If guilty, how Manchester City can pay the price without rewriting history – Back Page Football
After years of waiting, English football finally appears to have an answer in the Manchester City case. According to widespread reporting, an independent commission has found Manchester City guilty on 114 of the 115 charges brought against the club by the Premier League.
The charges cover a range of alleged breaches, including failures to provide accurate financial information, matters relating to player and manager remuneration, UEFA financial regulations, Premier League profitability and sustainability rules, and failures to cooperate with the league’s investigation.
There are some important qualifications before going any further. The full judgment has not been published. No sanction has yet been announced. Manchester City maintain their position and are expected to appeal. The club says the process remains ongoing. And I certainly haven’t spent the last several years digging through Manchester City’s accounts. I haven’t examined the evidence in anything approaching sufficient detail to independently declare what did or didn’t happen, nor am I going to pretend otherwise.
So everything that follows presupposes one thing: that what is presently being reported is substantially accurate and that these findings ultimately survive the appeals process. If they do, the punishment should be severe. But I strongly disagree with one of the most obvious proposed solutions: do not rewrite history.
You cannot manufacture an alternative past
There will understandably be calls to strip Manchester City of titles and award them retroactively to whichever club finished second. I don’t think the Premier League should do that. There is precedent elsewhere in sport for vacating accomplishments after the fact, but football should be extremely reluctant to establish a precedent in which championships can be administratively reassigned years after everybody went home.
For one thing, we cannot possibly know what would have happened. Take Diego Maradona and the Hand of God in 1986. Suppose the referee sees it, the goal is disallowed and Maradona is sent off. Does England beat a ten-man Argentina? Yeah, probably. But we don’t know. And even if England do win, they then have to play Belgium and, if they get through that, presumably West Germany in the final. Every match unfolds differently, every tactical decision changes and every subsequent event occurs in a world altered by what happened before it. You cannot change one enormous variable and confidently assume everything that follows remains the same.
The same problem exists with Manchester City. Manchester United lost the 2011/12 Premier League title on goal difference. Liverpool finished one point behind City in 2018/19 and again in 2021/22. It is incredibly tempting to remove City, move everybody else up one position and declare justice served, but that isn’t history. Those seasons unfolded with Manchester City in them. Teams approached matches according to the table in front of them. Managers made decisions based upon results that had already happened. Transfers were made. Managers were hired and fired. Players experienced pressure, confidence, fatigue and injuries. Change Manchester City and you change everything downstream.
We cannot know with certainty who would have won those championships, and even if we could somehow approximate it, I don’t think we should rewrite them anyway.
Football needs finality
There is a broader reason for that. I think retroactively changing championships years later would damage the Premier League brand considerably and establish a horrible precedent. We already hear complaints about VAR taking away some of the joy of a goal. The ball hits the net and everyone celebrates, but there is now sometimes that moment of hesitation while we wait to see whether somebody was offside, whether there was a handball or whether VAR is going to intervene.
Now take that concept to an entirely different level. Imagine introducing the idea that a championship you watched your club win might not really be theirs because lawyers and accountants could revisit the season five, ten or fifteen years later and officially declare somebody else champion. Football should not go down that road. Sport requires a degree of finality.
That does not mean violations discovered later should go unpunished. It means the punishment should address the violation rather than pretending the violation never occurred. A crime cannot be undone. This is not a criminal case, and violations of Premier League rules are not crimes, but the principle is the same. When a wrong has occurred, the legal system does not possess a time machine. It determines responsibility, imposes consequences and, where appropriate, attempts to compensate the people who were harmed. That is the model I would apply here.
Don’t use counterfactuals to rewrite history; use them to calculate Damages
This is where the distinction becomes important. I don’t believe we can say Liverpool definitely would have won a particular championship without Manchester City. What we can potentially do is estimate the probability that they would have, and that probability has economic value. The same principle can apply to Manchester United, Champions League qualification, league position, European progression, commercial opportunities and other identifiable sources of revenue.
And this is not entirely theoretical. Premier League clubs are already reported to be considering compensation claims following the reported City decision. Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham are among those reported to have preserved their ability to pursue compensation, with potential claims involving lost earnings and lost opportunities. That is where the counterfactual belongs.
I am willing to use a counterfactual to help determine damages. I am not willing to use one to manufacture history. Experts can attempt to calculate probabilities. Lawyers can argue causation. Economists can quantify losses. Manchester City can challenge those calculations. Independent commissions and, where applicable, courts or tribunals can decide what can actually be proven. It would be enormously complicated, but complexity is not a reason to ignore legitimate damage.
If a club can demonstrate that Manchester City’s violations materially reduced its opportunity to win a championship, qualify for the Champions League, progress in Europe or earn additional revenue, there should be a process for translating that lost opportunity into economic damages where the applicable rules and law permit it. The consequences need not stop with whichever club happened to finish second. Competitive harm travels through a league table. One club misses a championship, another potentially misses the Champions League, another loses European football and another finishes one position lower. The farther down that chain we travel, the harder causation becomes to establish and the smaller the potential damages are likely to become. That’s exactly why we have legal processes. Let the evidence establish where the chain ends.
This could extend beyond England
There is also an obvious European dimension. Manchester City were not competing solely against English clubs during this period. They were participating in the Champions League, earning revenue and occupying places in European competition. That doesn’t mean UEFA should start retroactively handing Champions League matches or trophies to somebody else either. The same principle applies.
Don’t manufacture an alternative tournament. But where a legally sustainable claim can establish economic harm arising from an improperly obtained competitive advantage, it should be examined through whatever European, regulatory or legal process has jurisdiction. This could become an extraordinary domino chain, but that is unavoidable if the underlying violations ultimately prove to have been as extensive as presently reported.
