What would have happened had Manchester City not acted as they did?
We won’t ever know. But, looking back in the wake of news that City have been reportedly found guilty of 114 of the 115 charges brought against the club by the Premier League over breaching financial regulations between 2009 and 2018, the thought has a haunting effect on those whose realities might have been altered by the manipulations that City still deny.
Much of the attention in recent days has focused on what punishment might be issued. The question everyone seems to be asking is will City be stripped of titles? And, if they are, will they be retrospectively awarded elsewhere? Will Manchester United suddenly be crowned champions for 2011–12 and 2017–18, and will Liverpool get 2013–14?
Manchester United are also looking into how City’s breaches negatively impacted their own finances, having lost the 2011–12 Premier League title and a Champions League qualifying berth in 2015–16 to City on a goal-difference tiebreaker.
But what of other smaller teams ... Stoke City, for example?
Man City Successes Viewed Through New Lens
Stoke contested the 2011 FA Cup final against Manchester City at Wembley Stadium. They returned home that night, having lost 1–0 to a single goal from Yaya Touré, who joined City from Barcelona the previous summer for more money than Stoke’s combined starting XI.
“Touré was reportedly earning 10 times what we were paying any of our players,” former Stoke manager Tony Pulis said in a BBC Sport column this week.
Pulis, Stoke boss for the second time in his career from 2006–13, said the Manchester City news has led him to reassess his feeling about losing the 2011 final.
“After the game, my disappointment was buried in the fact we had played a team full of superstars, and faced an elite coach in Roberto Mancini, and had just fallen short,” he said. “Today, I feel very differently, as I am sure people connected with the other clubs affected by City’s successes in the same period, between 2009 and 2018, do too.”
“We lost, but to a team that have been found guilty of breaking the financial rules set out by the Premier League. In doing so, they did not just beat Stoke in an FA Cup final, they collected a stack of titles and went on to completely dominate English football for more than a decade.”
It’s not that City cheated on the field. But cheating the system allowed the club to accelerate unfairly to get into a position from which to be successful and ultimately dominate.
The FA Cup in 2011 was the start of the success. It was City’s first major trophy in 35 years, preceding eight Premier League titles, 10 more domestic cups and the Champions League, all won by a club that had finished the final season before the Sheikh Mansour takeover with an 8–0 loss to Middlesbrough, had recently finished 16th, 15th and 14th in the Premier League and spent a year in the third tier of English soccer only a decade earlier.
Without Manchester City’s financial conduct, there is no guarantee that Stoke, for whom the 1971–72 League Cup represents a solitary major trophy in 163 years, would have won the FA Cup because there is no way of knowing who would even have reached the final in a different landscape. But being so close to it and losing out, now knowing what we do, stings enormously.
Of course, there is the argument that Stoke could have won the game anyway—as Wigan Athletic actually did two years later—but it ignores Manchester City starting with a massive advantage that was gained through unfair, devious means.
City similarly beat Sunderland in 2013–14’s League Cup final, and much later Watford in the FA Cup final in 2019. The latter falls outside the period for which the charges were brought, but the deed had already been done. These were clubs denied their one shot at glory.
Man City Took Away ‘What Fans Pray For’
“Taking my Stoke side to the 2011 FA Cup final was one of the highlights—if not THE highlight—of my 50 years in football as a player and manager,” Pulis said.
“That day in May will also live long in the memory of all Stoke fans who followed their team to Wembley dreaming that they would win the greatest club cup competition in world football for the first time in their long history. This was our day, that day that many smaller clubs and their fans pray for.”
It probably means significantly more to Stoke, because of the enormity of the achievement, than a league title might do to a Manchester United or Liverpool, who have 20 others to fall back on.
Pulis doesn’t believe it likely that Stoke will be awarded the cup. “I don’t expect Manchester City to phone me or the club up and offer back the 2011 FA Cup and the winners’ medals their players received,” he said. “I don’t seriously believe any other trophies and titles will be handed back over either. A points deduction and a massive fine feels far more likely.
“But I still feel cheated. Whatever happens next, we won’t ever get that day back and the chance to celebrate around Stoke-on-Trent with the cup and medals we so honestly fought for. After breaking the rules, Manchester City got to do that instead.”
