The unanswerable questions left by Manchester City’s distortion of English football
· Yahoo Sports
There have been moments over the past 10 days, most notably concerning the aggression of Manchester City’s response, when people in football have barely been able to believe what they’re seeing.
That’s perhaps only fitting given how this case has distorted the perspective of an entire era of English football history, right up to the uncertainty of how any appeal may go.
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A core question is how “real” it was.
You get a sense of how deep the poison seeping out of all of this goes when you start this process of trying to re-assess how different that football history might have been if you remove the era built on City’s cheating. It isn’t just that there are so many counterfactuals but also so many layers of complexity to each of them.
Would Jurgen Klopp (left) have been the defining manager of his generation if Manchester City hadn’t broken Premier League rules? (PA Archive)Take the last team to finish second to City but haven’t won a title. Since Arsenal exorcised a ghost last season and Arne Slot partly fulfilled Jurgen Klopp’s legacy in 2024-25 season – even if they would both argue it should have been so much more – that brings you back to Manchester United in 2020-21.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer would have been a champion and not sacked mere months later, likely transforming the outlook of the modern United.
Except, would they have even been second if Klopp’s Liverpool had not exhausted themselves trying to beat City over the previous two seasons?
But would Klopp have even been at Anfield had Brendan Rodgers won City’s league in 2013-14? Might Sir Alex Ferguson have left earlier had he won the 2011-12 title, ensuring the landscape-shifting moment that was his retirement had a completely different effect?
These are just the top details, since they involve the title, but it can be seen how trying to consider all of this quickly becomes a mind-bending exercise.
What would Everton look like? Would Leicester City have gone into such a tailspin had they got back into the Champions League?
It’s not just that it’s hard to know how to feel about it all, but that the perspective on it has been scrambled. The effect of City’s cheating spilled out in so many directions over years.
That matters for many more reasons than just potential blank spaces on the Premier League’s roll of honour. It’s about the memories and experiences that really matter to the game.
So many of Manchester City’s achievements have been called into question (Getty)And this actually informs one of the most dismal legacies of this entire scandal. An entire era of football has been toxified, poisoned. How real was any of it if the scandal cascades everywhere?
Above all, there’s the club itself.
The Premier League outcome means we can finally be blunt about this - pending appeal - but there was always the sense that City’s success wasn’t “real”.
Aside from feeling so sterile due to the very nature of the ownership, it obviously provoked questions about the foundation of it all. How, as has been asked many times, could City so quickly have revenues comparable to Real Madrid’s.
A series of major trophy wins would be met, outside City fans, with… apathy. We could see it in the numbers.
Do the careers of Manchester City’s best players now have to be re-appraised? (PA Wire)The lack of wider meaning even ensured City became “failsafe” winners to opposition fans. Better you had a champion that meant little than a rival winning a trophy that meant everything.
A generation of successes felt hollow.
And what of the careers of so many great players, who simply played to the best of their ability?
A true talent like Kevin De Bruyne devoted his prime years to this. Is his legacy distorted? How does he feel now?
He knows he played the games and wore the medals, sure, but everyone else knows the context of those performances.
And while those divine through balls and thunderous strikes still happened, would they have happened in the same way if City couldn’t afford the same quality of players alongside him. Or, as it was put on the SecondCaptains podcast, Paul Dickov there rather than Sergio Aguero.
Sergio Aguero might never have signed for Manchester City if not for rule breaches (PA Wire)All of this is up in the air. We can’t believe in what we’ve seen in the same way.
The integral integrity of the game, that you can trust what happens on the pitch, has been broken.
There have still been “real” effects in much more fundamental ways, mind. As has happened at every stage of this story, debate about the scandal has devolved into debate about the rules being broken. There has since been a conspicuous push to cast City as revolutionary disruptors of the established order. It is surprisingly widespread, but of course nonsense.
City became the order.
If you go from the last season covered by the investigation, and the first of Pep Guardiola’s success, in 2017-18, City subjected English football to a more intense period of domination than it had ever known.
Among the feats achieved were: six titles in seven years, a four-in-a-row, two different trebles and a 100-point season.
Khaldoon Al Mubarak, Chairman of Manchester City, and Pep Guardiola celebrate with the Premier League trophy (Getty)None of this had ever been done before. And this a mere eight years after being basket-case also-rans.
That didn’t level the field. It did the opposite. It raised the financial threshold required to compete. Clubs had to spend more to get there.
None of this is to deny football has a lot of problems with competitive balance but this was the opposite of a solution. It made the problems much worse. Just one team was regularly winning rather than three or four.
This had other real effect, too. Inflation, of transfer fees and wages, fed into inflation of ticket prices. There is a direct link to this and fans having to pay more.
Above anything, though, it was just another modern illustration of the super-wealthy winning. Except, in this case, it wasn’t even a billionaire or another big club.
It was as high a power as you can get: an autocratic state with an oil economy.
Abu Dhabi’s power is such that this does have some potential to throw a new government into crisis. Andy Burnham’s ill-chosen words on the crisis, already clarified twice, have invited a lot of focus on his relationship to the emirate from his time as mayor of Manchester.
Andy Burnham has been dragged into the Manchester CIty saga (PA Archive)That’s as real as you can get.
Right at the core of all this, though, there is still a real club; a valuable piece of cultural infrastructure that warrants protection. It could be argued they are the biggest victims of all. Pending the outcome of this, the leadership could be criticised for cultural vandalism.
City fans are obviously going through a very difficult time processing all of this, and even their thoughts as regards the owners.
A survey of everything from social media to media discussions shows a range of reactions back and forth.
This is inevitable, from what psychologists like Martha Newson describe as “identity fusion”. The connection to the club is so profound that people feel it personally.
And now, there’s a threat to that, that it might never be the same again.
That is why, if this outcome does end up as a worst-case scenario for the club, it is important for people to start thinking of some kind of off-ramp; that a separation is made between City the club and this ownership.
That is what happened with the Super League, after all.
Much of that is dependent on whether City can win any appeal. Even if they somehow manage to overturn this decision, though, it is going to be even harder to overturn public perception.
The effect of that is now all too real. A lot of people have seen enough.