Manchester City's era of dominance under Pep Guardiola is now defined by sham-ball, with the club's Premier League successes tainted by guilty verdicts for financial cheating. The building of Guardiola's supremacy was underpinned by financial cheating, and now he can only double down on his adherence to the owners.
The 2019 Question That Was Dismissed
In May 2019, after Manchester City's 6-0 defeat of Watford in the FA Cup final, Guardiola faced a question from Rob Harris of the Associated Press about whether he had ever received two salaries, following information that Roberto Mancini, his predecessor, had received a second salary from Abu Dhabi. City's press officer interrupted, saying, "We're not going here, we're really just not going there." Guardiola responded with a stare, not angry but sad and disappointed, yet really angry as well.
Fast forward to this week, a clip shows the same Rob Harris, now of Sky News, approaching Ferran Soriano, Guardiola's key man through that era, asking similar questions. "The Premier League maintains you cheated for nearly a decade … is all this success, as the Premier League says, based on sham contracts?" Soriano responded, "Thank you, thank you," with the look of a man caught shoplifting, followed by a mute, fumbling exit.
The Era of Sham-Ball
The 2019 Cup final win came at the end of the main period of shammery, and it was in many ways its unholy coronation. During the period embraced by the charges, City's net spend on transfers was, according to Transfermarkt, almost £400m more than Manchester United in second place, and five times as much as Liverpool and Arsenal. From 2016 to 2018, the key period in building the Pep supremacy, they massively outspent every other team, after which they won the league on the final day or by a single point three times. There were little things throughout, like digging out an extra £25m for Kevin De Bruyne.
Harris deserves his moment of grace, living proof that it's culturally vital to keep on asking questions. Nick Harris, AKA Sporting Intelligence, has kept going at this story relentlessly despite abuse, harassment and threats, and has every right to feel vindicated.
Guardiola's Stance and What He Knew
What did Pep know? This relates to the true nature of the club, of elite football itself, and more basic things like truth, spectacle and human nature. After City's two-year ban from the Champions League for a serious breach of Uefa's financial fair play rules was overturned by the court of arbitration for sport, Guardiola concluded, "We didn't break the rules. We played the same rules as all the clubs in the Premier League," which seemed silly at the time, given time-barring of offences was key to that decision.
To this day Guardiola's stance remains slavish adherence to the promises of his paymasters, as evidenced by his first statement on the matter on Wednesday. Guardiola says he will be getting through the current unpleasantness with the club and its fans, sticking together as always. But City's fans have some urgent questions of their own now. The majority believed what they were told, and put their faith in the "irrefutable body of evidence" schtick.
Guardiola will face his own questions too. The coach who only stays for three or four years stretched this out to a full decade at a club where 80% of that time was spent under a cloud of sham contracts and casual hubris. Through all this he had a deeply personal relationship with his chair, Khaldoon al-Mubarak.
Others in the Matrix
Soriano is utterly bound up in this. In one leaked memo published by Der Spiegel, Soriano writes, "We will need to fight this, and do it in a way that is not visible." His pre-City past has already been sliced and diced. He was at Barcelona during the period when the alleged, unproved, time-barred refereeing scandal happened, but not implicated or punished. He was at Air Spain when it collapsed, but cleared of any wrongdoing. And now he's been at City in the period of inflated income that has left the club dangling over the edge of a cliff.
Others who will be asked what they knew include the owner, Sheikh Mansour. How is it possible to spend so much family money on this thing, to dole out what are in effect government contracts, and not know the actual process here? Weren't the sham dealings obvious? It was there even in the absence of furious statements of support from the independent directors at First Abu Dhabi Bank, Etihad Airways, Experience Abu Dhabi, Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi, Aldar Properties of Abu Dhabi, Masdar Energy of Abu Dhabi, e& telecoms of Abu Dhabi. No word either from Dude Wipes, the club's official male-oriented toilet-paper partner.
We knew about the sportswashing aspect, knew that City was a soft-power vehicle for the state of Abu Dhabi, which has a record of alleged – and of course denied – human rights abuses and so on. City's fans must have known this too, or felt it on some level. It was there cooked into the blueprint, the sense of something brutally high-end but strangely cold. Some champion teams have a strut. City's basic vibe was always closer to an unceasing V-sign. Perhaps there was even a buried unease here. No one really enjoys being treated as a glove puppet, even when it is done gently and with a hand held discreetly under the desk.
