The sports media industry is almost unrecognizable to the one I walked into in June 2008, fresh out of university, taking a trainee role at the Press Association. The UK’s national news agency lived by the motto “fast, fair and accurate”. It still does. But those were simpler times, back when Twitter was still called Twitter, and a niche micro-blogging website few people had heard of.
One convention in the British sports media at that time was that neutrality was paramount. You knew who everyone else in the newsroom supported, but they wouldn’t broadcast it. You certainly wouldn’t do anything as vulgar as celebrate a goal in a press box while on assignment at a match. That stiff-upper-lip aspect still holds. It’s always funny for English writers to witness their European or Latin American counterparts giving it the full business at international tournaments.
Anyway, after three months in the job, I was a Manchester City fan on the sports business desk helping to cover the huge, staggering news that Manchester City were to be bought by the Abu Dhabi United Group, transforming the immediate horizons of the historic English club beyond all plausibility. But I certainly wouldn’t have written any sort of cloying, florid, first-person column about the takeover. Perish the thought.
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Things are different today, though. Most pundits and a growing number of journalists wear their colours very prominently indeed. Certainly on television broadcasts, where it feels almost obligatory to keep reminding viewers to which team each pundit is affiliated. Sky Sports used to have Fanzone, an alternative coverage option where commentary and reactions were supplied by supporters of the teams in action. Now they just plonk Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher in the commentary box whenever Manchester United play Liverpool.
Then there’s the relentless coverage on the days between the games. What does “Carra” think about the Reds? What’s “Wrighty” saying about Arsenal? Has Neville had enough former United players on his podcast to avert the need for a separate, dedicated Manchester United podcast on the same channel? No. They did an episode dedicated to Manchester City this week.
So, gradually and tentatively as a person from the old world, I decided it was fine to be a confirmed City fan in a work setting, not that it had ever been some sort of jealously guarded secret. Although the tribalistic punditsphere outlined above can be mind-numbing, I see the benefit of writing honestly with one’s affiliation in mind. Intensely performative neutrality looks exhausting and removes you from the feeling that made you want to do this in the first place. Those moments of joy where sport feels so completely and utterly perfect you want to spend the rest of your life writing about it. Or playing it, although I realised fairly early on I was pretty awful at that.
And so, a season ticket from the age of seven eventually became a work gig. Watching Sergio Aguero’s unforgettable Premier League-clinching goal in 2012 on the tear-stained terraces became watching on from the media tribune when Rodri steered home the only goal of the 2023 Champions League final against Inter Milan to complete Pep Guardiola’s treble masterpiece. It was quite something to feel and absorb all those emotions from both sides, not to mention experiencing City’s more chaotic but still strangely beautiful existence before 2008.
On Tuesday, when the Premier League verdict dropped to confirm Manchester City were guilty of all charges related to serious breaches of the competition’s financial rules — having concocted “sham” commercial deals to artificially inflate revenue and reduce costs to the tune of a £900 million benefit between 2009/10 and 2017/18 — it was hard to know precisely what those feelings and emotions meant anymore.
MORE: ‘Sham’ contracts and a $1 billion lie: Premier League reveals Man City verdict
Throughout City’s torturous legal battles with football’s authorities over the legitimacy of their finances, I’ve subscribed to the idea that you can’t take the memories away; you can’t change how people felt. I hadn’t considered how those feelings could be left brutally vandalised by the reckless actions of an ownership who have failed in their duty of care to a 132-year-old football club, its supporters and players, in a fog of their own self-righteous arrogance.
City’s decision-makers continue to unflinchingly protest their innocence, as they did when a two-year competition ban from UEFA on similar grounds was successfully overturned at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2020. But their so-called irrefutable body of evidence has been emphatically refuted.
They’re up for the fight; they will appeal the Premier League decision and might seek recourse outside of the competition’s defined legal process in open court. Some supporters are also still up for the fight, taking CEO Ferran Soriano at his word that City’s Abu Dhabi-based sponsors paid their obligations in full and that this is all some sort of “conspiracy”. Guardiola’s message of love and support will undoubtedly rally a few more back into the fold.
Loosely following the main arguments in defense of City, it’s true that their rapid ascent put noses out of joint among English football’s traditional elite, whose preeminent positions are protected by the way Premier League finances are distributed. That City are the only team to have vaulted into the upper reaches of the Premier League and stayed there in modern history does not paint a picture that chimes with the “competitive balance” the league has often trumpeted, given they needed the thick end of £1 billion of illicit finance to do so.
But the scale of City’s malpractice is truly staggering, and having this written in black and white was received wearily by City fans who have been taken for a ride. Even if chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, Soriano and the rest of the Etihad Stadium big brains end up celebrating an overturned decision — by all accounts, the chances are beyond remote — they will have overseen so much damage, so much mud that will not come off. A fanbase lauded for their loyalty and good humor when City briefly shambled into the third tier of English football in 1998/99 will now be derided as cheats for generations. All they’ve done is go to watch the team they always have, with their friends and family, their community.
