Day of Judgement
The "Day of Judgement" is the popular nickname used for a date, particularly 27 May 2024, in which The Football Association, the governing body of English football, imposed a historic and landmark punishment on the Premier League club Manchester City for 115 alleged breaches of the Premier League's Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules. In this, following a roughly three-years-long investigation, The Football Association found Manchester City, owned by Abu Dhabi's City Football Group, guilty of a total of 115 breaches of the league's financial fair play rules, namely from the season of 2009 until the season of 2018.
In their decision, The Football Association imposed, among other measures, a two-window transfer ban and a £100 million fine. However, the most drastic punishments saw Manchester City expelled from the Premier League and their titles accumulated from 2009 until 2018, which consisted of three Premier League titles, one FA Cup title, three EFL Cup titles, and two William Smith Shield titles, stripped from the club's possession and, in turn, handed over to the runners-up in all four competitions. Consequently, Manchester United was awarded two Premier League titles, Liverpool with one Premier League title and EFL Cup title respectively, Stoke City with one FA Cup title, Sunderland and Arsenal with one EFL Cup title each, and Chelsea with two William Smith Shield titles in total. Meanwhile, as a result of their expulsion from the Premier League, coupled with existing English Football League rules, Manchester City was relegated down to the fifth-tier National League and, in turn, a fourth additional team from the EFL Championship was included for promotion to the Premier League in a one-off instance, namely the loser of the play-off final who will be joining the play-off victors and the two-top finishing teams who are automatically granted promotion.
Considered widely to be the harshest and most severe punishment ever imposed on an English football club since financial fair play rules were introduced, the decision has been met with near-unanimous applause from the English footballing community who applauded the The Football Association's response towards such a severe violation of its rules while critics, including the Emirati government which owns Manchester City, have decried the punishment as "unfair" and "excessive". Historically, the decision came around three years after a separate financial fair play punishment handed to Manchester City by UEFA which saw the club fined a total of £10 million and banned from all UEFA competitions, particularly the UEFA Champions League, for two whole seasons. Sir William Smith, a former Manchester United player and a vocal critic of Manchester City, described the decision as "a watershed in English footballing history" while BBC Sport's Gary Lineker instead described the decision as "perhaps the clearest message sent out by The FA that blatant cheating, irrespective of the perpetrators, will not be tolerated and dealt with harshly".