Winning is not enough: Haaland's 'amazing character' cry rings hollow amid Manchester City's unprecedented crisis
On the pitch, Sunday afternoon at Anfield ended exactly as Manchester City would have wanted: a 3-0 win over Liverpool, with Erling Haaland continuing his prolific form — six goals in six Premier League appearances so far in 2026-27, according to FotMob figures current to 11 October. Off it, nothing has been resolved. If anything, the victory has only underlined how far the club's crisis sits beyond the reach of results.
'Amazing character' — the language of crisis, not celebration
Haaland is one of the brighter, more engaging players of his generation, with a quirkiness that suggests unusual self-awareness. Yet his post-match assessment read less like a celebration than a rallying cry from a dressing room under siege.
“It was tough,” he said. “It was hard but we showed amazing character from back to front. So proud of everyone. [It’s] important to stay strong mentally, stick together and do what you can do something about, and the thing we can do something about is to play good football and fight together. That’s the only thing we can do.”
“You want to win games, it’s as simple as that,” he added. “Perform well, play good football and win games. This was a mental battle, [it’s] never easy coming back from internationals.”
Writing in the Guardian, Jonathan Wilson notes that stripped of context, Haaland could have been describing an injury crisis, a manager's resignation or a suspension to a key player. The tropes are familiar: it was hard, we stuck together, we prevailed. But this was not really about coming back from internationals. It was about the verdict of the independent panel that examined the charges brought against City — the club have been found guilty of what Wilson calls the greatest act of sustained cheating in the history of English football.
The spending behind the 'disruptor' myth
City, as is their right, continue to maintain their innocence and have appealed; the propaganda battle goes on. But as Wilson argues, this is no longer a debate about whether the financial regulations were fair. City had every opportunity to raise objections and vote against the rules. They did not. They agreed to them — and while everybody else played by them, they did not.
The familiar defence that City merely spent what others did, but operated under stricter controls because of a lack of historic success, is dismissed as "not merely irrelevant but entirely bogus". Over the nine years under investigation, City's net spending on transfers — before wages are even counted — exceeded £1.2bn, around 50% more than any other Premier League side. And for all the talk of proud disruptors taking on the "red cartel", that spending transformed City into the most dominant side English football has ever known, with six league titles in seven years. They are, precisely, an argument for why spending controls are necessary.
Players left carrying the can
None of that, Wilson acknowledges, is Haaland's fault. He is a footballer offered a very competitive salary to play alongside very good players for a very good manager at a club for which his father played. It is one of football's absurdities that it is always the manager and the players who end up as the faces of the institution, quizzed about matters that have little to do with them, while the executives and directors responsible stay out of public scrutiny.
City's manager Enzo Maresca has sought to frame the task as tuning out the storm:
“My message to the players since we were together three days ago, when they all came back from their national teams, has been quite clear,” he said. “Guys, the noise will always be there so it’s about how we learn to deal with the noise and it’s our duty to make our noise. Our noise is to win games in the way we did today and to be happy.”
On one level the stance is absurd: nobody knows whether the three points claimed at Anfield will still be City's by Christmas. Nobody knows which division they will be playing in next season, or how bad any sanction could be. Nobody knows what is coming next — and, as Wilson observes, the gravity of the situation still seems not to have dawned on many in football. This is not some misfortune that has befallen the club; it is the direct consequence of the actions of its directors. On another level, though, what else can players and managers do but be professional and try to win games, even if none of it may ultimately mean anything?
'Leave the spaces blank'
Wilson has already gone further than most in sketching what accountability might look like. In a column published on 3 October, he argued that City's honours won during their years of rule-breaking should be struck from the record books — vacated but not handed to the runners-up, leaving blank spaces on the roll of honour as a memorial to cheating, echoing earlier sentiments from Jamie Carragher and Tony Pulis.
What Sunday's win emphatically was not, though, is just another football crisis from which City can move on by winning matches. It is a crisis unlike anything English football has ever known — and one with which the game's finely nuanced language is struggling to cope.
This report draws on Jonathan Wilson's Soccer Desk column for Guardian US.