A 17-year transfer embargo. 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.
Yes, 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 begun to stalk the land. The Sainsbury’s account on Instagram posting a picture that reads “114 unexpected items in the bagging area”. The relentless trolling from Domino’s Pizza, which claims to have “irrefutable evidence that pineapple is the best pizza topping”.
The City fan on BBC 5 Live arguing that 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, and therefore justified because “they’re trying to massacre Manchester City”. Liam Gallagher’s late-night diatribes on X, the most unhinged of which compares City to “Jesus prepared to die on the cross”. (The most popular reply, naturally, simply reads: “Sham Pain Supernova”.)
And on some level it’s possible to see the ritualistic ridicule of City 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. This is always how the British have dealt with anything, from an early general election to the death of a treasured celebrity. I heard my first Princess Diana joke within about 15 seconds of walking through the school gates the following Monday morning.
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 and 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.
Which sounds like a pretty hefty multi-pronged problem until you realise that these are all basically the same entity. Like 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. UAE dignitaries? The leadership of Etihad Airways? The board of Manchester City? Goodness, your versatility astonishes us. That’s acting range for you.
Still, 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, who offered a stiff-armed defence of City’s ownership before belatedly 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.
None of which, of course, gets us any closer to a workable solution. And of course 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, 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 Lindelöf lifting a Premier League trophy?
What follows here is little more than a personal prospectus, guided above all by two principles. Firstly 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 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, the aura of victory and the hangovers the following morning, and those are gone for ever. Carved up, parcelled away. And of course City knew this at the time. The Touré goal, the 6-1 at Old Trafford, the Agüero 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’re 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, may often have defended the owners in obnoxious and myopic ways, and perhaps it feels purgative and satisfying to throw them under the bus too. But ultimately they too are victims of a grand deception. They too were gaslit, lied to, told the dream was real life. In many ways the subterfuge is all the crueller because of how desperate they were to believe it.
And so any redress that deprives one of the country’s biggest fanbases of their club, that forces them out of existence, that cuts the body off at the knees and forces it to beg for mercy at the very bottom of the food chain, is also doomed to failure. And let’s be real: this isn’t going to happen in practice. The commercial appeal of Manchester City uplifts the entire league. Broadcast and commercial contracts would need to be redrawn. Ultimately throwing them out of football altogether, kicking them down the stairs, would cost everyone at the top of English football a lot of money. And we know how much they hate that.
But there is a recourse, albeit improbable and outlandish, that fulfils all the criteria of restitution, if not retribution. The new football regulator has the power to strip rogue owners of their position and force them to sell up. This sounds like a good punishment. But market intelligence suggests City are worth about £4bn now, compared with about £200m when the Abu Dhabi United Group took over in 2008. What kind of punishment enables the perpetrators to walk away with a 20-fold profit on their investment, much of which can be attributed to their cheating?
No, City should not be sold; they should be taken back. Requisition. Nationalise. Give them some patriotic name such as the Great British Manchester Football Club. Return Phil Foden to the exchequer. Enzo Maresca, you are now an employee of the UK government. And while this sounds outlandish because it is outlandish, there is a recent precedent here. Chelsea’s operations were briefly controlled by the government after sanctions were imposed on their owner Roman Abramovich and he agreed to offload the club. It was surreal, exceptional and only ever intended as a temporary measure.
There are plenty of levers that can be pulled here, if there is the political will to do so. Manchester city council owns the Etihad Stadium. A report by Tax Policy Associates has suggested that City may owe HMRC as much as £12m in unpaid tax over the Roberto Mancini contract. The cross-party Treasury committee has urged HMRC to scrutinise the findings of the Premier League case. Meanwhile, every week that City stay in their current ownership is a week in which money flows from fans and broadcasters and sponsors into the pockets of Abu Dhabi. No wonder City’s ruling regime has a vested interest in elongating this process as long as possible.
Nobody bats an eyelid at the idea of the state owning a park or a motorway or a museum, or taking over a failing train company or steelworks or bank. In each case there is a recognition that the asset has a broader social value that requires a certain protection against market forces. And of course the longer-term ambition here is not to run Manchester City as an arm of the state, but eventually to give the club back to its people. To gradually assemble the governance structures that would allow fans a genuine voice in the running of their club and facilitate an eventual sale. And in the meantime to maintain one of the country’s most successful football clubs as a going concern, generating revenue that will allow it to pay back its debt to English football.
None of this is going to happen. Abu Dhabi would rather hire the world’s 50 best lawyers to sue Burnham for the next 30 years before it allowed one of its prized assets to be given away for free. But also: is this not what we should want to happen? If any tangible good is to come from the sordid City case beyond memes and banter, perhaps it is a realisation that the ownership model of English football needs to be reimagined on a radical level. That a system built on the wholesale transfer of wealth from fans to owners is exploitation by any other name. That City are not the disease, but the symptom. And that the first rule of politics remains its most crucial: never waste a good crisis.
