Manchester City have been found guilty of all the financial charges laid against them by the Premier League, and the club have lodged an appeal. The Football Association has warned that the verdict carries big integrity implications for the game. With no real precedent to work from and emotions still raw, the more difficult question is what should actually happen next.
The immediate response has come in two forms. The first is ridicule: a Sainsbury’s Instagram post reading “114 unexpected items in the bagging area”, relentless trolling from Domino’s Pizza, and late-night diatribes on X from Liam Gallagher, the most unhinged of which compares City to “Jesus prepared to die on the cross”. The second is a far harder-edged counteroffensive. While City pursued their appeal, Etihad Airways was threatening to sue the Premier League over the “damaging implications” of the verdict, and government officials from the United Arab Emirates were warning that the case could threaten diplomatic relations and billions of pounds of investment into the UK.
Writing in The Guardian, Jonathan Liew frames those three responses as essentially the work of a single entity, and treats the episode as a reminder of what happens when state actors control football clubs: even minor footballing decisions become matters of diplomacy, geopolitics and, potentially, conflict. Andy Burnham offered a defence of City’s ownership before the political cost of appearing to side with the club became apparent, and faced pressure over it.
Liew’s own proposal is deliberately personal rather than procedural, and rests on two principles. The first is that relitigating history — reassigning trophies and medals on the basis of a counterfactual — is an unserious solution, because it is one thing to say that what the world watched was not real and quite another to invent a different version of events. Jamie Carragher made a related point on Sky Sports: winning is less about silverware than about the moments, the memories, the aura of victory and the morning after, and those cannot be recovered. For City supporters, the Touré goal, the 6-1 at Old Trafford, the Agüero goal and the Kompany goal remain theirs.
The second principle is that any sanction should inflict maximum damage on City’s owners and as little as possible on City’s supporters. Liew accepts that fans shared in the proceeds and often defended the ownership in obnoxious and myopic ways, but argues they were also deceived, gaslit into believing the dream was real. Depriving one of the country’s biggest fanbases of its club, or forcing it out of existence at the bottom of the pyramid, would be doomed to fail — and, he notes, it is not going to happen in practice, because City’s commercial appeal uplifts the whole league and broadcast and commercial contracts would have to be redrawn.
One route that fits the bill is already available. The new football regulator has the power to strip rogue owners of their position and force them to sell. But that, too, has a flaw: market intelligence suggests City are worth around £4bn now, against roughly £200m when the Abu Dhabi United Group took over in 2008. A forced sale on those terms would let the perpetrators walk away with a 20-fold profit, much of it attributable to the cheating itself.
Instead, Liew argues, City should not be sold but taken back — requisitioned rather than offloaded, on the model of Chelsea, whose operations were briefly controlled by the government after sanctions were imposed on Roman Abramovich and he agreed to offload the club. That arrangement was surreal, exceptional and explicitly temporary, and it shows that the mechanism exists.
Other levers could be pulled if the political will were there. Manchester City council owns the freehold to the Etihad Stadium. A report by Tax Policy Associates has suggested the club may owe HMRC as much as £12m in unpaid tax over the Roberto Mancini contract, and the cross-party Treasury committee has urged HMRC to scrutinise the findings of the Premier League case. Every week City remain in their current ownership, Liew writes, is a week in which money flows from fans, broadcasters and sponsors into Abu Dhabi — which is why the ruling regime has a vested interest in dragging the process out.
Liew is explicit that none of this will happen: Abu Dhabi would sooner employ the world’s fifty best lawyers to sue Burnham for thirty years than hand over a prized asset for nothing. The value of the argument, he suggests, is what it says about the wider model. If anything good comes out of the case beyond the memes, it may be the recognition that English football’s ownership structures need radical reimagining, that a system built on the wholesale transfer of wealth from fans to owners is exploitation by another name, and that City are not the disease but the symptom.