A Premier League legend is urging Manchester City players to throw their medals “in the bin”, while the world of English football sinks the boot into the Sky Blues after the extent of their financial cheating was laid bare.
An independent commission found City guilty of using “sham” deals with commercial partners to inflate the club’s revenues and reduce costs by more than £900 million (A$1.7 billion) between 2009 and 2018.
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The club were also found to have conjured up “sham” image rights deals with star players and former manager Roberto Mancini to artificially inflate their earnings.
The deceptive moves allowed the Abu Dhabi-backed club to hide the true state of its finances to avoid breaching the Premier League and UEFA’s rules on spending limits.
As a result, year-after-year City built a formidable squad who yielded eight Premier League titles, a Champions League, four FA Cups, seven League Cups and a Club World Cup in the 18 years since billionaire Sheik Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates’ royal family purchased the club in 2008.
The Telegraph’s chief football writer Sam Wallace summed it up by writing that “about £920m of funny money was pumped into English football to fund one of the most successful dynasties in history”.
Perhaps even better was his comparison to Leonardo Di Caprio’s depiction of infamous American stock broker Jordan Belfort in the Hollywood blockbuster ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ – citing one of the movie’s most well-known lines: “Was all this legal? Absolutely f***ing not.”
The word “sham” was used eight times in the findings.
City orchestrated commercial deals so that club sponsors only actually paid a portion of the fees.
The rest of the money was pumped in by Sheik Mansour’s company – Abu Dhabi United Group Investment and Development.
It was a lot to outlay from a man who has only ever attended two City matches in person – a 3-0 win at home to Liverpool in August 2010 and the 2023 Champions League final 1-0 victory against Inter Milan in Istanbul, Turkiye.
Those who have been there in the stands for the entire ride are hurting.
Fans on the blue side of Manchester who have taken immense pride in their club, who always played little brother to their rivals over at Old Trafford, are outraged.
After seeing their club emerge from the third tier of the English football in the late 1990s to become a Premier League powerhouse, their spirits are broken.
They were duped.
Despite scrutiny over the club’s financial practices for many years – dating back to a series of 2018 articles in German newspaper Der Spiegel based on emails, which also appeared on the Football Leaks website, obtained by convicted Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto – they were always told it was all above board.
Now, those who spent their hard-earned to train and bus across England, and fly across Europe, to witness history cannot help but feel like their memories of the treble of 2023, topped by that night in Istanbul, of triumphs at Wembley and trophy lifts at the Etihad have been destroyed.
“I am utterly aghast at the sheer scale of the findings here. I think it is probably fair to say that, over the duration of the investigation, the period of the charges, I have been considering the fact that they may be guilty,” host of the fan-made Blue Moon podcast David Mooney told Sky Sports News.
“I never dreamed for a second that they were guilty to this extent and this scale.
“My overriding feeling right now is just anger. [It is] pending appeal and they say they have an irrefutable body of evidence for the appeal; if it is so irrefutable, then why is it the scale that it is?
“At this stage, they have lied to the fans. They have lied to the rest of football.
“They have acted with sheer contempt towards the football club I support.
“At this stage, I am just so incredibly angry that they felt that they could get away with this.”
Much to Mooney and other football fans’ disgust, it appears that City believe they can still get away with it.
The club’s CEO Ferran Soriano released a video statement on Tuesday declaring that City will be vindicated on appeal, saying that guilty verdict was one big “Premier League conspiracy theory”.
A club statement also claimed that have “irrefutable evidence” to clear their name, but that has not been made public.
While several supporters have accepted their fate, there are other City figures that believe there is a lot more fighting to be done.
One of City’s most famous fans, Liam Gallagher of Oasis, took to social media two days ago to profess his belief in his club’s innocence, saying the only thing they were guilty of was making rivals Manchester United “look like s***c****”.
Soraino’s approach appears to have borrowed a bit of the superstar frontman’s fighting spirit, but it is also what City have done throughout this entire ordeal.
“City have, in the defence against the biggest legal case in the history of British sport, always reached for the extreme option,” The Telegraph’s chief football writer Sam Wallace wrote.
“They have acted as if they would rather bring the whole edifice down than just admit that perhaps, after all, they broke the rules.”
“It was one that took eight years to unpick, more than £100m of legal fees from the budget of rival clubs, 500 pages of argument from the Premier League, and witness statements comprising more than 700 pages,” Wallace added.
“The bundle of documents submitted in totality to the hearing was so voluminous that the index alone ran to 750 pages. This was a case that City fought line by line, day by day, chargeable hour by hour – and continue to do so.”
City’s hierarchy are clinging tight to the belief that they can back themselves out of their corner once again.
They did earlier this decade.
UEFA found the club guilty of breaching its financial fair play rules in February 2020 – they were hit with a two-year ban from European competitions and a €30 million fine.
City won the case on appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), however, with a ruling being issued that UEFA’s allegations were either “not established” or time-barred under competition rules.
