DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — It’s a scene inside the Lemerand Center on an unfairly cold Wednesday night in early January.

A junior college men’s basketball game is happening in a 1,000-seat gym. Everyone is here for that, including two players who were never supposed to be. But play has been paused. Security is defusing an altercation between the Daytona State College and Santa Fe College women’s hoops teams, who faced off earlier and are now pointing and yelling at each other across the bleachers. One of the Santa Fe players holds back a teammate by yanking on her shirt.

Some of this owes to Daytona State’s baseball squad raising the temperature by sitting behind the visitors bench and trolling them ruthlessly. And now, here come the Santa Fe women, who have been relocated to a section right next to them. The baseball dudes knowingly simmer down. “We don’t want no trouble, guys,” one of them concedes.

But if there’s a trigger to all of it, it’s a tie-up during the first half. A missed shot, some wrestling for the rebound, some choice words and Daytona State’s Ryan Bewley shoving a guy who got in the face of his brother, Matt. That’s when the mercury really jumped. And it brings us to the pertinent question.

What in the world are Matt and Ryan Bewley doing here?

Once upon a time, the 6-foot-9 Bewley twins were the first to hit a new switch on the traditional track for elite basketball talent: Top 15 phenoms who signed with a then-nascent operation called Overtime Elite, exchanging their last two years of high school for training, exposure to scouts and millions of internet eyeballs plus compensation. This was May 2021, one month before a Supreme Court ruling tore down barriers to college athletes profiting off their name, image and likeness (NIL). At the end of two years with Overtime, the Bewleys weren’t ready for the NBA nor eligible to play in the NCAA, fishhooked by the fine print of their choice.

The timing was excruciating.

Why it matters anymore is the issue.

Matt and Ryan Bewley, now 21, started by awing grassroots crowds across Florida. They then went from a throbbing 100,000-square-foot training facility in Atlanta to the far South Side of Chicago and court-ordered basketball purgatory to, on this night, a junior college with 16 women’s golf banners hanging in its gym. They are playing again. There is a joy in that. It helps wash down the thought that NCAA programs blithely use NIL money to make millionaires every year, and it’s completely fine. And they’re the ones paying, still.

“People think me and him just fell off the face of the earth,” Matt Bewley says. “It low-key feels like we’re the only people in the world that are going through what we’re going through.”

If the Bewley boys from Fort Lauderdale were not a figurative tag team, born a minute apart and bonded at every step in their basketball lives, they might have been an actual tag team. They were professional wrestling fans growing up, and that might be underselling it. “Bro,” Matt says, “that’s all we did.” They each can recite their top five all-time grapplers (the Undertaker and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin make both lists), and their enthusiasm occasionally broke the barrier to reality, among other things. Neither is sure who tried to powerbomb whom. They do remember the smashed window, their father asking what happened, and both of them shrugging and saying they didn’t know.

“We got in trouble so many times,” Ryan says. “Broke the bed. Broke the window. Couple of walls have holes in them.”

Given that, and given that they were both 6 feet tall by age 10, it is no shock their mother, Marlene, decided to funnel her kids’ energy into something constructive. They started organized basketball at age 11 in a rec league at the city of Tamarac Community Center. Within a couple years, the Bewleys caught the eye of a local trainer who started working with them daily. By eighth grade, they’d joined Team Breakdown, a prominent Florida grassroots program.

During the summer before their ninth-grade year, they played up against 17U competition at AAU events, leading the world in double-takes induced and creating their own mythology. The Bewleys received power-conference scholarship offers from Iowa State, Florida and South Florida before they attended their first high school class. “They were like grown men playing against little kids,” says Eddie Placer, a guard from Orlando who is now a teammate at Daytona State. “That’s what it looked like out there.”

“We always compared them to the X-Men,” says Gerald Gillion, who has known the Bewleys since they were 13 and who served as Chicago State’s head coach for their one year on campus. “Really powerful mutants that, in the right situation, can do some very, very good things.”

