The yellow cat eyes were the first giveaway. Carl Lewis first suspected Ben Johnson would cheat him out of gold at Seoul 1988 in a fleeting glance as they waited for the bang of the 100m pistol. The second clue came when the Canadian ran his race in 9.79 seconds. It was a world record fuelled by anabolic steroids. Much as we are discovering about Manchester City’s gluttony of success: if it looked too good to be true, it probably was.
Sport is littered with contested histories. If you squint closely at photos of Vincent Kompany wafting the Premier League trophy above his head, you can just make out the shape of Lance Armstrong sprawled on a chaise longue in front of seven sullied yellow jerseys. What was real, and what was a shameful lie? Every club will have reacted to the revelations about City’s alleged financial doping with the same incredulity and what-ifs.
For Tottenham Hotspur, the verdict – City guilty of all but one of 115 charges – comes at a moment when the pain is most acute. Bottom of the table, their days of flying within City’s orbit are gone. Four times Spurs missed out on the Champions League while finishing behind them. They lost a League Cup final.
But the impact is more profound than missing out on trophies, European places or prize money. At Tottenham, in particular, operating in the ecosystem Sheikh Mansour built has prompted introspection bordering on an existential crisis.
Mauricio Pochettino had a starting XI worth just £98m which twice challenged for the title. Because neither season ended with silverware, they were roundly ridiculed. Spurs were harangued and heckled and harried until that under that pressure, the purse strings finally burst. Having spent upwards of £300m, Roberto De Zerbi’s team are winless and facing up to the prospect of another relegation battle.
That is not to say Spurs can blame other clubs for their own mess. The market is skewed, the wages stratospheric and still current problems could have been avoided with smarter decisions. Nobody forced them to spend £60m on Tanguy Ndombele. It was not Sheikh Mansour who fired Pochettino, or veered aimlessly between Jose Mourinho, Nuno, Antonio Conte, Ange Postecoglou, Thomas Frank and for a fleeting moment, Igor Tudor. Daniel Levy and Vinai Venkatesham have made questionable appointments, sackings and signings of their own volition.
Yet if you tilt your head one way, Tottenham largely operated on an ethically sound, financially prudent model. And somehow, some way, they matched the oligarchs and oil barons and very nearly toppled them. Tilt to the other side and Levy never had the requisite ambition to turn Spurs into a super-club in their own right.
In 2017, when the then chairman oversaw a summer without a single signing, he made a visit to New York during which he was invited to ring the opening bell at the Nasdaq stock exchange in Times Square. He used that public appearance to deride the “unsustainable” spending of other teams and said he would always seek to run the club in a more “appropriate” way.
As the Premier League continued to eat itself, that in itself became unsustainable. In the five years leading up to this summer Spurs became one of the biggest spenders.
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That is the double-edged nature of City’s rule-breaking. On the one hand, the extent of the damage is clear to the naked eye. At the same time, the sheer scale of it is impossible to measure. The identity crises sparked at clubs like Tottenham will never be written into any legal challenge, but they are as real as any financial compensation City’s rivals may seek.
There is an obvious irony, in that at surface level the relationship with City is stronger than ever. Tottenham hired Rafi Moersen from City Football Group as director of football operations, a move which helped deliver the signings of Omar Marmoush and Savio. Marmoush was such a good deal, in fact, that his price tag fortuitously saved City having to play Frankfurt a sell-on fee. Gone are the days when Manchester City managers feel they have license to dismiss Tottenham as “the Harry Kane team”.
Given what we know now, the shortcomings or otherwise of the Harry Kane team have to be cast in a whole new light. Lewis was only beaten by Johnson by a tenth of a second. City blew the competition out of the water.