The age of the asterisk: Manchester City's glittering era left tainted after guilty verdict on Premier League charges

Manchester City's decade of dominance has entered what Barney Ronay, writing in the Guardian, calls "the age of asterisk". In the wake of an independent commission finding the club guilty on the vast majority of the 115 charges brought by the Premier League, his verdict on the club's glittering era is blunt: "Whatever punishment Manchester City and their owners receive at the end of this process, the fact remains, everything is tainted now."

The charges, lodged in 2023, concerned breaches of the Premier League's financial rules across a nine-year period between 2009 and 2018, with City's breaches found to amount to around £900m. City won three league titles in that window — the platform for the Guardiola-era supremacy that followed — and the findings now place an asterisk beside every one of them.

Ronay's column pulls no punches: "Overturn the tables, scatter the gold coins. Throw your medals in the bin. You cheated to win them. Whatever that thing was, it's done. Stolen glory, stolen income, stolen joy." Even the club's documentaries and terrace anthems come in for mockery: every awkward scene about "the deep, throbbing heart of this empire of love" now looks "odd, sinister, cold, sloppy", but above all "utterly absurd".

'We must also asterisk the asterisk'

Ronay is careful to caveat the celebration. "We still work on the principle of innocent until repeatedly proven guilty, pending mega-bucks final appeals," he writes. "There could yet be a dramatic reversal at the next stage. And if so, fair enough. Trust the process. So for now we must also asterisk the asterisk." City deny all allegations — "even when proven at the first instance" — and have not been found guilty of every one of the 100-plus charges. The club are expected to appeal, with Sky Sports reporting the case could yet drag on for years.

A good day for football — eight years in the making

For all the anger, Ronay frames the outcome as a victory for the rule of law. "The Premier League may seem an unlikely revolutionary," he writes, "but in the age of despotism, of endless chatter about the decline of the rules-based international order, any tribunal that finds a fund backed by one of the United Arab Emirates' ruling families guilty of breaches of minor but still vital sporting regulations deserves its own statue outside the Royal Courts of Justice. People in wigs: not always slaves to power."

The league is commended above all for its "refusal to bend", despite frustration at the timeline — a full eight years since Der Spiegel first published allegations of "industrial-scale cheating". Ronay also salutes Rui Pinto, the original whistleblower now in witness protection after being found guilty of information-related offences: "This verdict suggests football's greatest vigilante was also right, or right enough."

The extreme delay, he argues, is itself a consequence of a "lawfare-level response" — "an entity that is willing to spend so aggressively on the world's most energetic lawyers, to threaten to bankrupt the organisation it signed up to serve and nourish." An accusation of not cooperating with financial reporting, "a charge that on the face of it could be cleared up in half a day", took three years to reach a verdict.

Sanctions: 'What would be the point of going through this only to blink?'

Attention now turns to the sanctions hearing. "Everything is on the cards here, not least the much-trailed potential destruction of the brand," Ronay writes, acknowledging the whispered fear that the league is "taking a hammer to its own knees": "That thing we sold you all those years? Well, it's not straight. The product you paid for and believed in wasn't real." He even jokes that "arguably everyone who bought a Sky Sports subscription in that period now has a legal claim against City".

But he insists the league "has been rigid in the right way" and warns against mercy at the penalty stage: "Guilt followed by a minor slap on the wrist... would provide a complete reversal of all that goodwill. What would be the point of going through this only to blink at the sanctions stage?" In football, "where success is defined by expenditure, this is deliberate and highly effective deceit".

The human cost is central to his case. "Football is a zero-sum game," he writes. "When you cheat, you're taking money and opportunities out of the pockets of others. Not to mention glory, happiness, life chances, things people work and bleed for all their lives." The clubs who might otherwise have won league titles in those years, he notes, read: "Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal." He suggests they may "even consider suing City for compensation", and floats — with caution — that the league "could pre-empt this by stripping titles and reallocating glory", while admitting that "still feels like an overload of asterisks".

Even those who might benefit have been cautious: Jürgen Klopp, whose Liverpool sides ran City so close in those title races, says he is "a long way from preparing myself" for any retrospective silverware.

Carragher: strip the titles and remove the owners

Plenty want far more than an asterisk. In comments reported by Sky Sports, former Liverpool defender turned pundit Jamie Carragher demanded heavy punishment — titles stripped and the owners removed from their leadership roles. "The club are going to get punished," he said. "You've got supporters, players, the club and owners. For me this is all about the owners, the people who are at the top of the club." While stressing that "Man City are a wonderful club and have been for a hundred years and will be for hundreds of years going forward," he added: "In terms of what we're finding out now, I don't know how the owners can continue in English football. We talk about a fit and proper test for owners."

'None of that was real'

In the Guardian, Jonathan Wilson argued that the verdict, if upheld, "would call into question the legitimacy of City's recent dominance": "So it turns out none of that was real. Nothing that happened in English football between 2009-10 and 2017-18 that involved Manchester City actually happened. City beating Manchester United 6-1 at Old Trafford? Fake. Sergio Agüero's 94th-minute winner to clinch the title in 2012? A figment of the imagination." He noted City would not have been in the position they enjoyed for the past eight seasons without those successes, and that the 14-match winning run which carried them to the 2018-19 title would not have happened without what went before.

Sympathy for fans — and a political shadow

Ronay reserves sympathy for City supporters, "innocent of anything other than wanting their team to win and believing the evidence presented to their eyes", while suggesting "it is time for those owners to sell up and move on" after "a disgraceful episode in so many ways: the casual cheating, the refusal to mitigate or compromise, the assault on English football, the attempt to bleed the rest of the field dry."

He also raises a wider geopolitical note: Bloomberg reported in August that the UAE had been in touch with the UK government expressing concerns about the Premier League process — and, it was implied, the prospect of damaging the wider relationship. "If true, and it is simply a suggestion, this would demonstrate yet another profound misunderstanding of the culture you're buying into," Ronay writes. "The law is not supposed to bend to power and influence."

His conclusion doubles as the verdict's wider meaning: a "small but high-profile rejection of the idea wealth and political heft can steamroller regulation and process". "So for now this is a good day for football," he writes. "And also a good day for, of all things, the world."