“Burn the Club Down”: Knicks Champion Unleashes on Man City After $1.1B Fraud Verdict

Back in 2020, Manchester City appeared to dodge the biggest crisis in club history when the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned a two-year Champions League ban. It cleared the club of the most serious financial fair play allegations against it. Six years later, that reprieve looks a lot less permanent.

An independent Premier League commission has now found City guilty of nearly all 115 separate charges of financial wrongdoing. And the reaction from outside the club has been anything but restrained.

Among the loudest reactions came from an unlikely source. Newly crowned NBA champion Josh Hart of the New York Knicks took to social media to react to the scale of the findings. "Man City lied about 900 million pounds?!" Hart wrote. "Forget relegation… Burn the club down."

The Premier League confirmed that City was found guilty of serious breaches of financial regulations spanning a nine-season period. The panel concluded that the club arranged "sham" contracts with commercial partners to inflate sponsorship revenue, filed misstated accounts to conceal its true financial position, and significantly breached both Premier League and UEFA spending limits.

Manchester City has denied every charge and confirmed it will pursue an appeal. Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak called the panel's opinion "both disappointing and surprising" and argued it contains "clear material errors of law, principle and fact."

The club has until Friday to file that appeal. Meaning that any final punishment, ranging from fines to points deductions to potential relegation, remains months away at best.

That uncertainty hasn't stopped reactions like Hart's from spreading quickly, even as some voices closer to the club have pushed back hard against the verdict.

Former City goalkeeper Joe Hart, who won two Premier League titles at the club, offered a starkly different perspective on BBC Radio 5 Live. "I'm very proud of what I've achieved and what I did with Manchester City and what we achieved as a team, and that doesn't change," Hart said. "I did what I did. I won some games, lost some games, drew some games, and I shook hands, and I walked off."

Hart also dismissed any suggestion that the playing squad was aware of the financial manipulation happening behind the scenes. He framed the scandal as strictly a boardroom issue rather than a reflection on the players who delivered the club's trophies.

That distinction sits at the heart of the wider debate the verdict has sparked: whether fans, rival athletes like Josh Hart, and pundits are right to treat the club's success as fundamentally tainted. Or whether the punishment should fall solely on the executives responsible for the deception.