Manchester City remain top of the Premier League, but the case hanging over the club continues to frame how the season is being discussed. Max Rushden’s column for The Guardian captures that mood ahead of City’s trip to Liverpool on Sunday — a fixture he calls the perfect place and the perfect time for the saga to play out, against the side City have pipped to the title by a point or two three times since, in his words, the cheating began. He notes that two of those titles came after the cheating officially finished.
The column opens away from football. Rushden was interviewing Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley on TalkSport about an upcoming big band tour, playing some of the band’s music and discussing a career that has included time with Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Football intruded: Hadley supports Arsenal, which prompted a brief exchange about Mikel Arteta and Leeds’ weekend fixture, and he raised Billy Bremner while suggesting Rushden and co-host Charlie Baker are too young to remember the midfielder playing. Rushden admits he was delighted to be called young.
Turning to City, Rushden asked Hadley whether the league leaders would end the season bottom of the table. Hadley sidestepped neatly, saying “you just never know what’s going to happen – the world is a crazy place” before pivoting back to the Christmas catalogue on his tour. Rushden jokes that City manager Enzo Maresca could escape difficult questions the same way, by organising a 20-date big band tour so he can talk about bringing the house down with a Christmas medley instead. Even so, he writes that the magnitude of the story makes otherwise routine press conferences genuinely interesting.
Rushden is not alone in arguing that the story will not produce a single settled record. On Thursday’s Football Weekly, Nicky Bandini pointed to Italy, saying Serie A has two histories depending on where you stand on Juventus and Calciopoli. “You’re going to have one group of supporters who are absolutely certain they didn’t win these trophies legitimately, and therefore they don’t count, and you’re going to have one group of supporters who don’t care and are going to claim those trophies whether or not they get taken away from them,” she said. Bandini described it as the grim future lying ahead for the Premier League: two alternate histories, as in Italy, where the number of titles Juventus have won is repeated differently by different sources because one side or another will not accept the judgment even after the final appeals are exhausted.
Rushden lands on his own position: he is minded to side with those who would strip City of the titles but not hand them to anyone else. His reasoning is that football is not a simple, reversible ledger. Had City not signed a given player, they would have signed another, and that player would not have gone elsewhere; games, results, managerial hirings and firings and the lives of the people involved would all have diverged. He frames it as Sliding Doors meeting Biff’s Almanac, and asks what it would mean for Sergio Agüero’s life after his 2011 goal if that goal were declared not to be real. The centimetres matter too, he writes, wondering what would have happened had City been unable to afford John Stones and settled for Victor Lindelöf — and how vital Stones’ extra one centimetre was when he cleared the ball off the line against Liverpool at the Etihad in January 2019.
Then there is geopolitics, which Rushden calls the reason we fell in love with football. If the sanctions are not of the highest severity, he writes, it is hard not to wonder what has happened in the corridors of power — and whether the UAE would really refuse to scrap investment in a tech hub between Cambridge and Oxford if City were relegated to League Two. He calls it ridiculous that the two are even connected.
While everyone waits for the punishment, which Rushden imagines dropping on a quiet Friday, perhaps during the next international break, City still have matches to play. He expects pundits to reach for “galvanise” a lot and for plenty of talk about an “us against the world mentality”. He wonders which player will be first to tell Erling Haaland to look forward to Salford away next year, jokes that Enzo Fernández is probably frantically checking for a relegation release clause in the contract he signed in the summer, and notes that Elliot Anderson has Dominik Szoboszlai and Florian Wirtz to worry about instead.
Rushden says he sympathises with most City supporters — though not the radio phone-in caller who compared the rule-breaking to Emmeline Pankhurst’s fight for women’s suffrage. That complete loss of objectivity, he writes, is part of the beauty of football and sport. At his most pious he would save his ire for the owners, who he argues dragged the club into this and should go, while acknowledging that even that would be an almighty mess to untangle. He ends by asking himself whether, if he were City, he would really swap the highs of this journey for finishing 12th every season for the past 15 years.