One of the things that feels like it’s starting to dawn on people as the Manchester City Unpleasantness reaches fallout from the fallout from the backlash to the fallout stage is that on the most basic and fundamental level there is no righting the wrongs that have taken place.
There is no satisfactory outcome. When trying to consider who has been most affected by City’s cheating, the actual answer is ‘everyone’. Up to and including City fans themselves, which they will come to realise once they process their grief and stop denying the objective if horribly uncomfortable reality of their situation.
Everything that happened in English football for almost 20 years is now tainted and damaged in a way that cannot be put right. Did any of it really happen? Did any of it mean anything?
Sure, we can reallocate City’s titles for a laugh, but in reality it’s a double victory for silliness because all it actually does is take away City’s ability to still enjoy what they achieved while not really transferring the joy of those successes to anyone else.
It’s all just a void of nothingness. Nothing is real. Aguerrrrrrrr…. oh.
There are 38 Premier League clubs who shared a pitch with City. All have lost out. All will seek compensation. It’s impossible to really try and come up with a definitive ranking for, say, the 10 clubs most negatively impacted by City’s antics.
Only a fool would even attempt it. Here then is the definitive ranking for the 10 clubs most negatively impacted by City’s antics.
At the surface level, could be said to sit alongside Liverpool and ahead of noisy-neighboured Manchester United as the most significantly affected by Man City’s nefarious ways. But is that actually true? No, it is not.
Sure, City famously went through a phase there of helping themselves to Arsenal first-team players on something close to an annual basis. And don’t get us wrong, there were some good Arsenal players who made the trip north to the Man City Revolution in those early days of their dominance.
But one could, if one were so inclined, make a compelling argument that the single solitary loss of Ashley Cole to Chelsea did more harm to Arsenal than the collective loss of your Emmanuel Adebayors, your Kolo Toures, your Gael Clichys and the Samir Nasris of this world. And that’s even with making allowance for Adebayor’s length-of-the-pitch celebration.
But it’s not even just that City didn’t perhaps hit Arsenal quite as hard in that era as memory suggests; it’s that City have been actively helping Arsenal out in recent years. Sure, they’ve slapped them down to size in a couple of title races. But how did Arsenal get in those title races? There were some City spare parts providing on-field assistance, but above all there was Mikel Arteta in the dugout. Well, not the dugout. In the technical area. Well, not the technical area. But you get the idea.
It’s an interesting if mischievous thought: would Arsenal have even the one post-Wenger Premier League title they’ve got had it not been for Arteta getting the opportunity to attend the Pep Guardiola Finishing School at City?
Is the truly fair knock-on effect for Arsenal not, in fact, having a couple of extra Premier League titles heading their way but rather having the one they have got in the last 20 years taken away? Answer, sadly, must be yes.
At which point we might as well go all the way down the insane rabbit-hole of reallocating all the trophies Arsenal have won since 1919. They know why.
One of City’s key tactics was always to try and take the best players from clubs they considered a direct threat. Swansea should probably, therefore, take it as a compliment.
Would Chelsea have more trophies and medals and pots and pans and probably another handful of brilliant players along the way had Manchester City not been going around cheating everyone? Almost certainly yes. Are they in any position to really complain about this? Absolutely not.
N’Golo Kante buggering straight off to Chelsea after The Fairytale was probably the real killer blow, but Riyad Mahrez going off to be brilliant for City a couple of years later was another brutal reminder of Leicester’s place in the food chain and how there would always be limits imposed on their gravity-defying exploits.
End of the day, though, that probably happens with or without City and their nefarious activities. It’s not like if City didn’t exist then Leicester were going to be invited to sit in the empty chair at the Big Six table. They’d have just been picked off and eventually put firmly back in their box by a Big Five instead.
Haven’t ever really been quite good enough for it to directly matter in terms of on-field results. For all their noise, for all that Newcastle really is an extraordinary club that represents the entirety of its city in a way few others can, the reality is that it is still a club that has finished in the top four only once in the last 20 years. They’ve spent more years in the Championship than that over the same period.
But what Man City definitely have done is make it much, much harder for Newcastle to cheat in the same way having sold their own soul, with the even bigger kicker there being that ‘We could be as successful as Man City!’ was a pretty compelling convincer for a lot of Newcastle fans who threw their lot in with the Saudis, also giving away what was for a large club an unusually large measure of neutral goodwill in exchange for, at time of writing, one Carabao Cup and an occasional doomed foray into the Champions League.
Football’s a funny old game and who knows what the next 15 years might bring, but for now it seems unlikely that it will run to 4000 words if and when we find ourselves having to reallocate all the trophies Newcastle have won under a regime that, to the surprise of all, might not have been going entirely by the book.
The Toffees could certainly make the case that nobody else was filleted quite like them by Man City’s talent-hoovering operation. John Stones and Joleon Lescott were obvious massive losses for Everton, but it’s easy to forget just how excited everyone was about Jack Rodwell before he traded Everton blue for City blue.
And unlike absolutely everyone else on this list – even f**king Spurs – Everton haven’t had so much as one single trophy to celebrate during City’s ill-gotten reign of tiki-taka terror.
Now it’s also true that Everton also hadn’t won anything for quite a long time before City’s ill-gotten reign of tiki-taka terror, but still. Does make it even more annoying, surely.
But must we also consider the flipside; that City’s relentless pieing off of Liverpool makes it all okay? Or at least slightly more palatable?
Again, just goes to show that there really are no easy answers or straightforward solutions when it comes to trying to entirely disentangle Manchester City from the last 20-odd years of English football. Absolutely nothing is real now.
Easy to forget given the journey they’ve been on under Unai Emery, but Aston Villa have spent considerable time in Doldrum Town, population them.