Following two dunk-filled seasons at two different Florida high schools, the road forked. A new venture built by the media company Overtime, one that counted Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and more than 25 NBA players among its initial investors, made its pitch: Complete a high school education while training and playing at an academy in Atlanta, receiving exposure from a brand with a combined social media audience of more than 50 million people. Overtime Elite offered a minimum $100,000 salary plus bonuses and company stock to any player willing to take the leap. The aggressively untraditional terms were no secret. System disruption was the entire point.

Ryan Bewley was on board, primed for something more than Florida high school competition. “Iron sharpens iron,” he says now.

Matt Bewley was not, struggling with the idea of leaving home and friends behind. “I just felt like I was growing up too fast,” he says.

A visit to Overtime Elite’s facilities and reconsidering how reported seven-figure contracts would impact, well, everything in life recalibrated his thinking. The family likewise took into account the uncertainty of post-pandemic basketball in Florida and weighed it against predictable high-end training — “A path to getting to the league,” their father, Prince, says — combined with a centralized education structure and small class sizes. “It encompassed everything we needed,” Marlene says.

2023 Matt Bewley ranked top 25 in the country regardless of class (2021-2024) in ESPN latest rankings pic.twitter.com/rQ1ZB0EB3D

— Team Breakdown (@TeamBreakdown) August 21, 2020

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On May 21, 2021, the news release dropped: Five-Star Prospects Matt and Ryan Bewley Make History as First Signings for Overtime Elite. “Signing these two great pillars for our program is an exciting beginning,” Brandon Williams, the organization’s head of basketball operations, said in the statement. Every report about the deal included a note that the Bewleys were forfeiting high school and NCAA eligibility. (In the very next recruiting cycle, Overtime Elite offered prospects a plan for joining while also maintaining an ability to play Division I basketball.)

It can be true that teenagers may not be altogether concerned with details — “I don’t think anybody at that age can understand the repercussions of anything,” Matt says — and also that obliviousness is not an out. “Going into it, the eligibility part of it, maybe at that particular time, I didn’t completely understand,” Marlene says.

Says Prince Bewley: “What sold me was, every day, the training, the facility, the coaches, the environment was to train these guys like an NBA-type thing. But they’re high school players. That’s it.”

Exactly one month later, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling in NCAA v. Alston that cleared the way for college athletes to profit off NIL. It might’ve been a footnote in the Bewleys’ story had their chosen route worked out. It didn’t. Overtime Elite fulfilled its promise of development and exposure; 20 of the original 26 players to sign have spent time on professional rosters somewhere worldwide. (And one is a football player at Georgia.) The Bewleys simply did not rise to that level. They scored and rebounded but also averaged less than an assist per game and didn’t make a single 3-pointer between them in the 2022-23 campaign. They were not pro prospects. Not yet. They were, in fact, provided the option to spend a third year with Overtime Elite. Instead, they decided to make a run at Division I college basketball, against the headwinds of their choices, insisting that they do not regret them.

“Obviously, there are situations you go through in life where you’re like, damn, I should have made a different decision,” Matt Bewley says. “But nah, I feel like it’s just part of the story. That’s all it is. Wherever else we go, wherever this takes us, it’s just part of the story.”

They turned the corner and ran over traffic spikes. The Bewleys signed with Chicago State, a Division I program with a sympathetic coach in Gillion and zero winning seasons since 1986. They were heralded as “once-in-a-generation-type talents” who would have an “immediate impact.” The Bewleys applied for amateur certification in June 2023 and, later that month, the NCAA informed the school they were unlikely to get it. On Oct. 31 — one week before the first regular-season game — the NCAA made it official: non-certified. In short, the NCAA ruled the Bewleys had made too much money, beyond its acceptable limits for amateurs.

The Bewleys filed a federal antitrust lawsuit the next day, seeking a temporary restraining order and injunction against the NCAA. A judge in the U.S. District Court of Chicago denied them on Nov. 14. After a December hearing, the judge then denied the Bewleys’ request for reconsideration and a preliminary injunction on Jan. 14, 2024, concluding that they “have not established a likelihood of success on their claims that (the NCAA’s) bylaws are unreasonably anticompetitive or restrictive.”

