The Premier League has published the core findings of the independent commission investigating Manchester City Football Club. It finds the club guilty of all charges relating to serious financial breaches across nine seasons, from 2009-10 to 2017-18.
Author
- Josh Bland
Postdoctoral researcher of football cultures and heritage, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge
Among its findings were that City used “sham” commercial arrangements to inflate revenues and reduce costs, misstated its accounts and concealed its true financial position from auditors and regulators. The commission concluded that the club had intended to circumvent Premier League rules.
Manchester City has said it is “disappointed and surprised” by the decision, stating that it is “innocent of the accusations made by the Premier League”. It will pursue the appeal avenues open to the club.
It’s impossible to overstate the potential impact of this case on English football. Indeed, the findings have unleashed something approaching open season, as rival supporters, pundits and commentators are already demanding everything from points deductions and relegation to the stripping of titles. Arguments rage over whether an entire era of English football has now been irreparably tainted.
But amid the swirling mass of bloodlust surrounding City, it is worth considering the impact of this case on a group which is receiving less attention: the club’s supporters.
What the findings mean for fans
For City fans, the past few days have brought an uncomfortable reckoning. The ownership that transformed the club they love has now been found to have disgraced it.
Over the 18 years since Sheikh Mansour purchased Manchester City, the distinction between club and owner has become – perhaps understandably – increasingly blurred. City’s Abu Dhabi-backed ownership transformed perennial underachievers into a global powerhouse, while investing heavily in the club and its surrounding East Manchester community . In doing so, they accumulated enormous goodwill among supporters.
But in the context of the findings against City, it is clear that has also left a powerful sense of dissonance among the City fanbase.
For years, repeated denials and assurances created a fog of obfuscation around the allegations. Within it grew an increasingly conspiratorial impulse among people who should have known better, including claims that regulators and rival clubs were conspiring to keep City down. This has led to an extraordinary inversion through which some of the richest and most powerful owners in world football could be recast as victims of a system they have now been found to have systematically circumvented.
As recently as three days before the final findings were published, chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak wrote directly to fans insisting that City’s confidence in proving its innocence remained undiminished. He invoked key moments in the club’s recent history, such as victories in Istanbul and at Wembley. He warned of those seeking to “undermine” the club, and appealed to the strength of the “Manchester City family”.
That language is significant precisely because it is a blatant exploitation of the inherited relationship between supporters and Manchester City – its memories, loyalties and sense of collective belonging – in support of the current ownership. The commission’s findings make that exploitation impossible to ignore.
And there is a temptation here to offer City supporters an easy consolation. Whatever happened in the boardroom, nobody can take away the goals, trophies and memories. But I am not sure that is good enough.
Professional football depends upon a simple bargain. Supporters invest extraordinary quantities of time, money and emotion because they believe that, however unequal the resources available to different clubs might be, the competition itself has meaning.
Systematically circumvent those rules and the damage extends far beyond Manchester City. Other clubs competed for the same trophies, European places and prize money. Their supporters invested their own lives in those competitions too. Sporting integrity is not some bureaucratic technicality. It underpins the emotional meaning of football itself.
That makes what happens next vitally important. City supporters have been placed in an invidious position. Accepting the findings means confronting the possibility that one of the most glorious periods in their inherited story has been profoundly compromised. Anger, denial and even defiance are understandable responses to that rupture.
But the evidence now requires Manchester City supporters to make the distinction their owners have spent years blurring: Manchester City is not its ownership.
If this really is their club – an institution inherited through generations of families and communities – then supporters now have a responsibility to defend it. That means refusing to direct their anger exclusively towards the Premier League, rival supporters, journalists or some imagined external conspiracy. It means turning that anger towards the people who have brought their club into disrepute.
The same tribal loyalty that has been mobilised in defence of Manchester City’s owners can be mobilised against them. City supporters should demand accountability from an ownership that has exploited their trust, appropriated the heritage of a wonderful football club and, according to the commission’s findings, systematically circumvented the rules of the competition in which that club exists.
The question now is not whether Manchester City supporters still love their club. It is what their love for it requires them to do next.
