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Manchester City have been found guilty of all financial charges laid against them by the Premier League, prompting a national debate over how to punish the club. One columnist argues for restitution over retribution, with any penalties aimed at the owners rather than the fans.
Manchester City have been found guilty of all the financial charges laid against them by the Premier League. The verdict has triggered a great and cathartic silliness across the land, as rival fans and brands rush to mock the club.
Rival Brands Mock City Verdict
The Sainsbury's account on Instagram posted a picture reading 114 unexpected items in the bagging area. Domino's Pizza has relentlessly trolled the club, claiming it has irrefutable evidence that pineapple is the best pizza topping. A City fan on BBC 5 Live argued the club's defiance of unfair rules is part of a rich tradition of civil disobedience going back to the suffragettes and the Peterloo massacre. He said they are trying to massacre Manchester City.
Liam Gallagher's late-night diatribes on X have been equally unhinged. His most extreme post compares City to Jesus prepared to die on the cross. The most popular reply simply reads Sham Pain Supernova. On some level it is possible to see the ritualistic ridicule of City as the first downpayment on any punishment.
It is a kind of collective healing, banter as therapy. Before the stripping of points and titles comes the stripping of dignity. This is always how the British have dealt with anything, from an early general election to the death of a treasured celebrity. The writer heard his first Princess Diana joke within about 15 seconds of walking through the school gates the following Monday morning.
UAE Diplomatic Pressure Mounts
Back in the real world of real consequences, the Abu Dhabi counteroffensive was beginning in earnest. While City launched their appeal, Etihad Airways was threatening to sue the Premier League for the damaging implications of the verdict. Government officials from the United Arab Emirates were surreptitiously warning that the case could threaten diplomatic relations and billions of pounds of investment into the UK. These sound like separate problems until you realise they are basically the same entity.
It is like one of those one-man stage shows at the Edinburgh fringe, where all the characters are played by a single guy scurrying around the stage putting on different costumes. UAE dignitaries? The leadership of Etihad Airways? The board of Manchester City?
The versatility astonishes. All of this 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. Witness the desperate contortions this week of Andy Burnham. Burnham offered a belated realisation that appearing to side with English football's most notorious cheats may just poll badly in certain swing postcodes.
Philosophical Debates On Football Justice
None of which gets us any closer to a workable solution. You will have your own strong views over what should happen to City, assuming their trail of appeals and grievances is finally exhausted at some point. There are no real precedents here, and so there are no wrong answers. The emotions are still raw.
Often it is said that victims should not dispense justice. But what happens when the victim is an entire sport, an entire generation of fans, clubs who lost their best players, broadcasters who as it turned out were pointing their cameras at a sham competition? These are almost philosophical questions of justice and ethics and morality. Do you decide that the strict imperative is to punish or cancel the harm done, as Kant or Hegel might have argued?
Do you agree with Durkheim that the point of punishment is not exemplary deterrence but the reinforcement of shared moral values? Or with Bentham that the infliction of pain for its own sake simply prolongs the original sin, and that the emphasis should always be on averting future evil? And do any of these scenarios end with Victor Lindelof lifting a Premier League trophy? What follows is little more than a personal prospectus, guided above all by two principles.
Firstly, 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 the basis of a counterfactual is no more feasible than asking the shark to regurgitate, reassemble and reanimate the body of the surfer he has just crunched to pieces. It is one thing to tell the world that what we saw was not real.
It is quite another to perpetrate the compound fiction that something entirely different happened instead. As Jamie Carragher put it so well on Sky Sports this week, winning is less about the silverware and the trinkets than the moments and the memories. It is about the aura of victory and the hangovers the following morning, and those are gone forever. Carved up, parcelled away.
Punishment Targets Owners Not Fans
And of course City knew this at the time. The Toure goal, the 6-1 at Old Trafford, the Aguero goal, the Kompany goal: those moments are safe, banked, untouchable. We know what we felt, a lot of City fans have been saying in the last few days, and they are right. The 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 fans may have shared in the proceeds of cheating and may often have defended the owners in obnoxious and myopic ways. Among the suggested punishments is a 17-year transfer embargo. Another idea is to replay the entire era with all the original players. Restore the 2009 squad and force them to mount a title challenge with Stephen Ireland, Martin Petrov and Richard Dunne.
Force Ferran Soriano to drive a parade bus backwards through Manchester, once for every major trophy won. Ban the Poznan, or at least make City fans do it facing forwards. There are no real precedents and emotions are still raw, but good can come from this mess if ownership models change.
Premier League Financial Charges Premier League Punishment State Ownership In Football Abu Dhabi Counteroffensive
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