The door wasn’t dead-bolted shut. It was removed and replaced with a concrete wall. The Bewleys were seemingly the only people to sue the NCAA and lose.

“You know how you have that passion for something?” Ryan Bewley says now. “And that love for something? And it just gets taken away from you? … And you keep trying and trying and trying, and people are in your ear saying, it’s going to get better, it’s going to get better — and it doesn’t get better. It’s like, aw, man, your hopes are too high.”

They now couldn’t play competitive basketball while marooned on a campus a good 30-minute drive away from anything interesting. “Some days, I cried,” Ryan says. The judge’s initial ruling bruised them so badly, they declined to accompany Chicago State to the Cancun Challenge in November; by 2024, they couldn’t travel with the team even if they wanted to. “Me and him were legit depressed,” Matt Bewley says. When they did join everyone in the gym, the Bewleys served as high-end scout-teamers. “Practice dummies,” as Ryan puts it, and they admit their personal investment levels dropped accordingly.

“It was so bad I used to be scared to even go to the park and play a pickup game,” Matt says. “Because I’m just like, yo, I haven’t done anything.”

At the end of the school year, the Bewleys returned to Florida and entered the NCAA’s transfer portal. Maybe they could join Gillion at Long Island University, where he’d taken an associate head coach spot. High-major coaches called, Marlene says, trying to sort out the twins’ status. But weeks went by. Nothing changed, and no one wanted to risk another year of idle exile. Matt considered quitting basketball. He figured he’d find something, he says now, that tall people could do.

It was mid-summer when Joey Cantens, the head coach at Daytona State College, logged into a database that ranks the available players in the portal. He noticed two familiar names near the top of the list.

On a whim, Cantens called Gillion, whom he’d known for almost two decades.

“Hey,” Cantens asked, “what are the twins doing?”

A few weeks after competing in a U20 European championship tournament in July as Great Britain’s point guard, and a few days after settling in for a year of junior college basketball in the United States, Tyrese Lacey arrived at the doors of the Lemerand Center to let his coach in the building. The sight of two extremely large humans flanking Cantens staggered him. On the elevator ride to the second floor, Lacey confirmed that, yes, in fact, these extremely large humans were related.

The elevator doors opened. The tour continued. You know they’re the Bewley twins, the Birmingham, England, native was told, expectantly.

“I’m like, ‘Who the hell are the Bewley twins?’” Lacey says now.

That was the question, wasn’t it?

In August 2024, two former five-star prospects were at the doorstep of an 11,000-student commuter school with a $3,100 tuition for Florida residents. Three years removed from famously upending an ecosystem. A year and a half removed from competitive basketball. Walking existential crises. When the Bewleys first entered the transfer portal in the spring of ’24, junior colleges across the country reached out to gauge their interest. The brothers didn’t reply. “I’m like, obviously me and him are never going to juco,” Matt says.

But eligibility in this realm works differently. The Bewleys could play. Immediately. Unless they intended to spend another season in suspended animation, they were out of alternatives.

“This is literally the purpose of community college,” Cantens says, “is to serve kids like them.”

Daytona State offered a soft landing to boot. Cantens was an energetic 38-year-old with experience as a Division I staffer at both Florida Gulf Coast and USC, whose Daytona State teams had won 55 of 63 games the previous two years while deploying a high-tempo, 3-pointer-heavy modern offense. Most critically? The Miami native played for the same AAU program as the Bewleys. He knew the people they knew. “That’s just family,” is how Matt puts it. As for the infrastructure, the twins could do far worse. A $16 million residence hall, opened in 2022 and steps away from the gym entrance, housed athletes. The cafeteria, not much farther away, served three meals a day. There was a stash of nutritional snacks available every day and an athletic trainer who whipped up post-workout smoothies. No strength coach or video coordinator. No zero-gravity treadmills or charter flights. But hardly a basketball skid row.

