OFFSIDE | Retrospective titles for Man Utd, Arsenal and Liverpool? What Man City’s ‘guilty’ verdict means for the Premier League and the UK government
Hello and welcome to a special edition of Offside, where we make sense of the ‘guilty verdict’ against Manchester City on 114 out of 115 charges, decode what it means for the Premier League, question where it leaves Pep Guardiola’s legacy, wonder if other Premier League clubs will get retrospective titles, and look at what it means beyond football for the Premier League, the UK and the UAE.Aguerooooo (13 May 2012)The idea of neutrality in journalism, particularly sports journalism, is a preposterous one. Like secularism or having just one beer, it’s the adult version of believing Santa Claus is real. Ergo, it’s almost impossible to have a detached view of what it means for a lifelong Manchester United fan – even accounting for the post-colonial absurdity of supporting a club in the land of one’s former oppressors – to find City guilty. The same goes for any other football fan who has been on the receiving end of City’s “sportswashed” total football.But for United fans, to truly understand the hurt, one needs to go back to 13 May 2012.United were playing Sunderland at the Stadium of Light and Rooney scored the only goal. As the match ended, the United players waited for the result from the Etihad, where City were trailing QPR 1-2 in injury time. And then Dzeko and Aguero scored, giving City their first Premier League title, a moment that, with the benefit of hindsight, was the day the balance of power shifted in Mancunian football.For City fans, it was the reward of supporting the club through thick and thin, through years of heartbreak as their storied rivals marched from title to title while they flirted with relegation or turned up against Macclesfield or Stockport.Aguero’s goal wasn’t a flash in the pan but the first shot for City’s new empire. The club started to resemble the football version of the United States, attracting the world’s best talent, including Yaya Toure, David Silva, Kevin De Bruyne, and eventually Erling Haaland. Along came Pep Guardiola, football’s most coveted manager, under whom City became the definitive football team of their age, highlighted by the fact that they were often the pantomime villains in Ted Lasso. In 2013, the City Football Group became the mothership of a dozen clubs spanning five continents including New York City FC in America, Girona in Spain and Mumbai City FC in India. Aguero’s goal became for City what Ralph Waldo Emerson described in Concord Hymn as the “first shot heard around the world”, signalling the arrival of football’s newest and richest empire.Guilty PleasureGiven City’s hegemony over the last decade, there was a collective schadenfreudegasm after the first report about the guilty verdict was published. The reactions came in thick and fast on Football Twitter and other forums, which collectively turned up to dance on City’s proverbial grave.Manchester United legend Rio Ferdinand wondered how many titles that would give him. David De Gea also wanted the same conversation. Arsenal’s most pestiferous fan Piers Morgan argued that “at the very minimum they must be relegated from the Premier League and stripped of all fraudulently ‘won’ titles.”In the past, Jose Mourinho has jested about getting his medal and bonus for winning the league when he finished second with Manchester United. Former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp, often ending up on the wrong end in the battles against Pep Guardiola, has said he will buy beers and celebrate.Memes imagine the new City crest as a sinking ship, Salman Khan in a United jersey saying “It’s Done, Bro”, while Americans got trolled for not understanding why Zohran Mamdani was tweeting: 114. A clip from The Damned United – a nifty football drama about Brian Clough’s disastrous 44-day ordeal at Leeds United – has rival fans reminding City: “The first thing you can do for me is to chuck all your medals… into the biggest dustbin you can find because you have not won any of them fairly.”But beyond the jokes, there are wider questions about what this means, for which we have to ask ourselves:What exactly is City guilty of?Mainstreaming Oasis? Yes.Spending the GDP of a small nation and claiming it as football heritage? Yes, too.Sportswashing? Probably, but what else is sports for?Playing football so tactically conformist that it shunted individualists? Jack Grealish would agree.
