The independent commission’s finding that Manchester City breached all the Premier League charges brought against them has reopened an unavoidable question: what should become of the trophies? In his column, Jonathan Wilson makes the case that the record books should simply be left blank, with the empty spaces standing both as a rebuke to an era of greed and as a tribute to the Premier League’s pursuit of justice.
Wilson begins with the 2014 League Cup final, where Sunderland led Manchester City 1-0 at half-time. Yaya Touré equalised with a casually brilliant 30-yard clip 10 minutes after the break, and City went on to win 3-1. By the commission’s account, City were at that time involved in a prolonged and calculated act of cheating, while leaks published by Der Spiegel suggested Touré was being paid via a dual contract designed to disguise exactly how much City were spending. Although the precise details were left to the appendices, the commission’s report refers to payments “not recorded in an employment contract … but instead recorded in a consultancy agreement”.
For Sunderland, the stakes went beyond a narrow defeat. Had they won, they would not merely have ended a 41-year wait for a trophy but would have qualified for the following season’s Europa League. Wilson is careful not to overstate the counterfactual: it is possible the strain of the extra games would have led to relegation in 2015, rather than the more familiar sequence of sacking a manager — in this case Gus Poyet — midway through the season and surviving thanks to a bump under his successor, Dick Advocaat. It is equally possible, he suggests, that the greater exposure of European football and the surge of positivity generated by unexpected silverware would have brought Premier League consolidation, stability and semi-regular European qualification.
Should Sunderland feel cheated? Wilson’s answer is an emphatic yes — in the same way that those who finished second behind Lance Armstrong should feel cheated, as should Liverpool and Arsenal over the League Cup finals of 2016 and 2018, Stoke over the 2011 FA Cup final, Manchester United over the Premier League titles of 2012 and 2018, Liverpool in 2014, and every club that played in the same competitions as City between 2009 and 2018. But he treats that as a separate question from whether trophies should be reallocated, and here he is open about the subjectivity involved. Speaking for himself as a Sunderland supporter, he would not want the 2014 League Cup handed to his club. Having never seen Sunderland win a major trophy, he wants such a moment to be pure — the kind of images remembered down the generations, like the highlights of 1973: Ian Porterfield’s goal, Jim Montgomery’s save and Bob Stokoe’s celebratory skip across the pitch in mac and trilby. The arithmetic of trophies won, he argues, matters far less than the experience of winning and the memories and comradeship it provokes. Glory denied cannot be rectified a generation later by an independent commission, however august.
Awarding titles to rivals strikes him as even less satisfactory. In 2017-18, he notes, the league was effectively over by the end of January with City 15 points clear. As City went on to amass 100 points, there was little point in the four sides behind them — Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Tottenham, separated by five points — exerting themselves to rein City in. Their priorities changed: United, Chelsea and Spurs all reached the FA Cup semi-finals, while Liverpool got to the Champions League final. In those circumstances, handing the title to second-placed United would seem not just empty but arbitrary.
That, though, does not mean City should keep what they won. They won those titles unfairly, Wilson argues, so why should they be allowed to retain them? He acknowledges the same could be said of Chelsea, but treats that as an argument for Chelsea also being stripped of titles rather than for City escaping the same fate. He asks how those trophies can be left in the record books for future generations to see unquestioningly, and how City can stand as the fourth-most successful side in league history when so much of that success was achieved by cheating. To the argument that City’s players strove hard for those trophies, he counters that so did the players of the teams who were not cheating — and that it is easier to win with a deep squad of high-grade players drawn to City by money whose source, the commission concluded, had been disguised in contravention of Premier League regulations.
Wilson accepts that euphoric memories cannot be expunged. It is for City’s fans, players, coaching staff and directors to decide what to do with them, and nobody can stop them still exalting in Sergio Agüero’s 94th-minute winner that claimed the 2012 Premier League title. But the rest of the world, he writes, knows what it was based on: that as the rest of the Premier League played to regulations voted in by the clubs themselves, City did not.
The logical end point he sets out is a roll of honour full of gaps — no Premier League champion in 2012, 2014 or 2018, no FA Cup winner in 2011 and no League Cup winner in 2014, 2016 or 2018. He also wonders, when all this is done, whether there might be more to be investigated after 2018. If there are blanks, he writes, let them be: there was no honour there. The spaces would stand as testimony to what those seasons were, as a memorial to the years when a foreign entity tried to subvert English football, as a warning about the dangers of laissez-faire capitalism, and as a monument to a Premier League that finally — belatedly — took action, to a process that maintained its independence and to an institution that, at no little risk to its own wellbeing, ultimately preferred justice and fairness over grubby deals with the rich and powerful. Sometimes, he concludes, emptiness can be the most eloquent statement of all.