Tony Pulis believes Enzo Maresca’s first job at Manchester City this week is to convince his players they are on their own — and that it does not matter.
Writing as a BBC Sport columnist, Pulis said his whole psychology with the squad would be built around one message: “No-one is going to like us, but we won’t care.” He explained that he loved being the underdog and loved proving people wrong, and that he would demand exactly that siege mentality now, from players and supporters alike, so that the club shows it respects itself on the field and in the stands irrespective of what is happening off it.
The immediate setting is Sunday’s trip to Anfield to face Liverpool. Pulis points out that City’s players will be coming back from international duty and going straight into an off-field fight that has turned into a media frenzy, all while preparing for one of the biggest fixtures of the season.
He frames the column around the case concerning the Premier League’s financial rules, writing that the club were found guilty of breaking them and referring to the consequences should that verdict be upheld. At the same time, he notes that City have remained firm in denying all charges. Pulis describes the allegations as relentless, with “finger-pointing from every Tom, Dick and Harry” jumping on the bandwagon to hammer a club that has dominated the Premier League for more than a decade, and says it feels as though every positive gained over the period in question and beyond has been smashed into oblivion.
Pulis is careful to stress that the players themselves have not been involved in any of the allegations about the club breaching the rules. Even so, he writes, they must understand that supporters at every away ground will be “baying for their blood”, and that City have become a team whose every appearance offers critics of all kinds — including what he calls frenzied media outlets — a chance to attack them.
His prescription for Maresca is twofold. First, the manager must reassure his squad that the club will not take a step back from defending its own position, nor the position of the players, staff and supporters. Once that is established, Pulis would expect every player to concentrate on what they are paid to do, which is win games, with no distractions, no questions unrelated to the matches ahead and no excuses about off-field events.
Beyond the Anfield fixture, Pulis uses the column to question whether the financial rules themselves are right. He argues that professional football at the top level is now dominated by massive financial investment, and that more attention should be paid to the fairness of the regulations. He notes that around a billion pounds is not unusually exchanged between clubs in England and around the world during a single transfer window, while individual top-level players are bought and sold for more than £100m.
In the same breath he highlights the other end of the market, where smaller academies are, in his words, plundered by bigger clubs. Those clubs can take the best young players for far smaller compensation fees, polish them and sell them on later for much more, without any Financial Fair Play rules governing how much they profit. Pulis asks whether that serves the good of the game or of the players involved.
He also points out that clubs have broken the FFP rules in place over many years of Premier League governance. Some, he is sure, have not been caught yet, while others have been and have been punished — and it keeps happening. That, he says, raises the question of whether the rules need to change, or whether attempting to change them risks pushing clubs to find new ways, or loopholes, around the financial shackles currently in place.
The money in the game today, Pulis writes, is extraordinary, with massive corporations, billionaires and even countries buying clubs and wanting to invest more and more in the product without being able to. He laments that the days of local business owners buying their local clubs are gone: in the Premier League, Tony Bloom at Brighton and Matthew Benham at Brentford are, in his view, the last men standing, while in the Championship the Coates family at Stoke City and Steve Gibson at Middlesbrough are among the few to have had a taste of the top flight.
Pulis acknowledges that top clubs will always have the financial power to stay at the top, but insists there must be a way for smart operators at clubs without the big bucks or big histories to play a leading role in the world’s leading league. He notes that Brighton, Bournemouth and Brentford have achieved success by being smart without the “big club” tag, and argues that the rules should reward all clubs for doing the right thing — giving everyone the chance to compete at the highest level.
Tony Pulis was speaking to BBC Sport’s Chris Bevan.