More than a century ago, Manchester City already had a problem with football’s financial rules.

In 1905, City star Billy Meredith was accused of trying to bribe an opponent. The investigation that followed uncovered something even bigger: the club had been making payments to players that broke the Football Association’s strict £4-a-week wage limit. The fallout was severe. City was fined £900, 17 players were suspended, manager Tom Maley was banned for life, and the entire squad was put up for auction.

Football has changed dramatically since then, but the argument over how clubs use money has never really gone away. That history suddenly became relevant again after New York Knicks star and Chelsea supporter Josh Hart reacted to Manchester City’s latest financial verdict with a post that sent football fans in a very different direction.

Hart wrote on X, “Man City lied about 900 million pounds?! Forget relegation…Burn the club down.”

Instead of simply agreeing or disagreeing with Hart’s view of City, fans quickly turned the spotlight toward the club he supports. Chelsea’s own controversial financial history became part of the conversation, but there was a major detail that made the comparison far more complicated than a simple case of one club accusing another.

Manchester City’s £900 Million Case Is Bigger Than Hart’s Post

The reaction came after an independent Premier League commission found Manchester City guilty of 114 of the 115 charges brought against the club, covering nine seasons from 2009-10 through 2017-18.

The commission found that City had used commercial arrangements that artificially increased its reported revenue by £830.6 million while also understating operating costs by £70 million. The combined figure is more than £900 million.

The commission said the club’s sponsorship arrangements with Abu Dhabi-linked companies, including Etihad Airways and Etisalat, included money that was secretly funded by Manchester City’s parent company. Those payments were then recorded as commercial income from the sponsors.

The ruling also covered other financial arrangements. City was found to have used image-rights agreements and a separate consultancy arrangement involving former manager Roberto Mancini to keep certain costs out of its reported expenses.

The commission’s findings went beyond the accounting itself. It said some important witnesses who testified for City gave evidence that was “false in a number of key respects” and that some witnesses had given testimony “they knew to be untrue and so had been dishonest.”

That is why Hart’s £900 million figure needs some explaining. It does not mean City was found to have simply stolen £900 million in cash. The figure represents the combined amount of revenue the commission found had been artificially inflated and costs that had been kept out of the club’s accounts across the nine-year period.

And that distinction matters because the heart of the case was not simply how much money City had. It was how that money was represented under the rules designed to control club spending.

City Has Not Accepted the Verdict

Manchester City has strongly rejected the commission’s findings and is appealing the verdict.

CEO Ferran Soriano described the guilty verdicts as “a Premier League conspiracy theory” and said the ruling contained “clear material errors of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe. We will appeal.”

Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak also told supporters, “The Premier League process still has a long way to run, and our confidence and intent in proving the Club’s innocence is just as strong as when this began.”

So while the commission has issued its findings, the case is not finished.

No sporting punishment has yet been enforced. That means relegation, points deductions or title-related consequences should not be presented as confirmed outcomes at this stage.

Yet the size and scope of the verdict explain why Hart’s post attracted so much attention.

And that is where his Chelsea connection turned a City story into something much bigger.

Why Hart’s Chelsea Connection Changed Everything

Hart is not a neutral football fan throwing a random opinion into the Premier League conversation. He is a vocal Chelsea supporter who has regularly shown his connection to the club, including wearing Chelsea shirts around NBA games.

That gave rival supporters an obvious way to respond.

Instead of debating only whether Manchester City deserved punishment, they started asking a different question: what gives a Chelsea supporter the right to criticize another club’s financial history?

That question has some history behind it.

Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea for £140 million in July 2003 and transformed the club’s financial power. During his ownership, more than £1.5 billion was provided to Chelsea through interest-free shareholder loans. The spending helped Chelsea win 19 major trophies, including five Premier League titles and two Champions League trophies.

But there is an important piece of context here.

Much of Abramovich’s early spending came before the modern spending restrictions that now shape Premier League financial regulation. Chelsea’s ability to receive that owner funding was not itself a breach of the spending rules that existed at the time.

That makes the Chelsea comparison more complicated than simply saying the club “spent a lot of money.”

And Chelsea’s story has another, much more recent chapter.

Chelsea Was Also Punished Over Historical Financial Breaches

In March 2026, the Premier League announced sanctions against Chelsea after an investigation into historical payments made between 2011 and 2018.

The investigation centered on £47.5 million in undisclosed payments to player agents, representatives and intermediaries. The payments were connected to Chelsea’s Abramovich era and had not been properly reported in the club’s financial accounts.

Chelsea was handed a £10.75 million fine, along with a one-year first-team transfer ban suspended for two years and an immediate nine-month academy registration ban.

That is the detail that makes the backlash against Hart much more interesting.

Chelsea really did have its own recent financial-rule controversy.

But there is a crucial difference between the two cases.

The independent findings confirmed that Chelsea did not breach Profitability and Sustainability Rules. Even if the £47.5 million in undisclosed agent payments had been properly included in the club’s accounts, Chelsea would still have had enough financial headroom to remain within the PSR limits during the relevant seasons.