Manchester United owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, left, talks with Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak (AP Photo)
City’s financial irregularities, the sort of thing Arsene Wenger had called “financial doping”, came to light when German magazine Der Spiegel published internal Man City emails – football’s equivalent of the Epstein emails – that appeared to show money coming from Sheikh Mansour and Abu Dhabi being presented as independent sponsorship revenue.Financial Fair Play (FFP) – something City fans believed was brought in to benefit the ‘Red Cartel’ (all its direct rivals were red) – was ostensibly designed to ensure a modicum of an even playing field by limiting how much owners could simply pump into clubs and asking clubs to earn the money that they spend through sponsorships, which was always dicey when the owners are sponsors too.The clearest example of that dichotomy came from the blue half of Manchester.One internal email suggested that of a £67.5 million sponsorship payment, Etihad would provide only £8 million while £59.5 million would come from ADUG, Sheikh Mansour’s ownership vehicle. City disputed that interpretation and later won at CAS, which ruled UEFA had not proved the allegation, although City were still fined €10 million for failing to cooperate.But there were more awkward emails.Read: Pep Guardiola’s legacy – The good, the bad, and the uglyIn 2012-13, City’s finance chief pointed out that sacking Roberto Mancini would leave them £9.9 million short of FFP compliance. After City lost the FA Cup final and missed out on a sponsor bonus, Abu Dhabi-linked sponsorship payments were reportedly adjusted, with City Football Group board member Simon Pearce doing his best Trump impression and writing: “Of course. We can do what we want.”
Pep Guardiola reacts on the touchline during his Manchester City reign, an era of unprecedented dominance that now faces uncomfortable questions after the club’s financial-rule verdict.
Mancini presented another issue. The former City manager was reportedly earning £1.45 million a year from City, while also receiving another £1.75 million annually through a consultancy contract with Al Jazira, another club controlled by Sheikh Mansour. The allegation was that the second payment was effectively additional City remuneration that should have been disclosed.Similar questions surrounded player pay and image-rights arrangements. The allegations also included owner-linked money masquerading as sponsorship revenue, player/image-rights costs kept off City’s normal books, sponsorship payments adjusted when City were short and non-cooperation with the Premier League investigation. The bulk of the charges, however, related to inaccurate financial information and non-cooperation.The Premier League’s Calciopoli moment?The obvious analogy here is to Italian football’s Calciopoli scandal involving corruption in refereeing and football administration that saw Juventus relegated to the second division. While the 2004-05 championship was left vacant, the 2005-06 title was given to Inter Milan.That has obviously led many to wonder if something similar will happen in the Premier League. If that were the case, then the clubs that finished second could get the titles in that era, including Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal.Various clubs, including Manchester United, are also assessing the financial losses incurred during that era, but the bigger problem perhaps is for one of the Premier League’s greatest dynasties. The revelations put a huge question mark on everything: Aguerooooo. City finishing with 100 points. The Guardiola and Klopp rivalry. The Treble.The corruption scandal hit Italian football quite hard, although Italy went on to win the 2006 World Cup and qualify in 2010 and 2014 before missing 2018 and 2022. Could something similar happen here?Now, short of getting a Men in Black mind-zapping device, football memories, sad or happy, cannot be erased.No Manchester United fan will forget Ole Gunnar Solskjaer poking it in against Bayern Munich in Barcelona. Similarly, nothing Messrs Aguero, Kompany, Silva or De Bruyne have done can be negated. But would those talented world-beaters even have been there if FFP rules had been followed? Even if City’s verdict survives the appeal, the shadow cast over the most successful Premier League team of the last decade will hang heavy like an albatross around its neck.What are the likeliest punishments?While former players and managers might have dreams of retrospective titles, that’s unlikely to pass. The likeliest punishment is a massive points deduction that would potentially relegate City.Football finance expert Kieran Maguire told the BBC that rival clubs would “expect some form of points deduction”, while former City chairman David Bernstein argued that just a fine would be “pointless”. A fine, and a humongous one at that, might be in the offing. Rival clubs, including Manchester United, are considering compensation claims for lost prize money, Champions League qualification and commercial revenue. Unfortunately for fans of rival clubs, the stripping of historic titles and handing them over is the least likely outcome, and there is, according to BBC Sport, “little appetite for that” either from the Premier League or rival clubs.The Pep legacy issueWhen Pep Guardiola left City, ESPN’s Mark Ogden wrote a piece arguing that his legacy ought to be held higher than Sir Alex Ferguson’s because he edged the Scotsman as the greatest manager of the Premier League era amid various variables.One obviously disagreed.There’s an anecdotal quote often attributed to Jose Mourinho: “I don’t coach teams where the kitman could win the league.” While that’s not true for Barcelona, where he had the world’s greatest footballer at his disposal – though some could argue that Messi perhaps wouldn’t have become Messi without Guardiola’s tutelage – that’s true of Bayern Munich and Manchester City.
