If Manchester City had never unfairly skewed the competition, would the beautiful journey of Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool ever have happened?…
THE SCALE of Manchester City’s sham is now clear. For me, anyway, it is important to start here:
I had a great time. I believe we had a great time.
The reason Jürgen Klopp builds a team that takes 110 from 114 and wins a European Cup and World Club Cup during that time span, the reason those players’ focus and to treat every game as though it meant everything is because they were trying to beat a team that had cheated to the tune of nine hundred million pounds up to the end of the 17/18 season.
It is possible Liverpool and Jürgen Klopp wait for Virgil van Dijk (and pay £75m for Virgil van Dijk) because they know that buying another centre-back, a very good centre-back, won’t be good enough. They know they need perfection.
Liverpool Football Club, Jürgen Klopp, a group of players, a group of executives and a massed rank of supporters, look at Manchester City with Pep Guardiola and all this money that they should never have had, because they weren’t prepared to compete properly, and said “yep, we’re going at you” and if that doesn’t further deepen the great time then I don’t know what will. So much of football on the elite European level looked at City and effectively waited for the storm to blow over. Liverpool were storm chasers, sprinting right into its heart.
So I don’t feel sorry for us. You can, obviously you can, but I don’t feel particularly rancorous, though I’d have loved that final day triumph in 2022. I wish Steven had a Championship medal but I sort of like the poetry that he doesn’t and everyone else in 2013/14 got what they came for. I am hugely entertained that while Liverpool were thrilling the nation in 13/14 Manchester City executives, cheating Manchester City executives, were bitter that we got their headlines. These cheats didn’t just want to prosper, they wanted to be garlanded. They wanted the world to swoon. The world swooned at us.
And this is why we’re the lucky ones. We get the great time but we will pretty much always be alright. There are a ton of ways this actually isn’t fair but it isn’t fair to be Real Madrid, Barcelona or Bayern Munich either. Clubs like these, which includes us, can always build something and be something if they get it pretty much right. That “pretty much right” no longer would cut it, that we needed to be close to perfect as the decade drew to a close, and that we were, is about a remarkable moment led by a remarkable man, and my god, we were lucky.
If you want to do counterfactual history, it is worth pondering if what went on at City hadn’t gone on whether or not Klopp would have still come. He came to be Liverpool manager but he also came to take on Pep Guardiola with the power of Liverpool behind him. If we had won a league in 2013/14, if Guardiola had never had moved to City, would he have decided to come here? I do sort of think so but I’d love to ask him, give him the question in advance, have him reflect and contemplate it.
Regardless, I had a great time. I know you did too.
The unlucky ones were the ones who nearly could ride into the storm but in the end lost everything, the ones who couldn’t cope with the inflationary factors, the ones who had to sell their best players and for whom it didn’t go well thereafter. Tottenham Hotspur arguably lose their greatest manager since Bill Nicholson because he and they couldn’t keep up the pace. Arsene Wenger’s closing years at Highbury became more about AFTV than glory. And Everton.
Arguably the biggest losers from all of this, or at least the ones that can be most useful as a trope, are our Blue neighbours. Being a broadly well run club with a good manager and some tidy ideas stopped being enough to stand a chance of breaking into Champions League places. This is where the inflation kicked in, where the Premier League still have to reflect on their own decisions, along with everyone thinking Farhad Moshiri was a good thing.
As I always do, I urge you to look at this BBC piece the day Moshiri bought into Everton (https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/35677681). This is approximately eight years after the takeover at Manchester City. Look how lacking in rigour it is. All the way through you can see basic questions unasked. For our purposes here though, so much of Everton’s last fifteen years didn’t have to be the way it has been and that hasn’t been down to Red Shite or Red Cartels, however much that partisan part of me wishes it were so. The primary issue has been what the actions of Sky Blue did to the universe of Royal Blue.
And while Everton may be the purest example (selling of best players to them, knocked out of whack competitively, issues with spiralling inflation, ill-advised takeover) they are very much not the only ones. The aftermath is everywhere.
The cliff edge between Championship and Premier League would always be there and would always have deepened but this accelerated the process. There are cup finals that are now soured. European adventures (that we take for granted) that could have happened but didn’t. £900m across those specific years is just a staggering sum and it doesn’t include prize money that ought not to have been won to say the least. What that £900m has impacted could include everything down to inflationary impacts on ticket prices.
Perhaps why I cling to the indisputable hard fact that we had a great time is that everything else seems bent slightly out of reality, seems out of focus. These English football seasons now don’t just have asterixes next to them but they are like Magic Eye puzzles. You can’t quite work out where you need to stand to look at them properly. There is, actually, no clearing this up. There is no retrospective remedy that fixes what has happened, that compensates properly for the loss of experiences.
This is why the punishment has to be the heftiest possible in terms of what matters most – the scale of the breach in trust. Words like this can seem tame here when we could be calling people all kinds, but they are the most significant. The Premier League clubs should not be able to, in good conscience, stay in a league with the people who have done this and who have shown precisely no contrition, the opposite of contrition in fact, for their actions which has just skewed 15 years of competition out of recognition.
They have to be expelled. There is no other option. No clever clever solution. Keeping them in the league but with years of docked points or just a big enough points deduction to make them the Championship’s problem for a season (undermining Championship clubs by the way) and then back with sins supposedly cleansed, sins they still do not admit to, is simply not adequate. The Premier League has taken this process deadly seriously. The Independent Commission have taken their time to make sure they get it right. Now is not the time for “clever” solutions. It is time to finish that serious work with the ultimate sanction.
They don’t get to play with our ball. Let them find a league that will let them play with theirs.
It really is as simple as that. Manchester City will look to use every legal instrument which has a 5% chance of success but leagues get to decide who does or doesn’t get to enter. This process should be finished, which will take another 12 weeks or so, and then the Premier League clubs can simply take action and they should take it out of collective self-respect and out of a desire to protect the game.
The newly formulated regulator for football has statutory powers to force a sale if owners are not proper. It may well be painful for a new Prime Minister, who has been close to UAE investments in Manchester while Mayor, to stand aside and see the regulator he has called for to show its teeth. There may well be diplomatic incidents, but these were always the risks.
They were always such huge risks. By turning a blind eye to what could go wrong in 2008, we find ourselves here in 2026. The Premier League has been brave and bold with this process but the Magic Eye puzzle left in its wake beg questions for them too. I rarely get through a day without reflecting on the fact that twenty clubs each gifted Richard Scudamore one million pounds upon his retirement.
But at least that shows they are capable of collective action.
My optimistic hope is this is seen as an opportunity to rework the game and its structures and incentives and this one will not be passed up. This will almost certainly prove a hope too far.
For those who support Manchester City, well they come to Anfield soon and I am sure that could be seen as a chance for hardening hearts and battening down the hatches. But the first people who have had the piss taken out of them are the people of Manchester and in the club’s ongoing attitude of more and more bullshit we can see that the club feel they can continue to take the support for granted, for a ride. It has to stop somewhere and those supporters need to know there is a way back. Which there is, because there is always a way back.
They aren’t a sham club. They aren’t sham people. But they have had sham years. And they have inflicted them on everybody.
Not me though. Not us. Because we got to watch the greatest Liverpool team ever. We had a great time and I am bowled over by the fact that right now, years on, I am prouder than ever of Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool. They played every game like it was a cup final because they had to. They were by far the greatest team, the world has ever seen.
Neil
