{"id":652209,"date":"2026-10-12T07:12:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T07:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/652209\/"},"modified":"2026-10-12T07:12:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T07:12:09","slug":"no-longer-forced-to-live-a-lie-city-fans-embraced-their-club-for-what-it-truly-is-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/652209\/","title":{"rendered":"No longer forced to live a lie, City fans embraced their club for what it truly is \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The victorious, banana-festooned Manchester City<\/a> section at Anfield was a darkly magnificent sight. As the players and fans celebrated, they were like the crew of a pirate ship, brazenly revelling in their plunder.<\/p>\n

The days of living a lie are over. Finally City can openly be who they really are.<\/p>\n

Many of those fans have spent years furiously insisting, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that their club had never broken the rules. The mental contortions must have been tiring.<\/p>\n

Now that the verdict is in and City have been found guilty<\/a> of organising the biggest cheating scandal in English football history, the same fans have flipped to insisting that it doesn\u2019t matter that they are guilty. Actually, they are exulting in their renegade status. They taunted Anfield with a song that declared: \u201cCheating bastards, we know what we are.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t break the rules\u201d was always a tough position to take seriously, given what we all know about City. \u201cYes, we broke the rules \u2013 but they deserved to be broken!\u201d is a position you can get behind.<\/p>\n

The message coming loud and clear from City\u2019s fans and players is: it was all worth it. They won title after title during the years for which they\u2019ve been found guilty, they kept winning titles in the later years not covered by the investigation, they\u2019re still winning. This is the Premier League<\/a>, where crime pays.<\/p>\n

On Friday, Enzo Maresca claimed he still absolutely trusts his employers, despite the text of the recent judgment suggesting that might not be very wise. Maresca even said that his representatives had never discussed the question of the looming 115 charges in the negotiations to take him to City (negotiations which began while he was still the manager of Chelsea).<\/p>\n

It was Friday when he introduced the word \u201cnoise\u201d to the discourse and at Anfield, he repeated the word 16 times in a 5\u00bd minute post-match press conference. It was one of those moments when a word gets repeated so much you find yourself beginning to lose your grasp on what it means. <\/p>\n

\"LiverpoolLiverpool fans hold up a banner taking aim at Manchester City and the financial scandal enveloping the club. Photograph: Paul Ellis\/AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n

\u201cMy message is that the noise will be there because, if I say no the noise is not there, [it] is not true. The noise will be there. <\/p>\n

\u201cSo it\u2019s how we learn to deal with the noise, but at the same time it\u2019s our duty to make our noise \u2013 and our noise is to win games in the way we won today and be happy at the end of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNoise\u201d is something sportspeople often say they are ignoring and they usually mean things like media froth, excessive criticism or praise, speculation about their chances of winning or losing, \u201cpressure\u201d, etc.<\/p>\n

You have to remind yourself that Maresca is using this word, \u201cnoise\u201d, to refer to his club being found guilty of the biggest systematic cheating scandal in English football history.<\/p>\n

Some ex-City players and coaches are now saying that whatever the final outcome, \u201cthey can never take our memories away\u201d. And maybe it does give them genuine pleasure to think back on all the titles they won on easy mode, with Abu Dhabi\u2019s thumb on the scales, cantering away from all the poor saps who were playing by the rules.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Tension, \u2018cheat\u2019 banners and inflatable bananas: Manchester City\u2019s welcome to AnfieldOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Outside the defiant banana-waving City pirate bubble, those titles no longer mean anything to anybody.<\/p>\n

In the 40-page document giving details of the judgment against Manchester City, a table catches the eye. The first column shows Manchester City\u2019s reported sponsorship income every year from 2009\/10 to 2017\/18. The second shows the actual amount of said income that was paid by Abu Dhabi sponsors. The third column shows the amount of money that the club\u2019s owners, Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), paid in to make up the difference.<\/p>\n

\"LiverpoolLiverpool fans made clear their feelings towards Manchester City before and during Sunday’s Premier League match at Anfield. Photograph: Paul Ellis\/AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n

We see that ADUG topped up the sponsorship income by \u00a322.5 million in 2010, \u00a328.5 million in 2011, \u00a370.75 million in 2012.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting is that the top-up sums just keep getting bigger. \u00a3107 million in 2015. \u00a3120 million in 2016. \u00a3129 million in 2017. \u00a3134 million in 2018.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s where the table cuts off, as the recently-concluded investigation did not go beyond the 2017-18 season. (The Premier League announced the investigation in December 2018, following the Spiegel\/Football Leaks publication of City\u2019s internal emails).<\/p>\n

We are left to wonder: what happened in 2019? Are we to assume that City abruptly changed their whole way of doing business that summer \u2013 that ADUG\u2019s contributions went from \u00a3134 million in 2018 to \u00a30 in 2019, that everything from that point on was totally legitimate and above board?<\/p>\n

In the absence of the sort of evidence Rui Pinto provided on the earlier period, we can only observe that City\u2019s reported sponsorship income continued to grow and grow post-2018. In 2024-25 they reported the highest sponsorship income in world football: \u00a34m more than Real Madrid, \u00a3109 million more than Manchester United, \u00a3151 million more than Arsenal. A truly extraterrestrial performance by the hardworking commercial department.<\/p>\n

That City ran away with the game at Anfield<\/a> only after Liverpool were reduced to 10 men following Chris Kavanagh\u2019s decision to send off Ryan Gravenberch only heightened the pleasure for the City fans.<\/p>\n

As Erling Haaland clubbed in the opener, you had to wonder again, why were City the only club clever enough to sign him for \u00a351 million from Dortmund? Rivals only have themselves to blame for once again being outsmarted by \u201cthe Apple of football\u201d.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, it doesn\u2019t take much these days to outsmart Liverpool<\/a>, a club that has been run in a clownish fashion for the last couple of years. Who spends \u00a3230 million on Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz, then appoints a manager who plays 100mph rushball that doesn\u2019t suit either of them?<\/p>\n

The supposedly \u201cPremier League proven\u201d Isak is actually the bigger of the two flops, but he gets less criticism because he plays fewer games.<\/p>\n

Liverpool at least will get most of their money back on Wirtz, who will go to Bayern and be a superstar. It\u2019s clear that joining Liverpool in the summer of 2025 was the wrong move at the wrong time.<\/p>\n

Still, it could be worse. He could have joined City. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The victorious, banana-festooned Manchester City section at Anfield was a darkly magnificent sight. As the players and fans…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,7520,1547,8579,1102,112],"class_list":["post-652209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-ken-early","tag-liverpool-fc","tag-manchester-city","tag-premier-league","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}