So it turns out none of that was real. Nothing that happened in English football between 2009-10 and 2017-18 that involved Manchester City actually happened. City beating Manchester United 6-1 at Old Trafford? Fake. Sergio Agüero’s 94th-minute winner to clinch the title in 2012? A figment of the imagination. That season City reached 100 points? Bobby Ewing dreamed it in the shower.
Without those successes, City wouldn’t have been in the position they were for the past eight seasons (and 35 of the charges relate to a failure to cooperate with Premier League investigations between 2018 and 2023). The 14 successive wins that took them to the league title in 2018-19 would not have happened without what went before. Neither would the Treble of 2023 or the record four league titles in a row.
So while it may turn out those successes did indeed happen, they are tainted by what went before. “We’re not really here”? Turns out none of us have been for quite some time.
There will be an appeal. This is not yet the final truth, which could still be a long way off. But it may turn out that Jürgen Klopp was a lot more successful than anybody thought, that Brendan Rodgers and Ole Gunnar Solskjær are title-winning managers.
Probably not, because the authorities seem reluctant, even if titles are stripped from a club, to reallocate those titles – and understandably: if one team is streaking clear, priorities for others change. None of this feels right, but it would feel off if a team won a league because a rival had chosen to prioritise a cup or European campaign at the expense of an apparently unwinnable title. Ersatz glory satisfies nobody.
If the guilty verdicts are upheld, the consequences will be profound. There will be appeals for mitigation. There are wheels within wheels. Bloomberg reported last month that the government had been warned of potential negative consequences for UK-United Arab Emirates relations should the verdict go against City.
Andy Burnham was mayor during a period when UAE made significant investments in Manchester and spoke to the UAE president, Sheikh Mohammed, within a week of becoming prime minister in July. But it is hard to see how a systematic campaign of cheating over a period of nine years could bring anything except severe punishment.
Pep Guardiola and the Manchester City chair, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, in May 2018 after winning the league. Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA
Everton’s one breach in 2022, overspending the profitability and sustainability threshold by £19.5m, earned them a six-point deduction and they had to pay Burnley, who were relegated, £26m in damages plus £9m in interest. City’s offences are almost incalculably worse and they failed to cooperate with the investigation.
It is not just that they could be forcibly relegated; it is that potential for financial claims against City and not just from those sides who missed out on titles during the ghost years. Other sides were denied European places. Prize money was lost. Even relegated sides may argue City were a factor in them dropping out of the Premier League.
There are knock-on effects to the years after the period in question. Leicester, for instance, narrowly missed out on Champions League qualification in 2020 and 2021. Would they have qualified had City, who finished above them, not been artificially juiced? Had they played in the Champions League then, would they be in the mess they are in now? Then there are the less direct consequences: what might it have meant for a club’s – or a manager’s or a player’s – global reputation and thus their capacity to generate commercial income, had they won the league or remained in the Premier League for a further season?
Somehow, somebody will have to calculate which, if any of those claims, are worth pursuing and what they might be worth. The financial cost to City, irrespective of the official sanction, could be crippling. When City were found guilty of illegal payments to players in 1906 and forced to sell off the bulk of their squad, it took them 30 years to recover; when Sunderland were similarly convicted in 1957, they were relegated for the first time the following season and have never retained their previous status.
But the biggest cost, perhaps, is the one that is hardest to calculate: emotional energy. The Agüero goal was arguably the most famous moment in Premier League history. What does it mean to say it didn’t happen? Even if City are not stripped of the 2012 title, it is tainted. Marseille’s 1993 Champions League success remains on the record, but is inevitably undermined by being stripped of the Ligue 1 title that season for match-fixing.
That emotion, the euphoria of City fans, the despair of United fans, the amazement of everybody else, cannot be dismissed. For many connected to City, it must be the greatest surge of emotion they haveexperienced. Little wonder several City fans online have been desperately trying to find a way to cope, pretending this is conspiracy or irrelevance, rather than the consequence of the actions of their club’s owners.
Manchester City’s Sergio Agüero scored the goal that sealed their first Premier League title in 2012 but, given the guilty verdicts, it may have counted for nothing. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
Those actions are a consequence of the Premier League’s laissez-faire attitude to club ownership, which itself sits in the context of a world where anything can be sold off to foreign states or private equity. The fans’ anger is understandable enough, even if it is often misdirected.
For everybody else? There’s a sense of being cheated, and not just by City. This great human drama wasn’t real? What about now? Why should I care about this season when an independent panel might decide in 17 years it wasn’t real either? Will interest wane, revenues drop?
For the Premier League, that is a big issue – a potential problem whenever a competition becomes concerned with profit; revenue generation and sporting justice do not necessarily go hand in hand. But what is the alternative? Not to act is to legitimise rule-breaking, to say the game is not about technical excellence or tactical coherence, but about who can afford the best lawyers.
It is a painful route the Premier League has chosen. There could be lean years ahead, consequences as yet unimagined. But it is also the right path, because if a sport cannot govern itself, if its regulations can simply be ignored if you’re wealthy enough, it is no longer a sport.