In a lower corner of the whiteboard in Cantens’ office, there’s a program mantra scribbled in black ink: This is a transient program for future pros. Not a dead end program for losers. “We start practice and if you’re not here an hour and a half early, doing your lift routine, your stretch routine, your shooting routine, if you’re not getting protein after practice — I have a problem with you,” Cantens says. “Because you’re not setting yourself up for success.”

The Bewleys signed on. How it would go was a cliffhanger for everyone.

Weary after the previous three years and wary of more disappointment, the twins kept to themselves in the early days. “You could tell there was still a dark spot there,” Lacey says. They’d sat on the couch in Cantens’ office and insisted that all they wanted was to be part of a team and chase a championship. Cantens didn’t totally buy it, suspicious the Bewleys were parroting some well-rehearsed lines from Overtime Elite media training. Someone like Isaiah Dorceus, a guard who didn’t have gaudy rankings and who isn’t 6-9 and who had one year left to prove worthy of a Division I roster spot, simply didn’t want anyone to wreck the good vibes.

Pickup games riddled with trash talk chipped away at the twins’ shells. So did team trips to the beach. Two players who admittedly don’t get up early for much of anything submitted to 5 a.m. workouts. They also forged ahead when it became clear their conditioning levels were not 5 a.m. workout-ready. (“I think the first workout, I made Matt throw up,” Cantens says.) It wasn’t long before the Bewleys were just two more players at Daytona State with bendy-straw career paths.

“They live in the dorms like everybody else, they eat in the cafeteria like everybody else, they get yelled at by me like everybody else,” Cantens says. “And they do a good job of cheering their teammates. And when you see that, you realize, OK, this is real. They really just want to be part of something that they missed.”

As Ryan Bewley puts it, simply: “I’m having that joy again, you know?”

To be clear: They absolutely want something more. They believe they are future NBA players.

But functional jump shots and defensive awareness, not pro roster spots, are the next rungs on the ladder. Seeing the Bewleys play is seeing the possibilities everyone sees. Matt’s end-to-end speed and chin-at-the-iron vertical on lobs. Ryan’s raw feel that, if honed properly, could make him an enviable offensive facilitator at his size. It is the stuff that draws coaches from Illinois, LSU, Penn State, St. Bonaventure, James Madison, Vermont and more to this outpost on the Florida coast, just in case.

It’s also seeing the hitch at the top of Matt’s jumper and realizing he hasn’t attempted a 3-pointer all season for a reason. It’s seeing Ryan hoist shots from the side of his head, almost like a catapult, casting at least a little doubt on the translatability of his 35.7 percent 3-point shooting. The numbers — 10 points and six rebounds in 18 minutes per game for Ryan, 9.5 points and five rebounds in 12.8 per game for Matt — are fine. They don’t obscure the truth.

“If you don’t allow them to play at a four-year school, their only chance to get developed is at a juco, for two years,” Cantens says. “At that point you better be ready to play for money overseas, somewhere. Unfair to them. Everybody else gets four or five years. (They) only get two to figure it out.”

Matt and Ryan Bewley can’t play major college basketball.

And they probably need to.

In a second-floor conference room that’s also used for film study and reheating leftovers, at a junior college occupying a few acres between a spring break mecca and the world’s most famous speedway, a modern college basketball conundrum is relitigated.

The Bewleys believe what they received for what they did at Overtime Elite — playing basketball that a media entity turned into content, signing Topps cards via Overtime’s licensing agreement with that company, doing photo shoots for other sponsors, and more — is equivalent to NIL compensation. The courts didn’t buy it. The Bewleys voluntarily dismissed their lawsuit in April 2024 but plan to refile based on the upcoming House v. NCAA settlement, after which schools effectively will pay student-athletes via revenue sharing. “That wedge the NCAA wants to put between Matt and Ryan and other athletes is getting smaller and smaller as the NIL world continues to develop,” says Dominique Price, the twins’ Chicago-based attorney. The Bewleys likely have exhausted the NCAA’s traditional paths to eligibility reinstatement already. (An NCAA spokesperson says the organization cannot comment on individual student-athletes.)

