Sham City?

Very little can be said about Manchester City that either a) hasn’t been said already by The Athletic, or b) hasn’t subsequently been retold by the BBC.

But despite the mountains of paperwork and electronic files, at least now it seems that they’ve boiled it down to a clear charge: ‘sham’ contracts for a decade, and the accusation is that misleading numbers – plus a lack of cooperation – have disguised the club’s income and allowed them to spend more money than the rules (designed by the league and UEFA to stop over-spending) permitted, throwing shade on the cups they’ve won in that time.

We still aren’t 100% sure on guilt though. Manchester City are either very guilty, as the Premier League’s rather damning statement suggests, or completely innocent as their chairman’s carefully worded letter on the club’s website proclaims. Both of these, of course, cannot be true.

Whichever, it is creating the most destabilising period in Premier League history. Sanctions have yet to be decided. Other clubs have asked that it be resolved this season, but in a case that’s rumbled on for so long so far, what difference will another year or two make?

Both sides appear confident they’ll emerge victorious, like at the end of a closely contested boxing match when both fighters hold their arms aloft after the final bell chimes. They also know they both cannot win the fight, and deep down they’ll know whether they deserve to or not, but until the result is official, they’ll hold up their arms just the same.

But, whoever ‘wins’’ it doesn’t feel like there will be any real winners in this case. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything comparable when it comes to victims. No one comes out of this well, but there are some significant losers. Most notably the fans. And not just City ones.

Chaos

If Thomas Tuchel was trying to embrace the chaos against Spain at Wembley on Saturday evening, he might have concluded by 10pm that – for some – it had all become a little too chaotic. Uncharacteristic mistakes by defenders, Marc Gheui and Rico O’Rielly, might have made him already rethink his chaos theory, but maybe it was also a case of those players having a lot on their minds. As the latest developments continued to seep into all our consciousnesses, it seemed more than co-incidental that the two goal-gifting errors came from Manchester City players. The players – and coaching staff - are victims here too if City are ultimately found guilty. It’s hard to believe that they would have been that aware what was going on and are either right to back the club (as they’ve done) or have been duped just as much as everyone else.

It’s unlikely many people knew much about the goings on until an unknown hacker named Rui Pinto put his Football Leaks website on the map by handing tens of millions of documents to first, [Portuguese newspaper] Record, and then German sports magazine, Der Spiegel, who chose to publish out of public interest. The documents (three terabytes worth, or equivalent to about 3,000 copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica) were intended to show the dark side of football and targeted various clubs and individuals, but understandably, the City story has been the one at the forefront.

Pinto is possibly another victim here. Some think of him as a hero, others an out-an-out criminal but if these dark deeds are taking place, it can never be OK so long as no-one gets caught. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But Pinto has had his life upturned all the same, with an arrest in Hungary (where he lived), and extradition to Portugal where he was tried and a 4-year suspended sentence for attempted extortion, illegal data access and breach of correspondence. He has spent time in prison, under house arrest and in witness protection, so it’s fair to say there were serious consequences for his actions.

So far, that’s not been the case for the club. The punishment is, as yet, still unknown and that’s another downside of this elongated process. It creates a vacuum in which we can only speculate. But any punishment – whether it fits the crime or not – will have further ramifications for the biggest group of innocent victims; the fans.

But let’s get one thing straight. They won’t see themselves as victims. Or paint themselves in that way. Supporters stick by their club. When UEFA attacked, the City fans booed the Champions League anthem. There isn’t a Premier League equivalent, but if there was.

They’ve also seen years of incredible success. That’s banked. You cannot take that away from the fans, however much it will now be questioned in light of this. Gained under false pretences or not, afternoons and nights of the kind that City fans have enjoyed since 2008 can’t be erased from their collective memories. And why should they be? If anyonewon trophies illegitimately, it sure as hell wasn’t the fans.

Going forward, anything from the end of the Sheik Mansoor dynasty to a sizable fine has been mentioned. A big points deduction seems the likeliest outcome, maybe so big that it makes relegation to the EFL impossible to avoid. But again, while that might seem harsh on the fans, it’s unlikely they will see it in quite the same way.

Likes

For those of them who saw the club slip to the third tier and – as the Beeb delicately put it – had to face ‘the likes of York, Oldham and Chesterfield’ before climbing back to the top flight, a drop of a division or two isn’t the end of the world.

And many City fans – of a certain age anyway – hark back to the Paul Dickov goal that took their 1999 play-off final to a penalty shoot-out just as much as they talk about the treble winning goal in Istanbul in 2023. The point being, they’ve dealt with supposed adversity before and  enjoyed the experience. So if they do end up back at the likes of York, Oldham et al, they’ll enjoy that too. Fans always find a way. It won’t stop them loving and supporting the club and it shouldn’t.

Some might want some kind of explanation. At the moment they are getting a ‘stick with us, it’ll be alright’ message but if they are eventually proven guilty, some fans will want to understand the rationale and moreover, why it has dragged on for so long.

But it won’t take away those memories. At worst it will tarnish them a touch, but fans can ride it out although, you sense from all the memes and TikToks, that they will have to ride it for quite some time.

As the saying kind of goes…better to have celebrated and had it stripped from you, than never have celebrated at all.

If anyone thinks that awarding the titles and cups to other clubs will make their fans feel better, think again. That’s not how it works either, for exactly the same reasons as above.

For example, if the FA Cup of 2011 is belatedly given to Stoke City, their fans won’t line the streets for a victory parade. They wouldn’t even feel that good about it. They were still standing dejectedly at Wembley on the day, their chance missed and having to watch their opponents parade the cup around Wembley. That’s the only time it mattered; anything that happens some fifteen years later is largely irrelevant.

It’s like Liverpool’s 2019/20 championship win; if no fans are there to see it, did it really happen?  You could also ask: if a trial takes more than two years and no verdict or punishment has been meted out, did that really happen either.

Power

And if the final verdict is guilty, what does the football family really want to happen to the club?

The owners have invested billions into football and the local community and while that doesn’t excuse wrongdoing, it deserves to at least be considered. There have been a lot of really bad custodians of football clubs, ones who have almost – and in some cases have – put clubs out of business with their greed and mismanagement. If the ADUG were to walk away, for instance, does that make that part of Manchester – or football – any better off?

But it also highlights that their kind of power – if unlimited and then unchecked – can do a lot of damage to a club.

It’s also timely, as clubs in England’s top five tiers face up to much more scrutiny in the shape of the Independent Football Regulator from this coming November.

Introduced to stop clubs taking decisions that can ultimately destroy them, and their communities, it was probably envisaged that the IFR would be mainly dealing with smaller clubs who face an existential threat from unscrupulous owners.

But this case shows that even the biggest and richest clubs, and owners with access to breath-taking levels of wealth, can get embroiled in a mess that negatively impacts their club’s reputation, future, employees and, as we’ve seen, their fans.

And owners come and go; fans don’t.

Sometime in the next few weeks, months or even years, all this will finally come to an end.

Unless the legal professionals – never far away with this kind of scandal – decide to spend another decade wading through all the possible compensation arguments.

If it does, then English football will stay on its knees and all of us will be the real losers. It will be the only thing the media ever talk about, taking attention from better stories, and will drag the game , the league and all the fans down with it.

Manchester City fans have celebrated incredible successes for almost twenty years. Through no fault of their own, they might have to prepare for a similar period of ridicule.

In the meantime, I’d suggest that the Premier League don’t introduce an pre-game anthem any time soon.