Manchester City’s victory at Anfield came on the first weekend of Premier League football since the club were found guilty of breaking financial rules, and it arrived with a question nobody can yet answer: what, in the end, will the result actually mean? The football felt secondary. City continue to protest their innocence, insisting they possess a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that will clear their name, and they have lodged an appeal. Should that appeal fail, the sanction is likely to be unprecedentedly severe.
The offences at issue were committed between 2009 and 2018, and the uncertainty hanging over the club is unusually concrete. Do City’s games matter? Could results be annulled before the season ends? Was the win at Liverpool merely the difference between finishing the campaign on minus 100 points and minus 97? Could the club be expelled from the league altogether? Until a sentence is announced, everything City do will carry a quality of the provisional — football that may yet be cancelled, drawn out over weeks rather than the seconds of a VAR check.
An away trip to Anfield is no longer quite the event it was when Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp were at their peaks, but it should still be a great footballing occasion. This one was not. City were booed, there were chants of “going down” and a handful of banners, yet Anfield was not the seething pit of disgust many had anticipated. Nor was there much City-related fury at other grounds, although Manchester United supporters reinstituted their Stretford End counter recording the length of time since City last won a trophy, erasing all the silverware of the past 15 years.
The general sense was of bafflement and bewilderment. City’s own supporters have settled on a policy of defiance, as though the scandal were something that has been done to them rather than the consequence of their own directors’ actions — an understandable position, to an extent, while the sanctions remain unannounced and the appeal is unresolved.
The consequences stretch backwards as well as forwards. The sanction may or may not strip City of their titles; many of their fans would simply ignore such a punishment, continue to claim those honours and point out that memories cannot be so easily extinguished. But even if the appeal succeeds, or if the sanction does not relitigate the past, asterisks will remain in the minds of those who do not support City — and perhaps in the minds of some who do. Add Chelsea’s offences to the picture, and the Premier League is approaching the end of an 18-year period in which very little was quite as it seemed.
The inflatable bananas brandished by City’s support at Anfield may have harked back to an earlier, more innocent era, but there is no going back. City are not the club of Imre Varadi any more; as it stands, they are the club guilty of the greatest act of cheating in English football history. Their fans can do the Poznan in a spirit of resistance, but they cannot turn their backs on the shame their leaders have brought upon them.
What all of this means for the longer-term credibility of the league can only be guessed at. The basis of sport is faith, and incredible finishes mean little if nothing can be believed. The City decision could undermine that faith, or it could reaffirm it — arriving as proof that cheats do not prosper, that they will eventually be exposed, and that the Premier League, almost alone in a grubby world of compromise with and abasement before the mega-rich, is prepared to do what is right.
Until the sanctions are announced and the appeal is resolved, that phoney war goes on, and it is as though the scale of City’s offences has not yet been fully grasped. It is not that, the 2022 World Cup aside, this was the longest international break in history; breaks are disruptive because they remind us that clubs are not eternal entities but alliances of convenience between paid employees who have lives outside the soap opera. There has never been one quite as disruptive as this. The crisis is coming, but its impact has not yet been felt.