Sir Alex Ferguson and Pep Guardiola together, two managers who have defined very different versions of Premier League dominance and whose legacies now sit at the heart of the debate over Manchester City’s era.
Unlike Mourinho, who won the Champions League with Porto, or Ferguson, who broke the Old Firm hegemony in Scotland with Aberdeen before taking a relegation-threatened Manchester United to the pinnacle of English and European football, Guardiola has always helmed the biggest team in the land with the biggest budget that might not have been fairly held together.In the past, Guardiola has claimed that if the Man City hierarchy lied to him about the irregularities, he would walk. But the Spaniard is already gone, and one wonders if, perhaps like all the greatest magicians, Pep picked the perfect time to exit before the iceberg emerged.Beyond footballGiven that the Premier League is the UK’s greatest export since opium and the Beatles, the ramifications of any punishment will also be huge.City is owned by Sheikh Mansour, a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family and the UAE’s Vice-President and Deputy Prime Minister, which means that any existential punishment will reverberate beyond football given Britain’s relationship with the wealthy Gulf state and the fact that Emirati money is deeply embedded in both Manchester and the UK.In a statement published on Man City’s website, Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak wrote that the club had “faced challenges together before and prevailed” and added: “There remain many who want to undermine the momentum of our Club. We will not give them that opportunity.”The timing couldn’t be worse for Manchester as a city that is having its brightest moment under the sun since the Industrial Revolution, with the “King of the North” Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor, taking over as UK PM and Manchester at the centre of his devolution pitch.In July, one of his first conversations as Prime Minister was with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, a dialogue that began with a thank you for the UAE’s investment in Manchester and the “incredible impact” it had on the city.The City Football Group says more than £700 million of private investment has gone into East Manchester and the Etihad Campus, while the Manchester Life partnership between Abu Dhabi United Group and Manchester City Council began as a £1 billion housing initiative.UK-UAE trade was about £25 billion in 2025, with more than 5,000 British companies operating in the Emirates, and the UAE has billions invested in Britain. Britain also concluded a new trade agreement with the Gulf states in May, which the government estimates could eventually add £3.7 billion a year to the UK economy.
FILE – Manchester City’s head coach Pep Guardiola hugs Ruben Dias, left and Bernardo Silva afterthe English Premier League soccer match between Manchester City and Manchester United in Manchester, England, Sunday, April 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Dave Thompson, File)
Ergo, City getting relegated might just become one of the bigger fiducial headaches for the UK since its Empire collapsed after World War II.And it would have further ramifications for all Premier League clubs, the majority of which are foreign-owned. Punishing City could scare away massive investors, but failing to punish them would mean that anyone is free to flout the financial rules.And what would the fans think if the competition were compromised? Would the 1.45 billion people who watched live Premier League football in 2024-25 continue to do so? Would people across time zones get up at ungodly hours to follow the trials and travails of footballers in a league that is deemed venal and corrupt?The verdict will be a litmus test for the Premier League and the UK government. Irrespective of the outcome, City will always epitomise what global capital can do to English football. After years of wooing global capital, the UK will now need to walk a tightrope and see if it can regulate that capital, or if it even remains in a position to dictate terms.Perhaps like Americans, City fans too had started believing in their own exceptionalism that didn’t require them to follow the rules.Like Martin Luther King Jr, Man City fans too had a dream. Earlier, it used to be simply to beat United in the Manchester derby. When Agüero scored, they dreamt they could beat their storied neighbours in the league race. Man City became the kings of England and Europe, the definitive Premier League team of the last decade. If the findings survive appeal, the greatest era in the club’s history will forever carry an asterisk. For decades, City fans dreamed of waking up from United’s shadow. After a decade of doing exactly that, they will now be forced to ask the same question Dom Cobb had to ask in Inception: Was it a dream or was it real?
