In one of many conversations I’ve been having about the Manchester City case this week, a contact suddenly stopped mid-rant.
They remarked: “This is like the World Cup final for you, isn’t it?”
I initially bristled at that suggestion a bit, since the World Cup final is the World Cup final. Covering such special occasions like that are one of the reasons you want to get into this job.
It is everything around such occasions that has changed this job and the sport, however, ensuring you cover spheres well outside what you ever anticipated, such as sportswashing.
In truth, that contact wasn’t the only person to say something similar this week.
I have described the City case the worst scandal in modern sport, making it probably the biggest story any of us will ever cover, but that’s also all the more acute to me.
I have written the book on this:‘States of Play: How sportswashing took over football’, was itself merely an evolution of my work from almost 10 years as chief football writer of the Independent; an attempt to bring together all of these disparate strands I’d been covering into a narrative that I felt explained the concerning place the sport I love was in; the manner in which this was being used for ill.
And you couldn’t have a bigger illustration than the City case.
The key details of the story are that the club have been guilty of breaching football’s financial rules by creating a sophisticated scheme of industrial cheating that allowed them to disguise owner funding - restricted by football’s rules - as sponsorship, giving them an almost £1bn advantage over rivals over nine years. City have since appealed and maintain their innocence, pointing to a “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” to support their position.
This is the most serious kind of story you can have as a journalist, yet the entire scandal articulates and encapsulates the issues I’ve been writing about for years.
It is only the symptom of a far deeper ill: how state ownership of clubs and “sportswashing” has such a malign effect on the sport, while using it for their own political ends. This isn't some abstract thing, far off in the political clouds. It has real effect, on our game and clubs and - yes - those on the other side; those directly suffering under autocratic states. It matters.
It is, as is now abundantly clear, the most pressing problem football has. You can see it in the geopolitical reaction. This is why I have been so immersed in it and driven by it.
I remember the day it really sunk in for me with City, to say nothing of the abundant other issues around world football. It was actually one of the greatest days in the club’s history - or at least it used to be considered that.
I’d been in this job from January 2017 and, since the role made me cover wider football issues for the first time, I’d been increasingly conscious that something more was up with City. Ian Herbert and Nick Harris had already done excellent work for the Independent about City’s initial issues with financial regulations, and were the first to report on “the Fordham arrangement”, a story that the club stridently fought, with it since forming one of the sanctions in this case.
That started to pull at the long-time perception that the named owner, Sheikh Mansour, was just a wealthy Emirati royal enjoying a private business investment. Gulf expert Nick McGeehan began to attune me to the deeper politics of Abu Dhabi, before we then had the landmark moment that was Football Leaks in November 2018. As well as laying bare this sophisticated scheme of cheating, it finally spelled out the true nature of the state’s relationship with the club. This consequently marked the first time that Amnesty used the phrase “sportswashing” about City. It would stick.
The rest of City’s season was characterised by a disconcerting hostility off the pitch, but brilliance on it. By the FA Cup final in May 2019, they were on the brink of England’s first ever domestic treble, a near mythical feat.
They were facing a plucky Watford side, a club that had never won a major trophy and were playing in just their second FA Cup final.
A day they should have cherished forever instead become one to instantly want to forget.
Watford were brutalised. 6-0. I remember thinking this wasn’t really a sporting contest, in-keeping with a lot of concerns about the wider game.
And, worse, what was this actually for? The glory of Abu Dhabi? Normalising a nation when a dismal war in Yemen was ongoing?
Was this really what this great cultural virtue was for? This was wrong.
So, I wrote as much.
A previously OK relationship with City instantly changed. I guess my outlook as a journalist changed, too.
I began to delve into the subject much more and quickly felt this problem - even well beyond City - was of a scale that wasn't really in the national discussion about the game.
Put short, I suppose this became a defining subject of my career.
Except, it’s been a long, long road from there to here.
All of that has led a lot of people to ask this week whether I felt “vindicated” or if I am on "a victory lap".
I wouldn’t quite say that, and certainly wouldn’t engage in any triumphalism. It’s not about that, but instead about genuinely serious issues. It’s also not over. This still has a long way to go. City might overturn this.
Regardless of how this ends, however, I guess there has been a quiet satisfaction that the wider world is now more receptive to the issues that I have been writing about for years.
