Man City’s disgrace means this is a sham Premier League season

0Manchester City, who are top of the Premier League, could be punished significantly this season – Getty Images /Marc AtkinsOne certainty amid Anfield’s feral cauldron is that somebody, undaunted by the chants or the whistles or the potential blizzard of fake banknotes, will declare that it is time to focus on the football. It is amongst the game’s most reliably thought-terminating clichés, used whenever a subject becomes too uncomfortable or legally sensitive.One certainty amid Anfield’s feral cauldron is that somebody, undaunted by the chants or the whistles or the potential blizzard of fake banknotes, will declare that it is time to focus on the football. It is amongst the game’s most reliably thought-terminating clichés, used whenever a subject becomes too uncomfortable or legally sensitive.

With Manchester City, already treating the most damning verdict in top-flight history as a mere punctuation mark in their lust for litigation, that point might arrive sooner than we think. Except in this case, even the pitch offers no refuge. For when the cheating has been so systematic, and the top-up funding from Abu Dhabi so wildly inflated, nobody can be sure what the football itself even means.

“Sham”: that is the word that now clings to City like tar. It appears eight times in the independent panel’s core conclusions against them, describing everything from their sponsorship deals to the “Fordham arrangement”, the circular image rights scheme that has been exposed as just another front for their Gulf benefactors. So, if City’s modern dynasty is all built on sham schemes, does it not logically follow that they are a sham club? And that the Premier League, which they dominated thanks to commercial revenues artificially pumped up by more than £900m, is effectively a sham competition?

As an occasion of pure white heat, City’s visit to Liverpool on Sunday will be unmissable, a perfect encapsulation of the molten fury they can expect on the road from now until sanctions day. But the game’s significance in strictly sporting terms is harder to measure. On the one hand, City look as ominous as ever, sitting back at the summit after five wins out of five and in the form to inflict further pain on a Liverpool side struggling for momentum under Andoni Iraola. All of it, though, feels vulnerable to review, even erasure.

What does it matter if City remain unbeaten at Christmas or beyond, given the eventual punishment could be so savage as to render these results null and void? Deductions of 60, 80, perhaps 100 points are being openly discussed, reducing all that we see on Sunday to a phantom contest.

With the Sword of Damocles hanging over them, City continue to redraw parameters for shamelessness. Enzo Maresca was interviewed by the club’s in-house TV channel, and suffice to say it fell some way short of Frost/Nixon. After a few pleasantries about his restful international break – really, nothing else happened to disrupt his calm? – the manager and his inquisitor settled on portraying the near-universal condemnation of City as “noise”. Initially, the club had the gall to belittle the panel’s decision as an “opinion”, despite having thrown a squadron of silks at trying and failing to secure their desired outcome. Now they disparage it as “noise”, as if the unmasking of industrial-scale malfeasance were just irksome static in the background.

Unfortunately, even the Prime Minister has been suckered by City’s PR trickery, only calling for them to face the consequences “if wrongdoing has been established”. Except it has been established, on an eye-watering scale, as the commission found City guilty of all financial charges as well as calling some of their witnesses dishonest. Do we say, the moment after someone is convicted of a crime, “if he is found guilty”? The caveat is nonsensical. And yet City have persuaded their acolytes that their appeal is some crucial element of the process before guilt can be decided upon, when in reality it is anything but.

Maresca’s first press conference back was a waste of time, not deviating an inch from the prepared line that he trusted the club and that victory on appeal was a fait accompli. Plus, he kept parroting the notion that he and his team “could only control the football side”. It seemed not to occur to him that it was on the “football side” that a major part of City’s gigantic fraud was perpetrated, shredding any semblance of a level playing field through an acquisitive Gulf state’s endless sovereign wealth. Sport does not exist in isolation from the machinations designed to manipulate it. That is why all City’s achievements of the Sheikh Mansour era come with an asterisk, and why even this nascent Premier League campaign is wreathed in fog.

To think, City vs Liverpool was celebrated as the aesthetic apex of the English game. Those duels between Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola became appointment viewing, exercises in supreme sophistication, to the extent that the two managers spontaneously embraced after one gripping 2-2 draw in 2022.

It is impossible to perceive their rivalry through this prism any longer. Watching City scale the heights in that period is rather like watching Lance Armstrong rocketing up some hors catégorie climb while barely out of breath. You had no idea at the time how they were doing it, you were fairly sure it was not legal, and now that the deception has been laid bare you have no desire to see it ever again.

Liverpool fans believe, quite reasonably, that they have been swindled out of their own age of supremacy. Their club finished second behind City in 2014, after a season when their rivals’ owners injected an additional £111.5m, almost seven times the genuine sponsorship amount. And during the phase when City refused to co-operate with the Premier League investigation, Klopp engineered two of the finest title quests on record, amassing 97 points in 2018-19 and 92 points in 2021-22, only for Liverpool to finish runners-up to the sky-blue behemoth both times.

Their resentment over those near-misses is too searing to be assuaged by the simple reallocation of silverware. It is a sense of injustice that demands to be translated, for one afternoon at least, into merciless mockery.

Too many managers are pulling their punches, perhaps wary of antagonising City or Guardiola. So what a relief that Ian Holloway, at Swindon Town in League Two – a level to which City could find themselves demoted very soon – gives voice to the rage this story has unleashed. “I lost,” he said, of facing City as Blackpool manager in 2010, “because we weren’t quite good enough. A team was allowed to cheat. For me, it’s all too late now. But I would absolutely take everything away from them and make them start again. It’s a disgrace, and they’re still not owning up to it. I would throw them out. Get lost. How dare you ruin what’s part of our DNA in this country?”

As a howl of raw indignation, it takes some beating. And it is one that should chill City, if they have any soul left, to their core.