\u201cIt was tough,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was hard but we showed amazing character from back to front. So proud of everyone. [It\u2019s] important to stay strong mentally, stick together and do what you can do something about, and the thing we can do something about is to play good football and fight together. That\u2019s the only thing we can do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Strip away the context and he could be talking about an injury crisis, or perhaps the resignation of a manager or a suspension to a key player. The tropes are familiar: it was hard but we stuck together and so we prevailed. \u201cYou want to win games, it\u2019s as simple as that,\u201d he went on. \u201cPerform well, play good football and win games. This was a mental battle, [it\u2019s] never easy coming back from internationals.\u201d<\/p>\n
But of course this wasn\u2019t really about coming back from internationals; that\u2019s not what made this difficult for City. This was about the verdict of the independent panel looking into the charges brought against City, the fact that the club have been found guilty of the greatest act of sustained cheating<\/a> in the history of English football. Nobody knows what\u2019s coming next.<\/p>\n The gravity of the situation still seems to have not dawned on many in football. City, as is their right, continue to maintain their innocence and have appealed. The propaganda battle goes on. But this is no longer about whether the financial regulations were fair. If City had objected to the regulations they had every opportunity to raise objections and vote against them. They did not. They agreed to the regulations, and while everybody else played to them, they did not.<\/p>\n The excuse that they only spent what others did but that they operated under stricter controls because of a lack of historic success is not merely irrelevant but entirely bogus: in the nine years under investigation, City\u2019s net spending on transfers, before taking into account wages, was over \u00a31.2bn ($1.6bn), around 50% more than any other Premier League<\/a> side. And for all their talk of being proud disruptors, of rebels taking on the \u201cred cartel\u201d, that spending transformed City into the most dominant side English football has ever known, with six league titles in seven years. They are, precisely, an argument for why spending controls are necessary.<\/p>\n None of that, of course, is Haaland\u2019s fault. He is a footballer offered a very competitive salary to play alongside very good players for a very good manager for a club for which his father played. This is another of football\u2019s absurdities: it\u2019s always the manager and players who end up becoming the faces of the institution, being quizzed about things that have very little to do with them as the executives and directors responsible lurk away from public scrutiny.<\/p>\n \u201cMy message to the players since we were together three days ago, when they all came back from their national teams, has been quite clear,\u201d Enzo Maresca said. \u201cGuys, the noise will always be there so it\u2019s about how we learn to deal with the noise and it\u2019s our duty to make our noise. Our noise is to win games in the way we did today and to be happy.\u201d<\/p>\n Which on the one hand is absurd: nobody knows whether the three points City claimed at Anfield will still be theirs by Christmas. Nobody knows what division they will be playing in next season. Nobody knows how bad the sanction could be. And this is not some unfortunate event that has befallen City; this is the direct consequence of the actions of their directors. But on the other, what else can players and managers do? How else can they respond to this situation other than by being professional and trying to win games, even if none of it ultimately means anything?<\/p>\n
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