In the meantime, the No. 1 recruit in the Class of 2025, forward AJ Dybantsa, will play for BYU next season after receiving an NIL package reported to be worth at least $5 million.

“I don’t think it’s fair at all,” Matt says. “I never said this out loud, but I’m going to say this: It feels like everybody is living their life because of me and Ryan. You see NIL. You see all this other stuff. I think the reason why there even is an NIL is because of me and Ryan.”

“They’re getting paid to play,” Ryan says. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

The saga isn’t a regular conversation topic among their teammates. But there are thoughts on it at Daytona State, where the idea of opportunity is a little deeper and a little more desperate.

“It’s messed up that they’re going through this,” Placer says.

“Nothing should be stopping players from being able to play at the next level, in something they love to do,” Dorceus says.

“They’ve made money. But (other) people are making money as well,” Lacey says. “So what’s the issue now? What’s the difference? Because they signed it a bit earlier? They did their punishment. They did a year off. They didn’t play that year, and people were getting money that year. What is the difference now? Let the boys play.”

The next night, after all the hostilities end against Santa Fe College, Matt and Ryan Bewley walk past a locker room whiteboard framed by motivational placards — “WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BREAK YOU” is a little on the nose — and inspect the box score. Once Cantens finishes his postgame remarks, the twins bring some concerns to assistant coach David Watkins.

Ryan is confused about having zero blocked shots. Matt insists his rebound count is too low. Watkins laughs. He promises he’ll check the film, but it doesn’t appear the Bewleys will let this go. All they have is what they do here.

Maybe something changes. Maybe all the gray burns off and lets some light in. “I’m spiritual anyways,” Prince Bewley says. “I’m hoping for a miracle.” Failing that or a favorable judge’s ruling, they’ll reassess and consider testing the NBA Draft waters for feedback or exploring overseas options or just staying put. For now, though? There is nothing else but what happens in a place they never expected to be.

“Hey,” Matt Bewley says, “we’re all trying to claw to the top together.”

(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; photos: Courtesy of Daytona State College; Michael Conley / Associated Press)

On February 6, 2023, Manchester City were charged by the Premier League with more than 100 breaches of the competition’s rules.

As champions in six of the past seven seasons, the eventual verdict of an independent commission will have a seismic impact on the Premier League, regardless of which way their decision goes.

Each of the 115 (or more accurately 129) charges is related to the competition’s financial fair play rules, which are complicated and ever-changing — with both sides fighting tooth and nail over the details of each alleged breach.

One key part of the evidence in the bundle is internal emails from Manchester City, published by German newspaper Der Spiegel, which suggest potential wrongdoing. These formed the basis of a UEFA case against City — where the club were initially found guilty, before being cleared in July 2020 by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). You can read that ruling in full here.

In the latest case, the Premier League has since gathered what it believes is further evidence through the process of disclosure. City have insisted throughout the process that they have not broken any regulations.

That hearing is now over and the three-person panel has gone away to make its judgment. Its decision is expected before the end of the season.

But it is worth explaining exactly what it will be ruling on, so here is an explanation of the charges, broken down, using all the publicly available information and rulings about City’s case and graphic illustrations of the key points.

Fifty-four charges of failure to provide accurate financial information

These charges range over nine seasons, the longest such span of the alleged breaches. A complicating factor is that Premier League rules on this subject are often subtly revised, meaning the information City had to provide might have changed each season.

Generally, this addresses the demand for clubs to release financial information in order to demonstrate their adherence to FFP. Think of it like declaring all of your income so that a correct tax amount can be calculated — failure to do so is an offence.

The below graphic, like all others in this article, is based on the published judgment by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), with its context and the page it refers to noted above each excerpt.

