In surveys ranking the Premier League’s greatest moments, football supporters regularly give pride of place to Sergio Agüero’s championship-winning goal for Manchester City in 2012. Scored in injury time on the last day of the season, Agüero’s strike against Queens Park Rangers delivered the first league title for City since the 1960s. Knocking their historic rivals Manchester United into second place, it also signalled a new era in which the club replaced United as the dominant force in the English game.
“Aguerooooooo!” – the incredulous single-word response from the match commentator Martin Tyler – has entered football folklore. But an asterisk may now be needed at the end of all those Os. Reports that an independent panel has found Manchester City guilty of breaking Premier League rules between 2009 and 2023 cast a dark shadow over that day, and much else besides. During that period, the club won seven Premier League titles, six League Cups, three FA Cups and the Uefa Champions League, all while under the ownership of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family. The inescapable implication of the apparent ruling is that those trophies were won unfairly.
The guilty verdict on more than one hundred separate charges against City has yet to be officially confirmed. It may be assumed that the club – which has consistently denied wrongdoing – will launch an appeal. But rivals are already taking advice over compensation claims and the Premier League, which began its investigation in 2018 after whistleblower leaks, must contemplate how tough it wants to be on the most successful English football club of the current era.
If the verdict is upheld, the punishment should be exemplary and severe, given the threat to the integrity and credibility of the world’s most popular domestic football league. In essence, Sheikh Mansour and his board stand accused of illicitly bankrolling the City men’s team’s ascent from Premier League also-rans to repeat champions, using inflated sponsorship deals and off the books payments to fuel the rise. The club hierarchy’s aggressive response to scrutiny conveyed a sense that it seemingly thought extreme wealth – and the political heft of Abu Dhabi’s soft-power project – could confer a kind of impunity.
The Premier League’s investigators should be congratulated for staying the course, and this extraordinarily long-running saga should now be brought to as swift a conclusion as possible. It is hard not to feel some sympathy for Manchester City supporters, confronted with the likelihood that the greatest period in their club’s history will be forever tainted. On the pitch, City’s football during the Abu Dhabi era has at times been of a sublime quality, overseen by an inspired coach in Pep Guardiola. But off it, the biggest financial scandal in English football history is a reminder that the volume of money now washing about at the top of the game has been bad for its sporting soul.
During the Premier League boom years, great footballing institutions have lost their spiritual bearings as dubious billionaires, debt-leveraging carpetbaggers and petrostates have muscled in for a piece of the action. In the case of Manchester City, the Sheikh Mansour takeover delivered undreamt of success and that Agüero moment. But if it took persistent cheating to get there, it was a worthless kind of glory.
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