Punish the owners, not the fans: Liew's case for requisitioning Manchester City

A week of catharsis — and a counteroffensive

In the week since it emerged that Manchester City have been found guilty of all the financial charges laid against them by the Premier League, a "great and cathartic silliness" has stalked the land, Guardian columnist Jonathan Liew writes. Supermarket chain Sainsbury's posted an Instagram picture reading "114 unexpected items in the bagging area"; Domino's Pizza trolled City with claims of "irrefutable evidence that pineapple is the best pizza topping." The more outlandish fan proposals have ranged from "a 17-year transfer embargo" and replaying the entire era with the original players, to restoring "the 2009 squad and force them to mount a title challenge with Stephen Ireland, Martin Petrov and Richard Dunne."

Liew frames the ritualistic ridicule as "the first downpayment on any punishment: a kind of collective healing, banter as therapy. Before the stripping of points and titles, the stripping of dignity." He even asks whether any scenario ends "with Victor Lindelöf lifting a Premier League trophy."

City fans have not taken it quietly. One supporter on BBC 5 Live argued the club's defiance of "unfair rules" was part of "a rich tradition of civil disobedience going back to the suffragettes and the Peterloo massacre," insisting the charges were unjustified because "they're trying to massacre Manchester City." Liam Gallagher weighed in with late-night diatribes on X, the most unhinged comparing City to "Jesus prepared to die on the cross" — to which the most popular reply simply read: "Sham Pain Supernova."

The Abu Dhabi response

In the "real world of real consequences," Liew reports, the "Abu Dhabi counteroffensive was beginning in earnest." While City launched their appeal, Etihad Airways threatened to sue the Premier League for the "damaging implications" of the verdict, and UAE government officials warned that the case could threaten diplomatic relations and billions of pounds of investment into the UK.

Liew is unimpressed, noting that "these are all basically the same entity" — likening the coordinated response to "one of those one-man stage shows you see at the Edinburgh fringe, where all the characters are played by a single guy scurrying around the stage frenetically putting on different costumes." The episode, he argues, is "a long-overdue reminder that when you allow state actors to control your football clubs, even the most minor footballing decisions become matters of diplomacy, geopolitics, peace and war."

He also notes the "desperate contortions" of Andy Burnham, who offered a "stiff-armed defence of City's ownership" before, Liew suggests, realising that "appearing to side with English football's most notorious cheats may just be the sort of thing that polls badly in certain swing postcodes."

Two principles for punishment

Liew sets out a "personal prospectus" guided by two principles. The first is that "the relitigation of history — the messy and unsatisfactory business of reassigning trophies and medals — is an unserious solution for unserious people." Rewriting the past on a counterfactual basis, he argues, is "no more feasible than asking the shark to regurgitate, reassemble and reanimate the body of the surfer he has just crunched to pieces."

He invokes Jamie Carragher's point on Sky Sports that winning "is less about the silverware and the trinkets than the moments and the memories, the aura of victory and the hangovers the following morning, and those are gone for ever." The defining moments — "the Touré goal, the 6-1 at Old Trafford, the Agüero goal, the Kompany goal" — remain "safe, banked, untouchable." As Liew quotes City fans: "We know what we felt."

His second principle is that any punishment "should seek to inflict maximum punishment on City's owners and as little as possible on City's fans." The supporters, he concedes, "may have shared in the proceeds of cheating" and "often have defended the owners in obnoxious and myopic ways," but "ultimately they too are victims of a grand deception. They too were gaslit, lied to, told the dream was real life."

Requisition, not sale

Liew argues that expulsion is neither desirable nor likely: "The commercial appeal of Manchester City uplifts the entire league. Broadcast and commercial contracts would need to be redrawn," and throwing them out "would cost everyone at the top of English football a lot of money."

He points instead to the new football regulator's power to strip rogue owners and force a sale — but notes market intelligence values City at around £4bn, compared with roughly £200m when Abu Dhabi's United Group took over in 2008. A sale, he warns, "enables the perpetrators to walk away with a 20-fold profit on their investment, much of which can be attributed to their cheating."

His remedy: "City should not be sold; they should be taken back. Requisition. Nationalise." He floats a patriotic rebrand such as "the Great British Manchester Football Club," jokes that "Return Phil Foden to the exchequer" and that manager Enzo Maresca "is now an employee of the UK government," and cites the precedent of Chelsea, whose operations were briefly controlled by the government after sanctions on Roman Abramovich. He notes Manchester city council owns the Etihad Stadium as one of "plenty of levers that can be pulled here, if there is the political will to do so."

The wider fallout

The verdict has dominated the football agenda since it broke. On 2026-09-26, supporters were already bracing for relegation and stripped trophies, with one lifelong fan conceding the club was "bang to rights" over more than 100 financial charges. And on 2026-10-01, former City defender Danny Mills argued that Enzo Maresca could turn the guilty verdict into a "siege mentality" in the squad, insisting the club was far from administration.