The Premier League returns this weekend into a landscape that no longer looks the way it did. Its serial champions, Manchester City, have been found guilty of all the Premier League charges brought over rule breaches — a verdict that recasts a decade of dominance as, on one reading of it, a sham supremacy. City maintain their complete innocence and deny all charges, and an appeal is still to be heard. Maresca has refused to confirm he would stay at the club if that appeal is lost.
The first fixture of this new period could hardly carry more weight. City go to Anfield on Sunday to face Liverpool, a fixture that has produced some of the defining moments of the modern English game and now arrives freighted with something else entirely. Liverpool have a sharper sense of grievance than most: they were deprived of league titles three times on the final day by a club that, in the phrase now doing the rounds, was colouring outside the lines.
If there is a first stage of football grief, it is the counterfactuals, and they are stark. Five league titles were won on the last day of the season. There was the 1-0 FA Cup final win over Stoke and the 6-0 FA Cup final win over Watford. Tottenham missed the Champions League by a single place four times, always in City’s slipstream, and Manchester United’s signing of Rasmus Højlund is among the deals now viewed through a different lens. Abroad, Inter lost a Champions League final by the narrowest margin to a club that appears, on this account, to have built its era out of cheating on its income; two years later Inter were thrashed by another nation-state-owned team, and Simone Inzaghi was moved on. He is working in Saudi Arabia now.
The money is part of the story. City spent nine years flooding the zone with government-backed transfer funds — €1.2bn across that period, miles out in front — and in doing so skewed the money supply in every league in Europe. The extra £20m disbursed at the last moment to drag Kevin De Bruyne out of the Bundesliga is offered as one illustration of how that worked. Nor is the reckoning confined to the past: three of City’s next 14 league opponents are clubs who have reserved the right to sue them.
Then there is the question of influence. Pep Guardiola’s genius as a coach is not in doubt, and it stands apart from the gradient of the playing field. But his method shaped the way children play park football and the way young coaches work, and the Football Association’s England DNA pathway was essentially a document predicated on his winning way. The method is still good, the detail unarguable, the tactical blueprint pure. The argument being made is that the ten years in which it was demonstrated in England were also supercharged by cheating.
City’s supporters are entitled to space for their own reckoning, having spent years being told a story about the profound transformation of the thing they love, and it is normal to believe what you are told. The club’s documentary series, A Beautiful Obsession, is a different watch now that the ending is known; its portrait of Guardiola staring at a whiteboard while the world turns beyond his line of vision reads less like a passion play and more like willed seclusion.
What happens next matters as much as what happened. The appeal is unresolved, and Andy Burnham’s intervention in the debate has been criticised as tone-deaf and oddly partial. But for all the delay and indecision, what is under way is the rule of law being applied — and the case is being made that the league’s regulatory powers should end up strong enough to ensure that no nation state, or state fund, however the wording is arranged, owns an English club again. The fear that English football is profoundly damaged by all this may yet prove wide of the mark.
There are still 33 rounds of Premier League games to play this season, and the game’s relentlessness is the quality that marks it out as indestructible. The period of rupture will pass, as these periods do. What will remain is the question the verdict has opened and the appeal may not close: what was real then, what is real now, and what will still be real later.