Undermining how perfect that simple act feels is the biggest crime of the Manchester City ownership, bigger than any titles that might be stripped or reallocated. Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United supporters might have grounds to decry the memories and moments denied to them, but those moments didn’t happen, so they can never miss them. They can fully trust their own stories. City fans experienced them, after the most amazing journeys with their favourite people, and it’s now open for debate how they might feel about them. Some supporters will bullishly and honestly say it changes nothing, and good luck to them. But there shouldn’t be degrees of variance in which each person believes their most cherished memories. Sport and life are not supposed to work like that.
The messy fallout of English football’s greatest modern-day scandal will take some time to parse out, but it should be a priority that Manchester City Football Club continues to exist. The wide array of punishments on the table for the Premier League, including expulsion from the league and a subsequent plummet into non-league if the Football League shows solidarity with that course of action, means nothing is guaranteed for a club that won its first major trophy back in 1904.
It feels imperative that those responsible for the $1 billion lie are held fully accountable and pay every cost that can be wrung from them if City’s attempts to appeal the guilty verdict are unsuccessful. Under Sheikh Mansour’s ownership, the club have built sprawling infrastructure alongside the expanded 60,000-capacity Etihad Stadium in east Manchester, including a state-of-the-art training ground with a secondary stadium and a vast surrounding campus. Even if it soon comes to look like striking but discredited architecture from a post-Soviet state, the overheads on keeping this sort of thing up and running will be considerable.
Assuming the ownership is moved on, as they surely must be if guilt is upheld, City will have to downsize some of this, but it’s imperative that a long-loved community asset remains. The recently formed independent supporters trust, The Citizens Trust, mobilising to be ready for this eventuality is one of very few shafts of sky-blue piercing the gloom this week. Maybe a club that has drifted too far from its traditional working-class constituency over the past decade of unparalleled success can be persuaded to nurture those links more carefully out of necessity. As an aside, City’s owners might have put £900m into the club illegally, but they still saw fit to keep hiking ticket prices.
THE CITIZENS TRUST – MANCHESTER CITY SUPPORTERS’ UNION
STATEMENT ON PREMIER LEAGUE VERDICT
Have your say, join the trust: https://t.co/9YlpUzhRJn pic.twitter.com/dIHwaCV8QB
— The Citizens Trust (@MCFCtrust) September 30, 2026
Because of their rich and varied history, for most fans, Manchester City have never been defined by winning. The fact that many of them still fondly celebrate the days when they were the most appallingly accident-prone football team baffles fans of the big beasts of English football, who sometimes seem to judge their worth purely in terms of trophy tally at the expense of all that beautiful, idiosyncratic experience. Being downgraded to a club that doesn’t win trophies anymore doesn’t scare City fans; not having City there at all might suddenly be something to fear.
All of which begs the very fair question of the extent to which the partially impartial fan journalist should feel naive, duped and stupid. I was surprised by the extent to which Tuesday’s verdict left me absolutely reeling. I’ve always been realistic about the nature of City’s ownership — unique and now unquestionably deeply problematic in English football history. The owner being the deputy prime minister of a state with grave human rights concerns never sat entirely comfortably for the club from the city of Pankhurst and Peterloo. Those leaked emails, which emerged in 2018 to kick off this whole grim process, always looked absolutely awful.
It felt reasonable to assume that City tried to vault onto the upturning drawbridge of financial fair play regulations, which changed the entire landscape a year after the Abu Dhabi takeover. Tens of millions here and there would have been a bad look and rightly punished. But it’s the sheer scale — all but one of the Abu Dhabi commercial deals a fraud; the perception-altering audacity of the whole thing.
To say no one could compete with City during those years overlooks the vast fortunes that United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea spent to similar levels. Guardiola’s unparalleled genius as a tactical innovator made his teams truly brilliant; from the indomitable Kevin De Bruyne to the indefatigable Bernardo Silva, they deserve to be remembered in the same bracket as club greats of yesteryear like Colin Bell and Mike Summerbee. Generations apart, they gave everything in City colors and were adored for doing so. The same goes for hometown hero Phil Foden, the relentlessly goal-scoring meme Erling Haaland and the maverick Rayan Cherki, cut from the same cloth as Rodney Marsh and Georgi Kinkladze.
The sweat, toil and excellence they contributed to the cause is now cast in an unflattering light that they simply do not deserve. It’s not their fault that City couldn’t actually afford to have them all there at the same time but pretended they could.
These are weighty and disorienting things for us all to deal with day by day and week by week. That is the disgrace of the current Manchester City ownership, far more so than a sham sponsorship scheme. Manchester City FC must outlast the charlatans that promised it the Earth but ultimately threatened it with ruin. Shame on them, and solidarity with supporters and players past and present is the only position to take, impartially or otherwise.
