Manchester City’s 3-0 win at Liverpool on Sunday would ordinarily be the kind of result a club builds a season on. Erling Haaland’s assessment of it afterwards sounded like something else entirely.
“It was tough,” Haaland said. “It was hard but we showed amazing character from back to front. So proud of everyone. [It’s] important to stay strong mentally, stick together and do what you can do something about, and the thing we can do something about is to play good football and fight together. That’s the only thing we can do.” He went on: “You want to win games, it’s as simple as that. Perform well, play good football and win games. This was a mental battle, [it’s] never easy coming back from internationals.”
Strip away the context and that is the familiar vocabulary of an injury crisis, a managerial resignation or a key suspension: it was hard, we stuck together, we prevailed. But, as Jonathan Wilson writes, this was not really about the international break. The difficulty lay in the verdict of the independent panel looking into the charges brought against City — a verdict Wilson characterises as finding the club guilty of the greatest act of sustained cheating in the history of English football. Nobody knows what is coming next.
City, as is their right, continue to maintain their innocence and have appealed, and the wider argument over the regulations goes on. But for Wilson this is no longer a question of whether the financial rules were fair. Had City objected to them, he argues, they had every opportunity to raise objections and vote against them. They did not. They agreed to the regulations and, while everybody else played to them, they did not.
The defence that City only spent what their rivals did but operated under stricter controls because of a lack of historic success is, in Wilson’s words, not merely irrelevant but entirely bogus. Across the nine years under investigation, he writes, City’s net spending on transfers, before wages are taken into account, was over £1.2bn — around 50% more than any other Premier League side. For all the talk of proud disruptors and rebels taking on the “red cartel”, that outlay turned City into the most dominant side English football has ever known, with six league titles in seven years. They are, he argues, precisely a case for why spending controls are necessary.
None of that is Haaland’s fault. He is a footballer paid a very competitive salary to play alongside very good players under a very good manager at a club for which his father played. It is another of the game’s absurdities that the manager and the players end up as the public faces of an institution, quizzed about matters that have very little to do with them, while the executives and directors responsible stay away from scrutiny.
The message given to the players by Enzo Maresca has followed a similar theme. “My message to the players since we were together three days ago, when they all came back from their national teams, has been quite clear,” he said. “Guys, the noise will always be there so it’s about how we learn to deal with the noise and it’s our duty to make our noise. Our noise is to win games in the way we did today and to be happy.”
On one level, Wilson accepts, that is absurd. Nobody knows whether the three points City claimed at Anfield will still be theirs by Christmas. Nobody knows what division they will be playing in next season, or how bad the sanction could be. And this is not some unfortunate event that has befallen the club; it is the direct consequence of the actions of their directors. On another level, what else can players and managers do? The only available response is to be professional and try to win games, even if none of it ultimately means anything.
What this emphatically is not, though, is just another football crisis from which City can move on by winning matches. It is a crisis unlike anything English football has ever known — and one with which football’s language is struggling to cope.