imminent. City haven't lost their appeal, the IFR hasn't opened an investigation, and Kogan has explicitly refused to pre-judge either process. But the scenario is now on the table in a way it wasn't before this week, and it's worth being clear-eyed about the stakes.

The scale of disruption a sale would cause

A forced sale would be the single biggest shock to English football's financial landscape in decades. Since the Abu Dhabi United Group's takeover in 2008, City have built a squad, stadium infrastructure and global commercial network underwritten by Gulf capital. A change of ownership would raise immediate questions over:

• Continued investment in player recruitment and wages
• The long-term future of manager Pep Guardiola's project
• Commercial sponsorship arrangements built around City Football Group's global network
• Competitive balance at the top of the Premier League, given City's dominance over the past decade

For bettors and markets, ownership stability is directly priced into expectations around squad investment and manager continuity. Any credible threat to that stability, even one years away from materialising, changes the calculus on City's medium-term competitiveness.

What happens next

The immediate next step is procedural: City's appeal against the independent commission's verdict has to run its course before anyone, including the IFR, can act on it. There is no confirmed timeline for when that appeal will be resolved.

Only once the appeal outcome is known will Kogan and the IFR decide whether to open their own investigation, a decision he has said explicitly will not be pre-empted. If the guilty verdict stands and the IFR does investigate, the fit-and-proper test for Sheikh Mansour's ownership would become the central question, with forced divestiture the theoretical endpoint Kogan has now put into public conversation.

Whether that power is ever exercised will depend as much on diplomacy as on football regulation. Kogan has staked his own position on resisting political interference, which tells its own story about how fraught this could become if it ever moves from rhetoric to reality.