Everything City have achieved, they did so on the field; if you are talking about the EPL charges when you say "dirty dealings", remember that it is innocent until proven guilty, as at this time the EPL are yet to prove their case and City still say they are 100% not guilty. Having said that, whatever the outcome of this trial is, i think it is largely unfair to say all the success City have had is due to dirty dealings, when many of the charges go back to incidences of 10 years ago or more.
Manchester City would have not achieved many titles in Premier League if they had not gotten massive financial support from its owner.
Who is the current owner of Manchester City? Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan is the majority owner of Manchester City.
The current Premier League champions are part of the multi-club ownership structure, City Football Group (CFG).
CFG holds stakes in 13 football clubs over five continents.
Other clubs in the multi-club ownership structure include New York City FC and Melbourne City.
Their owners are rich and can spend money for Manchester City to buy players at expensive prices, pay players very high salary, and don't mind much about spendings, the charges against Manchester City are good to stop or reduce their over spendings that can destroy Premier League.
They are a strong team recent seasons but if it is solely from over spendings, their club's finance is unstable and can be broken anytime if their owner leaves their club.
It is about their finance but about their sport developments, they are doing well and we can see other rich clubs like Chelsea, Manchester United, Newcastle United don't have success like Manchester City. Beyond England, there is PSG in France and they spent massive money like Manchester City but can not compare to Manchester City about success they achieved so far.
Billionaires back city, but I remind you that if there was an FFP who had complete control over the big teams that owned by the billionaire, they would spend their money carefully or get punished based on how many times they were breaching the rules. Even though the city did not follow it, it will be punished very soon like what is happening right now when city has breached it many times. It's just a matter of time. Football is a game in which the rich win and dominate the competition and this is the fact.
This is a common thing that applies to almost everything in the world. When you are wealthy and have complete control over your actions caused by your money can buy everything. It is due to the fact that money provides you with more opportunities to support your business, career, or even football team which is helping you to always being a winner in anything. This has proven during abramovich and mansour's era. City has been transforming into the big clubs from a mediocre one in the past.
We had been only seeing the rich clubs have completely dominated all leagues which makes everything look so easy for them to get the trophy while the poor clubs can only survive to get money to play for the upcoming season . The poor club will not be able to do this. Because it is the reality, and it must be accepted in order to survive this period by any small clubs. So, this is a battle between all of the riches clubs and their owners and it will continue forever even if the ownership of club gets changed.
Sometimes there is a stupid club that spends a lot of money but gets nothing, such as Chelsea. The club's finances will never fail as long as the owner can provide it with personal funds and keep send the fresh fund to make the club alive but it must also struggle in order to get its balance sheet stable.
The money made from playing in leagues will never be enough to buy players worth millions of euros like what chelsea did.