Manchester City’s era of dominance under Pep Guardiola is being reassessed in the harshest possible light. With guilty verdicts now attached to the sham contracts that underpinned the club’s rise, the trophies, the trebles and the records are being read less as proof of genius and more as the product of an advantage bought rather than earned. The Premier League’s position is that City cheated for nearly a decade, and that claim now sits over everything the club achieved.
The question was first asked out loud in May 2019, and was drowned out. An hour after City had beaten Watford 6-0 in the FA Cup final to complete a domestic treble, Rob Harris of the Associated Press stood up in the Wembley press room and asked Guardiola whether he had ever received two salaries, after information had entered the public domain suggesting Roberto Mancini, one of his predecessors, had taken a second salary from Abu Dhabi. A City press officer cut in: “We’re not going here, we’re really just not going there.” Guardiola offered no simple denial — only a long, painful pause and a stare. At the time, success drowned out every other noise; the treble winners were, by definition, in the right.
That same question has now caught up with the club. A clip has been circulating of Harris, now of Sky News, confronting Ferran Soriano, City’s chief executive and Guardiola’s key man through that era. Harris put it plainly: the Premier League maintains City cheated for nearly a decade, so was all this success based on sham contracts? There was no moral high ground to retreat to and no glare in return. “Thank you, thank you,” Soriano said, before a mute, fumbling exit.
This is not City’s first reckoning with the rules. The club served a two-year ban from the Champions League for a serious breach of UEFA’s financial fair play rules, a sanction later overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Guardiola’s conclusion at the time — “We didn’t break the rules. We played the same rules as all the clubs in the Premier League” — looked questionable even then, given that the time-barring of offences was central to the CAS decision. On Wednesday, in his first statement on the current matter, Guardiola said he would get through it alongside the club and its fans, sticking together.
The scale of what was spent to build the “Pep supremacy” is central to the case against it. During the period embraced by the charges, City’s net transfer spend was almost £400m more than Manchester United’s in second place and five times that of Liverpool and Arsenal, according to Transfermarkt. Between 2016 and 2018, the key years of construction, they massively outspent every rival. They then won the league on the final day or by a single point three times — margins that make the argument about bought advantages difficult to ignore. Even small details lean that way, such as an extra £25m found for Kevin De Bruyne.
Attention now turns to who knew what. Soriano is bound up in the story from the start: in leaked emails published by Der Spiegel, he wrote, “We will need to fight this, and do it in a way that is not visible.” His record before City has been picked over — he was at Barcelona during the alleged, unproved and time-barred refereeing scandal but was not implicated or punished, and he was at Air Spain when it collapsed but was cleared of any wrongdoing. Guardiola, meanwhile, had a deeply personal relationship with the chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the pair shown whispering together in a recent Prime documentary. Above them sits the owner, Sheikh Mansour.
The fallout has reached beyond the boardroom. Roy Keane has told City’s players to throw their medals in the bin, rival clubs feel relegation to the Championship would not be enough, and Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has admitted concern at the prospect of the club losing its owners. For Guardiola, the stakes are personal: his life’s work and reputation are entwined with a decade at a club where, the argument now runs, much of that time was spent under a cloud of sham contracts. He can only double down and ride it to the end — “We will get through this together,” he says — towards a destination nobody yet knows.