The relief and giddy anticipation that always greets the Premier League’s return from the autumn international break was to be ramped up even further this year by the new three-week window. The reward for our patience was to be a huge game at Anfield on Sunday afternoon when the league leaders faced their biggest challenge yet under Enzo Maresca.
None of that matters now. Not since news emerged that an independent panel had found Manchester City guilty of the majority of the 115 charges they faced. That ghost will now haunt this Premier League season and leave all of us in limbo as we watch a dead or dying product, waiting for the appeal and then the next appeal while trying to wrap our heads around the litigations that are about to fly about like nuclear warheads in the final throes of life on Earth.
Eventually the Premier League will recover. Probably. Although the prospect of a FIFA-sponsored Super League, offering a clean break from a tainted brand and from pesky regulations, may be on the cards again now.
Assuming the Premier League does hold together we still face the prospect of at least a meaningless 2026/27 – and who knows what else besides – should Man City’s owners successfully use an entire petro-state’s legal resources to take their case to the high court (assuming their initial appeal is rejected) where the law may be applied differently – and where it will certainly take a long, long time to be decided.
Inevitably there are Manchester City supporters ready to cry conspiracy, ready to entrench themselves in blind support for their owners while announcing that stripped titles cannot sully the memories of those triumphs. This is denial talking. It will serve them better to open their hearts and let the pain in, because Man City fans should be angrier, more devastated, than any of us.
We have all been cheated, we have all been duped into watching a semi-scripted TV show, we have all been shattered by the loss of sporting integrity and by loss more generally; trophies not won, careers upended, lives altered forever by the defrauding of a zero-sum game. Man City supporters will feel all of that too, only with the additional horror that it was their club - one of such noble heritage - that was used to create this reality.
City were founded in the 19th-century to help give young unemployed men purpose in a destitute part of east Manchester. In the first decades of the 20th century they played a substantial role in creating fairer working conditions for footballers and were a leading light for working-class causes in the city. That a club with their history should be exploited and manipulated by the Abu Dhabi United Group is arguably the greatest tragedy of the entire affair.
It is difficult to see how the club can ever truly recover from the shame, of denying so much to so many other fans, of undermining – stealing – English football’s essence: its genuineness, its fairness.
The rest of us might have suffered from the actions of their owners, but it is their club used and abused; their club made into a vessel for UAE interests to trash the sport around them. Be empathetic towards those City fans who continue to build a wall and refuse to back down. They are the howls of denial for a grief too big to contemplate.
Accepting the truth would be a healthier way to go, not least because if the rest of football can welcome Man City fans into their own anger and draw new battle lines then some good might come out of this saga.
Fans are never to blame for the actions of their clubs but they are always the victims of any misdeeds. So, the obvious starting point to recover from this watershed moment in English football is to overthrow the fit and proper persons test and find a way to outright ban nation states from owning football clubs. It is self-evident that their interests are aligned with international politics and economics, a scale far too large to be played out in football, which by comparison becomes a simple pawn, discarded for a greater goal.
Another conclusion ought to be the simplification of the financial regulations. Man City’s irregularities were partly made possible by the complexity of various profit and sustainability rules, unanimously understood to be unfit for purpose. In which case: simplify dramatically. Put a cap on how much money can be spent on transfers and wages, rather than chain each club’s expenditure to its income. This would get rid of the potential for shady sponsorship deals, for selling hotels to yourself, for converting Beyonce tickets into Omar Marmoush.
The basic absurdity of the FFP/SCR system is often used by the Kool-Aid-drinking section of Man City fans to delegitimise the case against them, and it might even have sanded down the edges of Friday’s news for many neutrals. If the whole premise of the rules is nonsensical, then who cares if they cooked the books a little? Is it really any worse than Chelsea’s hotels, and do the finances really matter that much in a world where Manchester United can waste billions yet still be (sometimes) outperformed by an Aston Villa side continually forced to sell?
But these charges are not technicalities. City have not just rejigged the books, akin to the accounting tricks now infamously used across the Premier League club whenever the financial deadline looms. Breaking the rules to gain a clear competitive advantage is plain and simple cheating.
And so the owners have destroyed their legacy. They have also recklessly damaged the reputation of a club that was founded 128 years before the takeover and whose supporters never asked for any of this.
They might just have broken apart the Premier League, too. At the very least they have emptied the last 15 years of meaning and blown up the competition’s immediate future.
Then again the Premier League has always been a soap opera at its core, hungry for salacious stories like this one. How ‘tasty’ that Man City’s first post-guilty-verdict game is at Anfield, a ground that could have seen many more trophy lifts had their been a fair playing field. We will tune in to see how the Liverpool supporters react and to see if it creates a new on-field tension. We will tune to see if the City players are galvanised by a siege mentality, or if their legs will wobble and the unbeaten start will come crashing down. We will tune in to hear Gary Neville’s furious monologue.
Maybe – just maybe – the Premier League content machine will keep rolling on. No crisis has successfully dragged it down before. Not the pandemic, not Roman Abramovich, not the Super League. But this is a significantly bigger test than any of those, and if we are to keep on with the day to day then at the very least we need Man City to fall away.
It’s vital, for the good of the show, that other story lines develop, because if City challenge for the league title this season we will have reached the limits of our suspended disbelief.
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