Now it would be remiss to pretend that was primarily anyone’s fault other than their own. When a big club with in-built advantages contrives to get itself as massively and enormously relegated as Aston Villa did – and then also to take a wee while to get themselves back up again – they really can’t look too far beyond their own failings and mistakes.
But that’s the thing with City’s tentacles and how far they stretched throughout the English game. Whatever else Villa got wrong, would they have been quite so bad if City hadn’t come along and pilfered both Gareth Barry and James Milner, the most professional of all the professional’s professionals in the entire history of the Barclays?
At around the time City were embarking on their path to world domination, Villa were one of the first roadblocks that needed to be got around. They were starting to establish themselves among the best in the league, finishing sixth for three straight seasons between 2008 and 2010.
But they slumped hard to ninth, followed by some grim seasons scrambling for 40 points and safety (getting the latter but not the former on a few occasions) before eventually plummeting down with only 17 points to their name.
Not all because of City, obviously, but while others can more easily point to direct loss of honours and glory at City’s nefarious hands, Villa can reasonably point to the harshest and most serious actual consequence of it all in terms of meaningful hardship.
We did briefly consider putting them top of the whole lot, for a few reasons.
One, if it weren’t for City, then Spurs may well have signed Sergio Aguero to play alongside Harry Kane and, while Spurs are still Spurs and would have thus contrived to somehow f**k that up, it would have been fascinating to see precisely how a team scoring at least four goals in every single game still managed not to win anything at all.
Then there’s the departure. Spurs lost only one player to Man City, Daniel Levy’s infamous reluctance to sell anyone to a club he considered any kind of rival having kept Kane and others out of their clutches.
But that one player was Kyle Walker, who had his head turned when Spurs were bang in the 2016/17 title race. The consensus at the time was that £50m for a full-back was simply a good deal for everyone involved. That turned out to be only two-thirds right. It was a very good deal for Kyle Walker and for Man City.
Spurs, who were never again real title contenders as City began hoovering up pretty much all of them, slowly but surely slipped away from their peak. There were many, many other reasons behind the slow and continuing descent from their 2017 peak, but Walker’s exit was surely one.
But it’s more than those simple specifics. The timing of City’s transformation was absolutely brutal for Spurs, who had just about got themselves into a position to be able to consistently and repeatably challenge the hegemony of the Big Four at the precise moment City came along and made it six.
Spurs might be the biggest what if of all from the whole City era. Spursily, of course, they still contrived to have the one time they finished second be one of the seasons where City didn’t in fact win the league.
It was Chelsea who beat Spurs to the title in 2017. And thus, while all agree that City’s bad cheating must mean titles are reallocated to the deserving winners, Spurs were merely the victims of Chelsea’s much more lighthearted and lower-risk cheating. Only a fool would think their trophies won under the regime of gentleman crook Roman Abramovich should be reallocated.
We don’t expect or ask for much sympathy for poor old Manchester United, who thanks to City had to settle for a mere 20 years of Premier League dominance rather than it now standing at something nudging up towards 35.
Indeed, one of the striking things about Premier League football over the last 15 years or so is how many neutrals have been perfectly willing to swallow their doubts and concerns over what City had been up to, to bury those thoughts deep, deep down because they so often presented, to the casual fan, the lesser of two evils. Or if not quite that then definitely the lesser of two gobshites.
To fans of everyone outside those most directly affected by City’s shenanigans, the undeniably unpalatable nature of what City were doing was masked to a very large extent by the fact that City winning stuff in a dodgepot fashion was far more digestible on a simple day-to-day existence basis than those wins falling instead the way of louder and more overtly obnoxious sorts. Your Liverpools. Your Arsenals. And yes, The Manchester Uniteds Of This World.
But there’s also no denying that United were hit hard by the City revolution. Before City and especially Pep came along, United and Sir Ferg were still the only ones who could really claim to have truly dominated and bestrode the league for an extended period of time. Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal rattled them. Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea undid them. But never for the extended, era-defining way that City would.
And all under a manager who, had City remained in their box, would almost certainly have rocked up at Old Trafford.
If there’s no Man City and no Pep Guardiola then Jurgen Klopp goes down as the second greatest Premier League manager of all time, Liverpool under his watch as the second greatest Premier League dynasty of all time. But even before all that, so much changes.
Steven Gerrard has a Premier League winner’s medal, his slip against Chelsea a mere footnote in the story of a season of spectacular success under Brendan Rodgers.
Three times Liverpool have finished second to Man City in the Premier League. Twice while compiling genuinely absurd numbers for a second-place finisher; 92 points in 2021/22 and, even more nonsensically, 97 in 2018/19. In that season Liverpool finished a point behind City and 25 clear of third-placed Chelsea.
In 2022 it was slightly less mad. Again, a point behind City after their final-day nonsense against Villa to pinch the title. This time, though, only an 18-point gap over Chelsea in third.
One of the things that generally makes finding ‘alternative’ winners for the trophies City won such a futile and necessarily surface-level errand is that you have to just pretend pretty much everything else stays the same. But it doesn’t. Priorities change for teams once the title is not a realistic prospect. Nobody strives every sinew for second place.
And not every second-place team makes a worthy champion. Does anyone really think some great sporting fairness is served by declaring the Man United sides who limped home distant, broken and beaten runners-up to City in 2018 or 2021 champions? Were they really robbed of glory? United got 74 points in 2021, for crying out loud.
Liverpool absolutely can make such claims, though. They were so close to City and so very far clear of absolutely everyone else that there is no doubt, no unconsidered variable that could sufficiently shift the needle. They weren’t just very, very, very nearly as good as City; they were absolutely miles better than everyone else at the same time.
