City financial charges spark debate over stripping titles and rewriting Premier League history
City saga stirs alternate histories as punishment looms
Manchester City sit top of the Premier League as the club awaits a decision on its financial charges, and the scale of the story is already changing how press conferences and Sunday fixtures are consumed. Writing from a shed in Melbourne at quarter to midnight, Guardian columnist Max Rushden notes that for the first time since filming players walking off a bus in big headphones became spectacle, he is interested in seeing players walking off a bus in big headphones on Sunday afternoon.
The perfect stage for the next chapter, Rushden argues, is Liverpool away. "We couldn’t ask for a more perfect place or a perfect time for this game to take place. Liverpool away. The side City have pipped to the title by a point or two three times since the cheating began," he writes. The hypotheticals multiply from there.
Sliding Doors football
Rushden imagines counterfactual squads: "What if City couldn’t have afforded John Stones and had settled for, say, Victor Lindelöf? How vital was that extra one centimetre of Stones in clearing that ball off the line against Liverpool at the Etihad in January 2019? The hypotheticals never end. Sliding Doors meets Biff’s Almanac."
Nicky Bandini’s analysis on Football Weekly is cited to frame the risk of a permanent split in memory: "I think that’s the truth that English football isn’t ready for yet. Whatever happens with these decisions, whether they successfully end up appealing things or they don’t, 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."
Bandini warns: "I think that’s the grim future that lies ahead for the Premier League. You’re going to have two alternate histories, the same that happens in Italy, where the number of titles that Juventus has won is constantly repeated differently by different sources because one side or another is not going to accept the judgment even after the final appeals are exhausted."
Can titles be unwound?
Rushden says he is "minded to side with those who favour stripping City of the titles but not assigning them to anyone else. Not just because it’s fun to see how many people say Asterix. Football just isn’t that simple."
If City don’t sign those players, they sign other players, those other players don’t sign for someone else, games are different, results are different. Players train in different cities, different managers get hired and fired. People live in different places and move to different countries, meet different people. Different marriages, different children.
"It’s one thing telling Sergio Agüero that the goal isn’t real, but what about his whole life after 2011? Does he have to redo it all?" Rushden asks.
Geopolitics and the mood around the club
The piece also touches on the wider stakes beyond sport. "If the sanctions aren’t of the highest severity it’s impossible not to wonder whether anything has happened in the corridors of power, or on one of those benches in Spooks or Slow Horses when two people sit on a bench in Regent’s Park with identical briefcases and walk off in separate directions with the other one."
Rushden questions the link between club punishment and state investment: "Will the UAE really refuse to scrap investment in a tech hub between Cambridge and Oxford if Manchester City are relegated to League Two? It’s ridiculous that the two are even connected."
With a quiet Friday punishment expected, possibly during the next international break, City still have matches to play. Pundits will talk about galvanising and "us against the world mentality". Rushden wonders who will be first to tell Erling Haaland to look forward to Salford away next year, noting Enzo Fernández is probably "frantically checking whether there’s a relegation release clause in the contract he signed in the summer".
On the pitch, Elliot Anderson is trying to fend off Dominik Szoboszlai and Florian Wirtz regardless of the sanctions. Rushden concedes sympathy for most City fans, even as he reserves ire for the owners who "dragged the club into this". He ends on the moral dilemma of the era: "At the same time, if I were City, would I really swap the journey they’ve given me and these highs for finishing 12th every season for the past 15 years? Am I better than that? Like all moral dilemmas, it’s easy to have a strong opinion when it doesn’t affect you and you’re in a shed talking to a New Romantic."