Pep Guardiola, City’s most successful manager, at least had the luxury of asking his employers directly. “When they are accused of something I ask them, ‘Tell me about that.’ They explain and I believe them,” he said back in May 2022.
And if they’re lying to you, Pep?
“If you lie to me, the day after I am not here,” he said. “I will be out and I will not be your friend any more.”
All of this foments a lack of faith in our institutions and fosters endless conspiracy theories at the extremes. For some at one end it’s that City are cheats, their success is tainted and the Premier League is weak and spineless because it let them get away with it for so long. For those at the other end, it’s that City are victims of a witch hunt engineered by England’s traditional legacy clubs — you know, Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United — who force their puppets at the Premier League to make a spurious case against them.
Most reasonable folk are somewhere in the middle because we’d like to make up our own minds, like Pep did. We’d like the rules explained to us in a way that we understand and we’d like to know what evidence there is that City broke them, as well as City’s rebuttal. We won’t be the ones deciding, fine, because we’re not trained in the supposedly mystical finer points of the law, but it would be nice to know what this case is about, how it will be judged, when, where and by whom.
But no. We won’t be afforded that luxury. And frankly, that will make it that little bit harder to accept the verdict, whatever it may be. If and when it ever comes out, of course.
