01-06-2025
When scandal at Man City rocked football to its core
The scandalous news rocked the football world to its core.
Manchester City guilty…
Record punishment…
Financial malpractice on a grand scale...
Serious irregularities in transfer dealings…
Illegal under-the-table payments to players…
But this is not about the here and now. It is completely unconnected to the '115' charges City are currently facing from the Premier League. This happened more than a century ago and when two official investigations revealed the scale of their financial chicanery, the Football Association came down on City like a ton of bricks – first in 1904, and then the largest punishment in 1906.
The club were handed a huge fine, five directors were suspended, manager Tom Maley and chairman Waltham Forrest banned for life and the club forced to put 17 of their players up for transfer.
Some historians, including Geoffrey Green, claim this bizarre fire sale happened in a smoke-filled function room at the Queen's Hotel, in Manchester, where the players were sold, cattle market-style, to a room full of rival clubs. Others, however, say that it happened at City's old Hyde Road ground.
Either way, City's agony was compounded when the cream of their team, including superstar Billy Meredith, Sandy Turnbull and stylish England left-back Herbert Burgess, were all signed by newly promoted cross-town rivals Manchester United.
The new recruits helped United clinch their first league championship in 1908 and the FA Cup in 1909 – with another title arriving in 1911 – and fuelled the beginnings of an acrimonious rivalry between the Manchester clubs.
The dark and largely forgotten footballing tale and its eerie prescience to City's current issues has been cast back into the light by the sale of Burgess's medals at Graham Budd Auctions.
The story began at the end of the 1903-04 season when City were barely 20 years old. They finished second in the league behind Sheffield Wednesday and beat Bolton Wanderers in the Cup final at the old Crystal Palace. The light blue half of the city wildly celebrated their first ever piece of major silverware with a victory parade that brought the place to a standstill. A fortnight later the whole edifice began to crumble.
Two grim-looking senior officials from the FA, sceptical about City's rapid rise, pitched up at the club and demanded to see the books. Their forensic investigation uncovered a systemic web of fraud, from missing cheques and forged receipts, to illegal inducements to new players. The club were fined £250 and their ground closed for a month. But that was just the beginning.
The following season the league championship went down to the wire, with Newcastle United taking the title on the final day and City losing 3-2 at Aston Villa, a game marked by fights on the pitch and crowd disturbances off it.
Another investigation followed and, almost by accident, the FA discovered that City's star forward Meredith had tried to bribe the Villa captain to throw the game – something Meredith denied, claiming it was a bad joke. The FA, however, did not see the funny side and banned him for an entire season.
To make matters worse, City refused to pay Meredith during his suspension and, it is alleged, the player began passing information to the FA about far wider financial fraud at the club.
In March 1906, a new FA inquiry began and when the results were announced a few months later, it rattled the football world to its bones.
A well-honed and fraudulent scheme had been created, in which a percentage of the gate receipts were siphoned into secret bank accounts to make payments to players. The maximum wage at the time was just £4 a week, but City were routinely paying 50 per cent more to players, along with hefty bonuses.
Unhelpfully for the club, Meredith told the press: 'What was the secret of the success of the Manchester City team? In my opinion, the fact that the club put aside the rule that no player should receive more than £4 a week... the team delivered the goods, the club paid for the goods delivered and both sides were satisfied.'
The FA report concluded: 'It is now proved that the club had for years systematically broken the rules by very unscrupulous means.'
The proverbial book was thrown at the club. Seventeen players were fined and suspended – then transferred – five directors banned and the manager banned for life.
The scandal completely unmoored the hugely successful City side and, stripped of their core players, they were relegated in the 1908-09 season and would not win the FA Cup again until 1934, or a league title until 1937.