Football clubs are valuable cultural institutions, and important to so many communities. In many areas of the modern world, they genuinely are people’s last social anchor. This profound power, and the emotions they provoke, is precisely what these interests - from Abu Dhabi to Donald Trump - want to use, be that for political or capital gain.
And the game is just far too valuable to be left to such forces. Not only that, but autocratic states are on a completely different scale. They inherently co-opt clubs in human rights issues in a way that just shouldn’t be happening, with their very wealth posing a power that football can’t possibly hope to cope with.
What is the entire City case, after all, but a tension between trying to put on a mere sport and an absolute monarchy accustomed to doing what it wants?
This has been made all too clear over the past seven days. Much of the football world, and wider public, have woken up to this.
And, since I will later elaborate on a lot of the negative social comments I’ve got, it's worth acknowledging one I genuinely appreciated.
“Pretty much total vindication for your central thesis over the last few years,” one user wrote.
I’m far from the only journalist to have covered the subject, of course. Ian and Nick were among many reporting on it long before me, and I would also mention the work of Tony Evans, Tariq Panja, Dan Sheldon, Sam Wallace, Matt Slater, Rob Harris and Der Spiegel among many others.
The nature of the coverage, however, could still make it feel lonely. There were times when you just thought you were beating the same drum to little response, even if you felt you had to say it. Hey, look at that goal by Erling Haaland. And there was considerable pushback.
At football conferences and the like, some City employees would go cold when they saw my name. (Some, it must be said, were very interested in talking).
Aside from the inevitable online abuse, too, I had it in person. I remember sitting in Heathrow on the way to City’s 2022-23 Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich, only to hear the words “Delooney, you fucking wanker”, followed by a volley of abuse. That season’s Champions League final in Istanbul saw a series of fans just barrack me as I walked to the media entrance, before getting a similar reception on the flight back. In between, I was left a twitter DM voice note telling me to get down to the Irish bar so someone could bite my nose off. Fans would try and take photos of me at games to put online to slag me off.
I was even confronted at an Oasis concert at Wembley last summer.
Unpleasant as I have to admit that is, I have nuanced feelings on it. This is what sportswashing does. It toxifies the game.
These owners have given fans the greatest days of their lives. Of course many are going to be hostile, since you’re raising uncomfortable questions about something they just want to be happy about.
Yes, it’s bizarre to think this is all for just a game, but it’s because it’s this game it matters so much to people. Psychologists call it “identity fusion”.
I often thought it was amusing that my very first experience of football in England was a City game at the old Maine Road, in the famous Kippax Stand. My football team played an underage tournament nearby and brought us for the club’s crucial 1-0 win over Sheffield Wednesday in the ultimately doomed 1995-96 relegation battle. One of my heroes at the time, Ireland’s Niall Quinn, came off the bench. This had so much more glamour than even attending Bray Wanderers’ Irish cup celebrations in 1990, and I had a fondness for City’s character since then.
Because, of course, none of this is about the club. It’s about the ownership, and the ownership is never the club.
They are being misused, their name blackened.
By the time that became abundantly clear last Friday, at the same moment everyone started to register what was actually going on here, I actually had a strangely blank feeling.
I think part of that was because of how long we’d all been waiting for this story. It had been looming over for us for years, feeling especially weighty over the last three, as the stakes ratcheted up.
So, once it actually happens, you’re almost just stunned there’s actually - finally - a tangible outcome, with genuinely shocking details.
The publicly available evidence meant I’d always expected a Premier League win, with that accentuated by information I’d received over the last few months, but I didn’t expect a win as comprehensive as this. The feeling was more that it’d be a kind of fudge, especially given all the legal might that Abu Dhabi’s power can muster.
In the midst of a moment like that, there is a genuinely enjoyable pressure to try and get your coverage exactly as you want, but this had a different challenge. The eight years meant I’d been thinking about this so much, and had so many people talking with so many details amid so many strands, that it was almost an information overload.
As many others found, it was difficult to get your head around.
Many fans evidently felt the same.
My work on this meant I did a fair few media appearances this week and, at one, an employee, who is an ardent City fan, came up to speak to me.
He told me that a few colleagues and I had been among the “most hated” journalists in the eyes of many City fans in recent years.
But he didn’t feel that now, he insisted. He admitted he was wrestling with his own thoughts on this, and was interested to hear my views on it.
My view on that contact’s comment is probably a bit different, too.
The love for the sport that makes you want to nail a World Cup final also makes you want to immerse yourself in this story.
The feeling is, in many ways, the same.
