In this sterile age of bear hugs in the dugout and fist bumps in the tunnel we’ve almost forgotten what it feels like to anticipate a game for its needle, for anything other than the patterns forming on the pitch.
These days if you want the showbiz drama of Martin Keown and Ruud van Nistlerooy, of Jose Mourinho and Rafael Benitez, then you’ll need the battle to begin in the courts.
Sunday’s headline game at Anfield will probably be the most-watched Premier League game in a generation. Colour, spectacle, hatred, eyeballs on the content: isn’t that what the Premier League brand has always been chasing? It turns out a mega scandal is all we needed to take this entertainment behemoth to the next level.
That might be a slightly facetious lens through which to view a story that many are predicting could sink the Premier League long-term, especially if Man City’s owners continue to pursue a scorched-earth policy by tying the competition in legal knots for the next few years, although – to keep mixing those metaphors – many things have threatened to burst this bubble before.
Nothing has stopped its expansion.
Like any great soap opera (or, like the England men’s team) carrying scars from a dark past only seems to enhance the product, whether it’s the Super League fallout and the unmissable telly of a Gary Neville rant or Chelsea seized by the UK government precipitating a BlueCo buyout that’s given us endless light-ent fodder.
Stripped titles might cast an enticing shadow over the Premier League. Relegation to the fourth tier might give us a redemption arc to get behind. And Man City (finally) getting cast as baddies should give the competition its central villain.
That is certainly the reason to watch on Sunday. Forget the football itself, this one is all about the preamble.
Every other club will follow the example of the first reaction and Anfield really is the perfect place to set the tone for how English football will define itself against Man City.
The three-week break has given us time to let the verdict really sink in, to let the narrative and the lexicon form (we’re going with “sham”, people), and to let Liverpool supporters get creative with the paints.
Liverpool have suffered more than anyone else from Man City’s cheating. Financial calculations will argue otherwise (Tottenham’s lost income from Champions League qualification is often cited here) but only Liverpool can legitimately claim silverware was stolen from them.
Generally speaking you can’t delete Man City from the history books and then pretend the rest of the league season or cup competition would have played out the same way. That’s just not how reality works. But Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool, defined by near misses, would have dominated the Premier League were Man City absent.
Twice they lost the league title to Man City by a single point, winning an absurd 97 points and 92 points but finishing second. In one of those years, 2018/19, only a 2-1 defeat to Man City at the Etihad – only a 1.12 cm goal-line technology decision, in fact – prevented Liverpool from winning the title with 100 points and as Invincibles.
But beyond the club’s legitimate fury about lost titles Liverpudlians are simply the best people for the job: the most vocal, the most passionate, the most proud of football’s socialist and working-class traditions.
Nobody will be angrier. And that’s box office stuff.
There is a more serious side to this too. How Liverpool supporters treat Man City will inform how others fight back and only in the court of public opinion can City’s owners be pushed out, an outcome everyone should want, most of all City fans, the people whose club was hijacked, hollowed out, repurposed as a political tool, and then tarnished forever.
It is theoretically possible the independent regulator will force the Abu Dhabi United Group to sell up but as Andy Burnham’s clumsy intervention suggests, the politics of such a bold move make it an unlikely outcome.
No, the only way to end the sportswashing project is to break the model, ensuring that the UAE’s association with City damages their reputation.
They need to feel hated. They must be made to understand that they have wrung out all the political power they can, which, by the way, was a lot more than they ever imagined and a lot more than ‘soft’; the money they pumped into Manchester ended up providing the economic platform for the new prime minister, who made the UAE president one of his first phone calls from number 10.
City’s owners need to feel that further association only harms them and, importantly, that even victory in the High Court cannot undo the damage.
If we are to avoid years of legal wrangling, and the potential downfall of a weary Premier League, then Liverpool fans need to let them know: hearts and minds are lost.
The war is already over.
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