In the moments after the Premier League finally published the Manchester City decision, staff at their Brunel Building base could feel a weight lifting. Actually, they could almost hear it.
Some of the most prominent figures were now, finally, able to discuss the case.
For someone like chief executive Richard Masters, it is an extraordinary pressure: to be among the few people on the planet to have knowledge of a case the world was obsessed with. You could almost sense the release in his comments in the Premier League’s statement.
And yet, as has been the case throughout the eight years of this saga, one development has only opened up another issue; another avenue for complications.
This one is arguably the most fundamental.
The Premier League now has to get on with its raison d’etre of actually playing matches amid the greatest uncertainty it’s ever faced. Worse, we have no idea whether many results will have the same meaning by the end of the season.
This isn’t like after the charges in February 2023, or the initial leaks in November 2018. After those, everything was speculative, just one of many possibilities. Nothing might have happened.
Now, something has finally happened. We have a concrete decision. Manchester City might well overturn this in the appeal process but, right now, they are guilty of charges that are near certain to at least bring significant points deductions. There is evidently a need to expedite that process for some sense of normalcy.
Because, almost as relevant as those tangible effects, are the emotional effects. Other clubs are furious. Some feel they may struggle to “even be in the same boardroom”.
City and the Premier League nevertheless have to proceed with trying to play games as if everything was normal, but in the most abnormal circumstances.
As one senior source says, “I don’t think people have got their heads around how much of a farce it’s going to be.”
Another who has made significant decisions on regulation adds: “Every game now has an asterisk.”
We will get a profound sense of this in the first weekend back, which also brings a match that may well be the season’s most significant.
The fixture list has always had an amusing capacity for throwing up the most narratively fitting game in the midst of a huge story. And there are none bigger than this.
In the first match back after City have been found guilty of all but one charge in the worst cheating scandal in club football history, they happen to travel to the team who arguably suffered from this most. And, oh, Liverpool are going to let them know it.
The atmosphere at Anfield is going to be febrile. There will surely be banners with the word “sham”. City’s players will by then have reconvened under the club leadership after the international break, but who is to know how they respond.
There might be a siege mentality, but how long can that be sustained amid the certainty of an outcome? It’s not quite like Pep Guardiola being able to say he has faith in the club that the charges will be beaten.
Given how modern football tactics demand intense commitment from players, too, any doubt could eventually cause the team to collapse. It’s why Guardiola himself abruptly discarded players he didn’t feel were fully locked in.
Now, it’s open season.
And an asterisk for so many fixtures in this season only fits with the asterisks that may be required for so many seasons before.
We are talking about an entire era of Premier League history potentially being revised, in a worse manner than the Tour de France or Serie A.
Given the Chelsea case, as well as how everything Manchester City have done since 2018 is inseparable from what they did before 2018 in the nine-year period covered by the investigation, that’s 10 individual titles under question: 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024. And that’s even before you get to the rest of the league, with the multiple implications from variables like what Champions League qualification might have done for other clubs.
It just immediately looks so damaging. The very mythos of your competition, what so much of its prestige and spectacle is built on, evaporates. That’s precisely why there is little will to retrospectively strip titles, since you at least keep the semblance of normalcy; that it counted.
It should be stressed that none of this is to make the absurd suggestion the Premier League shouldn’t have taken the case. They absolutely had to, with the need all the greater because of what went before.
This is on Chelsea’s previous ownership and City, pending appeal, but all of that was ultimately facilitated by the lack of regulation that went before – right up to ownership rules.
This is Richard Scudamore’s complicated legacy. Masters’s predecessor may have been crucial to building up the Premier League’s global dominance through his innovation and charismatic deal-making, but the long-term effects of that same governance now pose a threat to that status.
Scudamore’s era was described as “regulation light” and “ownership-model neutral”.
In other words, and in-keeping with New Labour’s approach to foreign investment, anyone was allowed in so long as they didn’t have a criminal conviction. A lot of regulatory issues were sorted out in face-to-face meetings where men would give their word. The Premier League looked like what it was: a club.
That huge foreign investment turbo-charged the league for a long time, but also meant it was going so fast that authorities couldn’t quite keep up.
Problems were hard-wired into the system before people even realised they were there. And now, we’re beginning to see the sparks fly, ready to explode.
Many in football have understandably compared it to Calciopoli. That’s both in nature and, more ominously, how that scandal effectively ended Serie A’s decades-long hegemony in 2006. It’s not unfair to say many in foreign leagues have been longing for this moment. This is a chance to rein in the Premier League.
Except, it’s arguably both worse than Calciopoli in terms of scale but nowhere near as bad in terms of effect.
It is obviously damaging, and a considerable threat. The crucial sense that you can completely trust what you see on the pitch has already been eroded. It was only earlier this year, however, that LaLiga’s Javier Tebas was talking about how the Premier League was too far ahead to ever be caught.
There might well have been an element of calculation to those comments, but the numbers also illustrate he’s right. A global cultural dominance has crucially been established in the first years of truly global media. That’s quite a head start.
What’s more, it is precisely because of what sport is that strong regulation is essential. This could actually end up as the competition’s finest hour, even if it takes a long, long time for that to be clear.
Regardless of what happens with City, too, some fundamentals will remain.
This is unpopular to say amid so much talk of a “red cartel” but acres of academic research – most notably from the University of Liverpool’s David Forrest – show that the Premier League only really needs Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal to definitely be in it, as well the possibility that they can frequently be beaten by the other 17; in other words, those big names and a sense that there’s competitiveness and unpredictability.
City, for all their success in this disputed era, have never really moved the dial in that sense. And yet they may shake the Premier League in a manner that has every other league hoping to pick up the pieces.
Wednesday alone saw an Abu Dhabi state-owned airline threaten legal action and the prime minister make some curious comments about the case, and the ownership.
It only emphasises the mess of all of this, a direct consequence of that Scudamore era. A weight has lifted. Another problem descends.