Fifty-four charges are a lot, but they are all governed by the same principle.

Each individual charge in this section — for example, in 2014-15, City are accused of breaching six Premier League laws — relates to the specifics of what they were expected to provide information on. These include separate financial areas such as revenue, related parties, and operating costs. Effectively, City are alleged to have breached five or six clauses every year for nine years.

But rather than 54 separate cases, there is one key broader question at hand: were all of these figures accurate? To get specific: were Abu Dhabi-owned City reporting the true revenue they were gaining from sponsorship deals with Abu Dhabi-linked companies as they maintain, or only declaring part of it?

Discussion in the Der Spiegel emails as published in the CAS ruling shows City executives discussing cashflow between sponsors and the football club, as well as what they were expected to show for auditing purposes. Under Premier League rules, City were expected to provide “(in) the utmost good faith, accurate financial information that gives a true and fair view of the club’s financial position”.

Initially, Manchester City were found guilty by UEFA’s adjudicatory chamber, which stated it was “comfortably satisfied” that City “did not truthfully declare their sponsorship income as payments purportedly made by sponsors were in reality payments from (owners) ADUG or (Sheikh Mansour).”

City subsequently appealed the case to CAS, arguing that UEFA, European football’s governing body, was misreading the emails.

In the CAS case, though found guilty by the initial panel, the appeal committee found that they could not consider the legitimacy of the alleged payments from Etisalat because they were time-barred — a barrier which is not expected to affect the Premier League, according to legal experts consulted by The Athletic.

Two of CAS’ three-man panel dismissed the main charges that City had received disguised payments through Etihad and Etisalat, finding that all claims relating to payments from Etisalat were time-barred, as were some of those from Etihad, and that in any event, the charge of providing incorrect information had not been established.

The Premier League is unlikely to be blocked by time-barring rules in the same way UEFA was, while it is also understood that the legal process of disclosure has resulted in it gaining additional documents than those UEFA had.

If the commission finds on “the balance of probabilities” that City failed to provide accurate financial information, based on misreporting the origin of sponsorship money, the club will be found guilty.

Fourteen charges of failure to provide accurate details for player and manager payments

This is another alleged example of failing to share correct information for FFP purposes but differs slightly. Rather than being accused of injecting funds into the club by disguising it as sponsorship deals, here City are charged with hiding money being paid out to players and coaches.

Effectively, this has the advantage of being off-the-books, meaning portions of salaries would not count under the FFP cap. The Premier League alleges this occurred between 2009 and 2016.

The most high-profile examples discussed in the leaks from Der Spiegel relate to alleged payments made to manager Roberto Mancini and midfielder Yaya Toure during their days at the club.

(Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)

In Mancini’s case, City’s then manager signed a deal with Abu Dhabi club Al Jazira — owned, like City, by Sheikh Mansour — which would pay him £1.75million annually for a minimum of four days’ work per year. The Premier League will claim this constituted part of his City salary, with executives at the club (including the chief financial officer and head of finance) sharing emails related to the Al Jazira payments. Mancini and City have always denied any wrongdoing.

With Toure, the questions relate to image-rights payments allegedly made by Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) rather than City themselves, and subsequently were not declared as salary. As with Mancini, club and player deny any wrongdoing.

Seven (or 21…) charges of breaching profit and sustainability rules

The exact subject matter here is slightly less certain; it is based on information gathered during the Premier League’s investigation rather than the leaked emails. The charges can be split into alleged breaches over three seasons: 2015-16, 2016-17 and 2017-18.

Arguably, this is where it is more accurate to use 129 charges rather than 115 to describe the total number of offences allegedly committed by City. The Premier League has charged them with breaching seven PSR rules in each of those three seasons — during early explanations of the case, these were grouped as a total of seven charges rather than added together to make 21.

The Premier League has not engaged with the media on any aspect of the case since February 2023, including confirming the current number of charges.

