From Marseille and Juventus to Luton and Bury, the Harshest Penalties Ever Handed to Football Clubs
Published on September 28th, 2026Written By: Dave Manuel
On September 25, 2026, The Athletic reported that an independent panel had found Manchester City guilty of 114 of the 115 Premier League charges against them. Nobody knows the punishment yet, and City are expected to appeal. So I went back through the history of football to see what has actually been done to clubs that broke the rules before. It turns out the answer runs from a fine to a club being wiped out of existence, and the most important lesson is that the first sentence is rarely the last one.
The Premier League charged City in February 2023 over the seasons from 2009-10 onward: 54 counts of failing to provide accurate financial information, 14 on player and manager pay, 7 under the Profit and Sustainability Rules, 5 under UEFA Financial Fair Play, and 35 for failing to cooperate with the investigation. The hearing ran in private from September to December 2024. On September 25, 2026, The Athletic's David Ornstein reported a guilty finding on 114 of the 115. At the time of writing no sanction has been set, City have always denied wrongdoing and are expected to appeal, and the Premier League has declined to comment.
The league deliberately has no fixed tariff for these breaches. The panel can fine, dock points, relegate, strip titles or expel. Everything below is what those words have meant in practice.
The Case Files, Heaviest First
This is the only club ever thrown out of the Football League in the middle of a season, and the detail I keep coming back to is why. Paying players during the war was a common enough offence. What turned it into a death sentence was that the directors refused to hand over the club's books. The authorities punished the stonewalling harder than the crime.
Keep that in mind when you get to the end of this list. Thirty-five of the 115 charges against Manchester City were about failing to cooperate with the investigation.
Bury were not cheats. They were broke. The club had been in the Football League since 1894 and won the FA Cup twice, in 1900 and 1903, and had just been promoted. The league suspended their first five fixtures, set deadlines, and when a takeover collapsed a few hours before the last one, it withdrew their membership. A fan-owned phoenix club started again far down the pyramid.
It belongs near the top of this list because nothing is heavier than not existing. It also shows that the harshest outcome in football does not always come from wrongdoing on the pitch.
This is the biggest punishment ever handed to a major club, and it was delivered at a speed that is hard to believe by modern standards: the scandal broke in the final weeks of the 2005-06 season and the title was reassigned in late July. Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi was at the centre of it and was banned from football.
Juventus were not alone. Milan, Lazio and Fiorentina were docked 30 points for 2005-06 and started the next season on minus 8, minus 3 and minus 15. Juventus won Serie B at the first attempt and came straight back up, and they have long continued to count both titles as their own on club merchandise. Their appeals to change the record have failed.
Marseille beat Valenciennes 1-0 on May 20, 1993, to clinch their fifth straight title, then beat Milan in Munich to become the first French club to win the European Cup. The plan behind it was to keep the players fresh for the final. One Valenciennes player, Jacques Glassmann, refused the money and exposed it, and was later honoured with a FIFA Fair Play award for it.
The French federation stripped Marseille of the league title that September. Club president Bernard Tapie went to prison. UEFA let Marseille keep the Champions League trophy, since the fixed match was not in that competition, but would not let them defend it. The 1992-93 season still has no champion.
This one matters on a betting site, because it was a betting scandal. Two men who had organised fixes through Italy's black-market betting network lost heavily when results did not go their way, and the complaint they filed brought the whole thing down.
Milan's president was banned, twenty players were suspended, and two of the biggest names in Italian football were sent down. Rossi's ban was reduced to two years, which is how the man at the centre of a fixing scandal ended up as the hero of the 1982 World Cup two years later.
Luton had already been docked 10 points the season before and relegated. Then they started League Two on minus 30, the heaviest deduction English league football has ever seen.
They won 13 games and drew 17. That is 56 points of football, enough to finish comfortably clear of trouble. Take away 30 and they finished bottom and dropped out of the Football League. It took them five years to get back in, and the story from there, all the way up to the Premier League, is one of the best in the English game.
Wayne Rooney's Derby spent the whole season climbing out of a hole the club had dug before a ball was kicked. Without the deduction, their points total would have kept them up. With it, they went down.
Six years after reaching a Champions League semi-final, Leeds started life in the third tier on minus 15. They nearly climbed out anyway, reaching the play-off final at Wembley before losing to Doncaster. There is a small symmetry here: Leeds United exist because Leeds City were expelled in 1919, and nearly ninety years later the new club was the one being punished.
This is the case that proves a sentence is not a sentence until the last appeal is done. In June 1994 the FA handed Spurs the harshest penalty in English history. Alan Sugar fought it. By December the points and the Cup ban were gone completely, and all that was left was a bigger fine.
Every club facing a panel knows this story.
Juventus again, and this time it was about money rather than referees. The 15 points came off in January, came back in April when Italy's highest sports court sent the case back, and then 10 came off again in May. It knocked Juventus out of the Champions League places in the last weeks of the season.
If you want to understand why everyone is braced for City's appeal, this is it. The number moved three times in five months.
These were the first Premier League deductions for breaking its financial rules, and they set the scale everyone has been measuring City against ever since. They are also the reason so many rival fans are furious: two clubs lost points for overspending while the biggest financial case in the league's history was still waiting for a verdict.
CAS found that most of the allegations were either not established or too old to be prosecuted under UEFA's time limits. City called it a validation of their position. UEFA's president has said since that he still believes UEFA was right.
The detail that matters for the case that followed: the fine that survived was for obstructing the investigation. That word again.
What the Files Say
Refusing to cooperate gets punished harder than the offence. Leeds City were dissolved for hiding their books. The only part of UEFA's 2020 case against City that survived was the fine for obstruction. And 35 of the 115 charges are non-cooperation charges.
The first sentence is rarely the last. Juventus went from a proposed minus 30 to minus 9. Tottenham went from minus 12 to nothing. Everton went from 10 to 6. City's own European ban became a fine. Whatever the panel announces, the appeal will decide what it is really worth.
In every case in these files, titles were stripped only for corrupting the result. Marseille bribed opponents. Juventus influenced referees. Every financial case on this list, however serious, ended in points, fines or relegation rather than a title taken away. City's case is financial, which is exactly why nobody can say with confidence which side of that line it will land on.
The biggest numbers come from going broke, not from cheating. Luton, Derby and Leeds carry the largest deductions in English football, and all of them came from administration and insolvency rules. The top-flight financial-rules deductions in these files, Juventus, Everton and Forest, topped out at 10 points once the appeals were done. Nobody has yet had to decide what a deduction looks like for a case this size.
One Last Word
Every club in these files thought its punishment was unfair, and some of them were proved right on appeal. What the history shows is that football has always had the power to do almost anything to a club, from taking away a title to erasing it altogether. It has rarely used the heaviest options, and when it has, it has usually been about corrupting the result itself. Manchester City's file is the first one that tests whether a financial case can go further than that. When the panel decides, it will not just be sentencing a club. It will be setting the scale for everyone who comes after.
About these files: each case is drawn from the governing bodies' rulings and contemporary reporting. The Manchester City verdict was reported by The Athletic and had not been formally published at the time of writing; no sanction had been set. Punishments listed are the ones that applied after appeals unless the entry says otherwise.
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