The two-year ban was overturned and the fine was reduced to €10 million as CAS acknowledged that City had failed to co-operate in the initial investigation.
That escape may have allowed City to go on the merry way in the Champions League, but it created fractures within the club that may evolve into an irreparable break with the latest news.
Former manager Pep Guardiola spoke with the club’s board following the UEFA ruling and believed their side of the story.
“But I tell them: ‘If you lie to me, I will leave and I will no longer be your friend.’,” Guardiola said.
If the legendary manager sticks to his word, it is unlikely he will be appearing in the chairman’s box at the Etihad to watch successor Enzo Maresca’s side anytime soon.
The findings certainly hurt Guardiola’s legacy.
“Now, at City, there are asterisks everywhere, raining in like grenades, blowing up that house,” The Telegraph’s chief football correspondent Jason Burt wrote.
“Tainted by association even if Guardiola will probably argue that what he achieved on the pitch cannot be spoilt by things that happened off it. Things that pre-dated him of which he was unaware.
“And whatever levels of cheating happened, City would not have won what they won without Guardiola. It was not about money alone.”
But there is little sympathy from the red side of Manchester.
Speaking on UK broadcaster ITV following England’s UEFA Nations League 2-0 win against Czechia on Wednesday morning AEST, former United captain Roy Keane said City’s trophy-winning players should be “sticking those medals in the bin”.
“They [City] knew it would hurt a lot of people, but they still did it,” the notorious hardman argued.
“If I was a player who had success over those years, whom we’ve given lots of praise and credit for, I’d be 100 per cent sticking those medals in the bin. It’s cheating.
“You hear nonsense from ex-players saying ‘they won it on the pitch,’ but there was cheating going on.
“It’s going to be very difficult for the players and the manager. They had trusted the football club and what they stand for.
“You got owners who are quite happy cheating. It’s very difficult for the players going forward to maintain the level of excellence.”
Meanwhile, former United players Rio Ferdinand and David de Gea sniffed an opportunity by posting on social media that they should be awarded retrospective titles for the time their Red Devils’ sides finished runner-up to City – most notably in 2012 when Sergio Aguero’s last-gasp goal against QPR denied United the league.
They were not alone in doing so with former Stoke City boss Tony Pulis said he felt “cheated” after his team were beaten by City in the 2011 FA Cup final.
But United legend Wayne Rooney stressed that he “wouldn’t feel comfortable about accepting another Premier League medal” because of City’s guilty verdict.
“I don’t think we deserve it. We didn’t do enough that season to win the league,” Rooney said on the Stick to United podcast.
“I’m thinking as their players, they’re there doing everything they can to win the Premier League title and in their minds they’ve done it.
“And, if those players have got no understanding of what’s going on above them, then if that happened to me – if all of a sudden Manchester United have been doing the same and I’m getting my Premier League medals taken away from me – I’d be absolutely devastated.
“They might take them away but I wouldn’t want it because I don’t feel as a team we deserved it that year because we obviously didn’t finish first.
“When I’ve heard of ex-team-mates and people saying, ‘we’ve won another medal’, I’m happy with the five I’ve won.
“I wouldn’t want this one just sat there… 15 years later or whatever it was you get a medal because City cheated. I wouldn’t feel comfortable.
“The question is, would I want to receive that medal for finishing second? No.
“Some players might. I just wouldn’t feel comfortable for accepting a Premier League medal for finishing second.”
The titles may stand or like what happened to Melbourne Storm in the NRL when their salary cap scandal was exposed, those triumphs may simply be struck from the record with no champion awarded in those seasons.
Regardless of what happens on that front, Rooney believes City should be relegated as punishment for their crimes.
“I’d put them in the lowest league they can go in and then put restrictions on them in terms of how much money they can spend for the next three or four seasons,” he said.
“If you’re just putting them in the Championship, and I get that’s a massive punishment, they’re going to come back up. Where, I feel if they have got restrictions… League Two, whatever… that could be very difficult for them.
“For instance, if they got a 20-point deduction for the next three years then players won’t want to stay there. If it’s Championship for a season, you could talk players round.
“I’d go as big as I can really.”
City’s appeal must be heard before their fate is truly sealed, however.
It means this saga could have a lot more to play out, and despite the satisfaction felt by City’s rivals that the independent commission found their long-held suspensions to be true, football certainly does not win in all of this.
“City’s owners have to acknowledge the impact their activities had on other clubs, and accept the considerable compensation claims flooding their way from other clubs they pipped to trophies, possibly even from players,” football journalist Henry Winter wrote on X.
“If they’re sensible they will look for a settlement that includes substantial compensation, running into hundreds of millions of pounds, to aggrieved clubs who missed out on trophies, on prize money. Maybe that £830.69m should be the figure considered in any settlement. Fitting.
“City’s owners have to see sense. The alternative is years and fortunes spent in the courts. Nobody wins. Except the lawyers. Football loses, because the game remains on hold until City are punished.”
