A little more than three years ago, Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak touched upon the reputational damage caused to his football club by their fight with the Premier League.
‘It’s very frustrating because it takes so much from the great work that’s happening at this club,’ Mubarak told the club website. ‘What these players have achieved is incredible.’
Khaldoon was speaking in the wake of City’s Treble win in 2023. Six months earlier, the club had been landed with the 115 charges that will from this day forward form such an ugly part of their identity.
And that is a key component of what this has been about for City and indeed what it will be about for a long time yet as they attempt to move on from today’s devastating news.
It’s always been about reputation. It has always been about what a traditionally working class club formed 146 years ago in the Manchester suburb of West Gorton is now seen to stand for.
So deep, drawn out and ugly has City’s confrontation been first with UEFA and then more recently the Premier League that it will sit like an asterisk next to their name for years to come.
It is understood the Premier League have triumphed on the vast majority of charges against Manchester City
Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak (left) spoke on the reputational damage – which could stick with City for years to come – after their Treble win
The football world can now start to judge City’s on-pitch achievements in its own way
If Khaldoon thought or presumed that the frustrations he talked about in June 2023 would evaporate once the Premier League’s judgement was passed then he has been firmly disabused of that notion today.
For all that we can expect City to appeal this verdict – for all the money and expensive legal power they have ploughed into this dreadful, ugly fight – the mud attached to City’s good name will stick.
And this is a long, long way from what they once were and some way from what they thought they may one day be when Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi rescued the club from the verge of financial oblivion at the back end of the 2008 summer transfer window.
This is not what that dream of success on the field was supposed to be about.
Perhaps it’s ironic that back on that frantic day – September 1, 2008 – the new City attempted to throw money around as though there were absolutely no restrictions. And there weren’t back then. UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules were still a year away from conception.
So City bought the Brazilian Robinho for £32million from Real Madrid, tried to hijack Manchester United’s signing of Dimitar Berbatov from Spurs – just because they could – and talked openly of signing Cristiano Ronaldo from their neighbours at OId Trafford.
Some of it was a bit crass but it must also have felt like great fun for a football club that had for so long been patronised and slighted by their local rivals and pretty much regarded as a vague curiosity by just about everybody else.
The club is a long way from when Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi rescued the club from the verge of financial oblivion
They spent money freely – trying to hijack Dimitar Berbatov’s move to Manchester United
City were playing in their big new stadium by then – leased from the council after the 2002 Commonwealth Games – but much else about them still screamed ‘small’.
When City signed Vincent Kompany from Hamburg just nine days before the takeover, for example, manager Mark Hughes was so embarrassed by the press and media facilities at the club’s Carrington training ground that the club persuaded Sale RUFC to let them use theirs for the Belgian’s unveiling on their site over the hedge next door.
It was never any surprise, then, that City wished to move fast. This was their moment to seize and their opportunity to grasp. Abu Dhabi were not here to play, as the saying goes.
But it was when European football and, after that, our own Premier League decided to impose a new and utterly without precedent spending model on its member clubs that City’s new owners ran into the murky waters that now threaten to wash so many of their achievements away.
Had Abu Dhabi known that such a shift in football’s financial landscape was about to take place, would they have bought the club in the first place? It’s at the very least a question worth thinking about.
City denied wrongdoing from the start.
‘The attempt to damage the club’s reputation is organised and clear,’ was a retort repeated so often it may as well sit beneath the crest on their sky blue shirt.
Nevertheless, the rest of football made up its mind a long time ago and will now feel vindicated. To their mind – and in the eyes of the Premier League – City have been cheating.
Eight Premier League titles, three FA Cups, six League Cups and one Champions League have all been won by the club in the modern era
City’s own supporters tend broadly to be split into three camps.
A tiny minority section who no longer attend games, disillusioned by City’s change from the club they presumed represented their values to one they now think does not. Another group who believe totally in their club’s innocence and, perhaps more significantly, another large number who feel the rules are merely unfit, a tool deliberately imposed by clubs like United and Liverpool to try and keep the upwardly mobile down where they want them.
That debate about the spending restrictions remains live and is one had on repeat at football clubs up and down the Premier League. It is not just City.
Nevertheless the ‘Red Cartel’ narrative is deeply-engrained within the Etihad Stadium. Their emergence as England’s most powerful football team came at a time when City were not represented in the analysts’ chairs at places like Sky, BT (as it was) and the BBC. The sports pages of newspaper websites continue to drip with red and even the now-departed City coach Pep Guardiola has referred publicly to that.
It all plays to the deeply-held notion in and around City that the Premier League – and before them Europe – would have liked it had City merely stayed in their lane, one once inhabited so entertainingly by vaguely calamitous figures of yore such as Peter Swales, Francis Lee and Thaksin Shinawatra.
City have already burst through that red tinted glass ceiling, of course. Eight Premier League titles, four FA Cups, seven League Cups and one Champions League have all been won in the modern era.
But now that we have our verdict – now that a line can begin to be drawn – football can at least start the process of judging City and all those on-pitch achievements in its own way. From that point of view this is a line in the sand moment.
City supporters are split into three camps, having made their minds up a long time ago
This will be a long haul back to acceptance and sound standing for City. Guardiola will doubtless be glad he is well out of it.
The internet meme of Brian Clough – played so brilliantly by Michael Sheen in the Damned United film – telling his Leeds players to put their medals in the bin because you have ‘won them all by bloody cheating’ will get a fair airing over the coming days.
The Premier League’s verdict is more resounding than many of us thought likely. We presumed more shades of grey.
And while we await sanction, the plain truth of it all for City is that many people in football had made up their minds on this one an awfully long time ago.