The money should go somewhere
There is another reason I prefer compensation to historical revision. Money paid as compensation doesn’t simply disappear. If Manchester City ultimately has to compensate other clubs for demonstrable losses, that injects capital back into the clubs that were harmed. That is far closer to restoration than changing the name engraved on an old trophy.
Don’t give Liverpool a championship years after the fact; compensate Liverpool for whatever losses it can actually establish. Don’t pretend another club played in a Champions League campaign it never participated in; determine whether it lost an identifiable economic opportunity and, if so, what that opportunity was reasonably worth. Apply the same principle throughout the league wherever legitimate damages can be demonstrated.
That creates an interesting corrective mechanism. Manchester City loses capital corresponding to harm attributed to its violations, while other clubs receive capital corresponding to losses they can establish. Instead of pretending to restore competitive balance retrospectively, you begin restoring it prospectively. There is already a recent Premier League precedent for substantial compensation arising from a financial-rule breach: Burnley were awarded £35.1 million from Everton after a commission determined that Everton’s breach of the Profitability and Sustainability Rules had given it a sporting advantage in the season Burnley were relegated. The City situation, if the reported findings survive appeal, is potentially on an entirely different scale.
The punishment should actually hurt
Compensation alone may not be sufficient. If Manchester City are ultimately found responsible for violations approaching the scale presently being reported, there must also be a serious sporting consequence. Relegation would be entirely appropriate in my view. Alternatively, an enormous points deduction could effectively produce the same result through the league table.
What cannot happen is a fine sufficiently small that an ownership group of Manchester City’s resources can simply absorb it as the cost of doing business. The consequences should materially affect the club, and substantial compensation could create consequences of its own. Manchester City have continued spending and building for the future. If the club eventually faces enormous financial liabilities alongside sporting sanctions, it could be forced into extremely difficult decisions. That might mean selling valuable players. It might mean several transfer windows in which City cannot operate from anything resembling its previous position of strength. Combined financial and sporting consequences could set the club back several seasons.
That would not be an arbitrary redistribution of Manchester City’s wealth. It would be the consequence of a process determining that identifiable parties suffered identifiable economic harm and are entitled to compensation. City got the trophies, and those stay. But preserving the trophies does not require preserving every economic advantage derived from them.
Leave the players out of it
There is also an important distinction between Manchester City as an institution, its manager and the players who actually went onto the pitch. For the players, this should have no impact whatsoever on how their performances are viewed unless evidence emerges that particular individuals were personally involved in wrongdoing. They weren’t responsible for constructing Manchester City’s financial arrangements. They went out and played football, produced the performances and moments that supporters remember, and there is no reason to retrospectively attach institutional wrongdoing to players who were neither involved in it nor aware of it.
Pep Guardiola’s legacy raises a slightly different question, not because I am suggesting Guardiola personally participated in financial wrongdoing, but because the circumstances under which a manager’s squad was constructed are inherently relevant when evaluating his accomplishments. Pep should still have the titles. But if it is ultimately established that Manchester City enjoyed a considerable competitive advantage in assembling and maintaining those squads because the club operated outside financial restrictions its competitors were required to observe, that is legitimate context when evaluating Guardiola against contemporaries such as Jürgen Klopp and José Mourinho.
That doesn’t erase Guardiola’s tactical accomplishments, nor does it prove another manager would have achieved what he achieved. It simply becomes part of the historical evaluation. The record book can tell us what Pep Guardiola won. Football supporters and historians can decide what weight to give the circumstances under which he won it. We don’t need the Premier League to make that judgment for us.
Enforcement can strengthen the Premier League
Financial regulations in football are already controversial. There are supporters who believe the rules themselves entrench the established elite by making it extremely difficult for ambitious clubs outside that group to spend enough money to catch them. That is a legitimate debate, but it is a different debate. If the rules are bad, change them. While they exist, everybody has to obey them.
And if it is ultimately established that one of the richest and most successful clubs in world football egregiously violated financial restrictions that everybody else was expected to follow, that is appalling. Some will argue that imposing consequences on this scale would damage the Premier League’s reputation. I think mishandling it would be far more damaging.
A transparent process in which Manchester City receives every opportunity to appeal, the findings are eventually made clear, legitimate damages are assessed, injured parties are compensated and meaningful sporting sanctions are imposed demonstrates that nobody is bigger than the competition. That could ultimately strengthen the Premier League. The alternative — establishing enormous violations and then imposing a punishment that Manchester City’s ownership can shrug off — would tell supporters that the rules are meaningful only until somebody becomes wealthy enough to break them.
Don’t erase history, deal with it
That is ultimately my position. Don’t give Liverpool championships they didn’t celebrate, don’t give Manchester United 2012, don’t erase Agüero’s goal, and don’t tell players who had nothing to do with financial arrangements that their accomplishments disappeared years later. Most importantly, don’t pretend we can construct an alternative decade of English football and know how it would have unfolded. We can’t.
Presupposing these findings survive appeal, punish Manchester City severely. Calculate the economic harm as comprehensively as the evidence and applicable legal processes allow, compensate clubs that can establish legitimate losses, and allow those damages to inject capital back into the competition. Impose a sporting sanction commensurate with the seriousness of what was done, including relegation if appropriate.
And if the financial consequences are so severe that Manchester City must sell assets and spend several seasons rebuilding from a significantly weakened position, that is not rewriting history. That is living with its consequences.
The record should say what happened. The findings should say what was wrong. The punishment should address the damage. And history should be trusted to hold all three facts at once.
