Manchester City have been found guilty, and English football is now beginning to reckon with what that verdict means. The charges concern a period running from 2009-10 to 2017-18, the years in which the club’s modern success was built. Thirty-five of the charges relate to a failure to cooperate with Premier League investigations between 2018 and 2023, and an appeal is expected to follow.
This is not yet the final truth, and that truth could still be a long way off. But if the guilty verdicts are upheld, the successes of the past decade and a half are tainted by what came before them. City’s 6-1 win at Old Trafford, Sergio Agüero’s 94th-minute goal that clinched the title in 2012, the 100-point season, the 14 successive wins that carried them to the 2018-19 title, the Treble of 2023 and the record four consecutive league titles all sit under that shadow. Without the earlier successes, the argument runs, City would never have been in the position to achieve what followed.
There is also the question of what happens to the honours themselves. Even where a club is stripped of a title, the authorities appear reluctant to reallocate it, and there are understandable reasons for that: if one team is streaking clear, the priorities of its rivals change. Awarding a league to a side because a rival chose to prioritise a cup or European campaign would feel just as wrong, and ersatz glory satisfies nobody.
The political dimension is unlikely to be separable from the sporting one. 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 the UAE made significant investments in Manchester. Yet it is hard to see how a systematic campaign of cheating over nine years could bring anything other than severe punishment.
For a sense of scale, consider the precedent set by Everton. A single breach in 2022, overspending the profitability and sustainability threshold by £19.5m, earned them a six-point deduction and an obligation to pay Burnley, who were relegated, £26m in damages plus £9m in interest. City’s offences are described as almost incalculably worse, and they failed to cooperate with the investigation. Forced relegation is not the only threat; there is also the potential for financial claims against the club, and not only from sides who missed out on titles during the period in question. Other clubs were denied European places, prize money was lost, and even relegated sides may argue City were a factor in their dropping out of the Premier League.
The knock-on effects extend beyond the years under scrutiny. Leicester narrowly missed Champions League qualification in 2020 and 2021; had City, who finished above them, not been artificially strengthened, might they have qualified, and might their subsequent difficulties look different? Less direct consequences are harder still to price: what a title, or simply another season in the Premier League, might have meant for a club’s, a manager’s or a player’s global reputation and their capacity to generate commercial income.
Somebody will eventually have to work out which 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. Marseille’s 1993 Champions League success remains on the record, but is inevitably undermined by the club being stripped of the Ligue 1 title that season for match-fixing.
The biggest cost may be the one hardest to calculate: emotional energy. The Agüero goal is arguably the most famous moment in Premier League history, and for many connected to City it must be the greatest surge of emotion they have experienced. Some City supporters have been trying to find ways to cope online, framing the verdict as conspiracy or irrelevance rather than the consequence of their owners’ actions. For everybody else there is a sense of being cheated, and not only by City. If the drama was not real, why should anyone care about this season, when an independent panel might one day decide it was not real either? Interest could wane and revenues could fall. That is a serious problem for a competition increasingly concerned with profit. But the alternative — not to act — would legitimise rule-breaking and reduce the game to a contest over who can afford the best lawyers. It is a painful path, and there could be lean years ahead, but it is the right one: if a sport cannot govern itself, and its regulations can be ignored by those wealthy enough, it is no longer a sport.