While Everton and Nottingham Forest were also charged with breaching PSR rules, their situations are not directly comparable with City’s — those two clubs were subject to an updated Premier League rulebook from 2022-23 onwards and their cases only related to whether they exceeded the maximum allowable loss, where the rules in their entirety are far broader.

Guardiola’s side are still awaiting their fate, but City deny any wrongdoing (James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)

Regardless, the Premier League’s historic PSR rules indicate areas in which it may seek to prove wrongdoing by City.

For example, Rule E.53.2.2 states that a PSR balance sheet should be “to the best of the club’s knowledge and belief, an accurate estimate of future financial performance”. If any of the charges already discussed should be upheld, it is clear how City may be in breach.

Rules E.54-57 relate to related party transactions, which are relevant to the Abu Dhabi-linked sponsorship deals City are alleged to have illicitly struck.

Finally, Rule E.59 relates to the well-known “losses in excess of £105million” limit — again, if previously discussed charges are upheld, a recalculation of City’s PSR submissions with the new figures may find them in breach of this permitted total.

Five charges of failing to comply with UEFA’s FFP regulations

In 2014, City made a deal with UEFA after £118.75million of sponsorship was questioned and the club’s own accounting was rejected. Their settlement saw City repay UEFA €20m from TV revenue, as well as submitting themselves to future spending guardrails. City publicly announced their displeasure with UEFA’s findings.

These charges, however, are slightly different, beginning in the 2013-14 season and continuing until 2017-18. In some sense, this predominantly comes under UEFA’s remit, but the Premier League has its own rules requiring that clubs also follow the continental ones — these are the laws that City are alleged to have broken.

The Premier League has not explained exactly which UEFA rules it is referring to. For example, Rule B.15.6, as it stood from 2014-15 until 2017-18, simply reads: “Membership of the league shall constitute an agreement between the league and each club to be bound by and comply with the statutes and regulations of UEFA”.

But it is likely to relate to the possibility that if City’s true PSR numbers are found to be different to their publicly declared ones, they break UEFA’s maximum-allowable-loss restrictions as well as those of the Premier League.

Thirty-five charges of failing to cooperate with Premier League investigations

This is straightforward to explain, although 35 is another very high number.

Simply put, the Premier League accuses City of breaking numerous rules related to “acting in good faith” since its investigation began in 2018 — the charges relate to each of the seasons from 2018-19 to 2022-23, inclusive.

They were found to have done similar by UEFA.

Specific rules City are alleged to have broken include the failure to release documents to the Premier League by insisting they are confidential, and not providing “full, complete, and prompt assistance to the (Premier League) board”. City expressed their surprise at this during the initial public comments following the charges, “given the extensive engagement and vast amount of detailed materials that the EPL has been provided with”.

To get some sense of the mood of this process, one witness who had already been spoken to by City’s lawyers described it as “hardcore”, “aggressive”, and “no-holds-barred” — though this is more illustrative of the enmity between the two sides rather than specifically related to non-cooperation.

Initially, the CFCB hearing found that City had breached Article 56 of its laws by failing to provide requested information and at one point advancing a case that the club’s ownership “must have known to be false”.

City appealed to CAS, stating they did not need to authenticate the leaked emails and arguing they went beyond what was needed in helping the panel.

However, the CAS upheld the decision of the CFCB, pointing to the club’s failure to provide witnesses, complete copies of the leaked emails, and prevaricating over the identity of the mysterious “Mohamed”.

What comes next?

With closing arguments made on December 6, the three-person commission is now compiling its verdict. The identity of that panel has been tightly guarded.

There is no set time frame on how quickly it must reach a decision, unlike last season’s PSR cases involving Everton and Forest. Those cases took around a month to reach their judgments, while City’s case is far more wide-reaching and complex.

Nevertheless, all parties expect a decision to be released before the end of the season. With the process governing a case of this scope effectively unprecedented, it is not clear whether City, if guilty, will immediately be given their punishment or whether that will be finalised at a later date. City have denied any wrongdoing throughout.

Both sides have the right to appeal any verdict. English (and European) football awaits.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)