Chelsea’s new ownership group discovered the historical payments during its 2022 acquisition due diligence and voluntarily reported them to the authorities.

That cooperation also mattered to the punishment. Chelsea’s original fine was reduced from £20 million to £10.75 million after the club self-reported and cooperated with the investigation.

So yes, Chelsea was punished for financial-rule breaches.

But no, that does not mean Chelsea’s case was the same as Manchester City’s.

And that distinction is exactly where the fan backlash gets messy.

Fans Turn Josh Hart’s City Attack Back on Chelsea

The reactions to Hart’s post largely fell into one argument: if he wanted Manchester City punished over its finances, why should Chelsea be treated differently?

One fan went straight at Hart’s Chelsea allegiance:

“a chelsea man talkin like this?”

Another brought up Abramovich’s ownership and Chelsea’s rise under him:

“Your club’s most successful period came under the stewardship of a Russian oligarch who was forced to sell Chelsea after being sanctioned by the UK government. Maybe let’s not get too sanctimonious about other clubs’ ownership,”

A third fan took an even more aggressive shot at Hart:

“Chelsea fan tweeting this is f****** insane. Consider 9mm frontal lobe application,”

The spending argument followed.

One fan wrote:

“The only reason you support Chelsea is because they did worse than City, but unfortunately there wasn’t a hacker to expose them back then. 0 chance you’d be supporting midtable Chelsea from the 90s without financial doping.”

And another simply turned Hart’s own words back toward his club:

“I agree and also do the same to @ChelseaFC too”

The reactions were clearly emotional, but they also exposed the central problem with trying to compare football clubs’ financial controversies using one giant label.

Chelsea’s supporters can point to the fact that its historical payments did not push the club beyond PSR limits.

City’s critics can point to a commission finding that its commercial arrangements artificially inflated revenue and reduced reported costs by more than £900 million.

Both clubs have faced financial scrutiny.

The findings, however, are not identical.

The Difference Between Chelsea and Manchester City Matters

The simplest way to understand the divide is to look at what the respective investigations actually found.

Chelsea’s case centered on undisclosed payments to agents and intermediaries. The club was punished because those payments were not properly reported.

Manchester City’s case centered on the financial picture presented to regulators, including commercial revenue and operating costs. The commission found that City’s arrangements artificially inflated revenue and reduced reported expenses over nine seasons.

The distinction becomes even more important when PSR is considered.

Chelsea had enough legitimate financial headroom that the undisclosed payments would not have pushed the club beyond the PSR limit if they had been properly recorded.

The City commission, by contrast, found that the financial arrangements helped the club present a stronger financial position under the rules.

That is why calling the two cases identical would be misleading.

But it also explains why Chelsea fans cannot simply wave away the criticism either.

Chelsea was fined £10.75 million and handed sporting restrictions over historical financial breaches. City has now been found guilty of 114 charges and faces an appeal before any final sporting punishment is determined.

The cases sit in the same larger debate about financial regulation, but they do not tell the same story.

The Premier League Has Changed Since Abramovich’s Chelsea

There is another reason this debate is so difficult to separate from football’s history.

When Abramovich arrived at Chelsea in 2003, the Premier League did not have the modern spending controls that now govern clubs.

The league later introduced financial rules designed to stop clubs from recording losses beyond permitted limits and to prevent owner-linked companies from being used to inflate commercial revenue.

That is why sponsorship deals, owner funding and financial reporting have become such major issues.

A club can spend huge sums without automatically breaking the rules. What matters is where the money comes from, how transactions are recorded and whether those transactions comply with the regulations in force at the time.

That is also why the £900 million number in City’s case needs to be understood rather than simply repeated.

The number is eye-catching.

The mechanism behind it is the real story.

And for Manchester City, that story is now moving into the appeal process.

Hart’s One-Line Post Became Part of a Much Bigger Fight

Hart may have only intended to react to the scale of Manchester City’s verdict.

Instead, his Chelsea allegiance pulled an entirely different history into the conversation.

That history includes Abramovich’s enormous investment in Chelsea, the club’s later sale after UK sanctions were imposed on its former owner, and the Premier League’s own 2026 sanctions over undisclosed historical payments.

But it also includes an important distinction that social media arguments tend to erase.

Chelsea’s financial breaches and Manchester City’s findings are not the same.

Chelsea was punished for failing to disclose historical payments, while the independent commission found Manchester City guilty of a much broader financial scheme involving artificially inflated commercial revenue and understated costs.

City continues to deny the findings and appeal the verdict.

So Hart’s “Burn the club down” line has ended up doing something his original post probably did not intend.

It has turned one of football’s biggest financial rulings into a debate about whether fans judge clubs by the same standard when the badge on their own shirt is involved.

And with Manchester City’s appeal still ahead, that debate is unlikely to end with one post on X.