The pitchforks are out, the torches are burning and Manchester City are being marched towards the town square. [The now well-publicised reports of City’s guilty verdict on 114 of their 115 charges](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7049721/2026/09/25/manchester-city-charges-verdict-premier-league/) have much of the footballing community baying for blood – and if the judgment is upheld, rightly so.
The conversation has quickly moved to punishments, which have ranged from fines to points deductions and, most significantly, the reversal of titles won during the period under scrutiny. But who should win these titles? The team that finished second, or the runners-up in a cup competition?
Opposing fans might be sensing a quick trophy grab on the back of being historically wronged by Manchester City – social media is currently rife with these claims – but this is an outcome to be avoided.
A punishment for Manchester City should be designed to punish Manchester City. It shouldn’t attempt to create an alternative history in which another club is retrospectively declared to have achieved something it didn’t actually achieve.
The obvious counterargument is that if City obtained a sporting advantage through rule-breaking, then the results of those seasons are already compromised. Why shouldn’t the teams that were denied the opportunity to win be recognised afterwards?
That is a perfectly understandable position. If financial rules exist to protect competitive fairness, and an independent commission has found that those rules were breached, then there is a legitimate argument that the consequences should extend beyond financial penalties. But that still doesn’t tell us which club should be declared champion.
If City were removed from the table completely, that doesn’t mean the second-placed team automatically becomes champion. There are so many effects of City’s presence that would not be accounted for. You can’t know what the Premier League table would have looked like if Manchester City had not existed in the same form.
If Arsenal finished second to City by five points, perhaps Arsenal would have approached certain matches differently if City weren’t there. If Liverpool lost the title by one point, perhaps their entire season would have unfolded differently without City as the benchmark.
A similar logic applies to re-awarding cup competitions to the runner-up. Without delving into every permutation of a knockout bracket, would the semi-finalists knocked out by Manchester City not also have a claim to the trophy? They could have won the final had they not been knocked out by City – and this logic obviously extends across the whole competition. You can’t simplify the re-award process by ignoring every other effect of the advantage City gained through their wrongdoing.
Is the punishment supposed to correct the competitive advantage City allegedly gained, or is it supposed to identify the club that would have won in an imaginary alternative league? Those aren’t the same thing, and as much as some opposing fans would love the latter, it isn’t the outcome that should legitimately be sought.
The closest modern equivalent to this scandal is Calciopoli in Italy – the controversy that exploded in 2006 after widespread referee manipulation was uncovered at several Serie A clubs. The 2004/05 Scudetto was stripped from Juventus and left unassigned, yet the following season’s title went to third-placed Inter Milan following Juventus’s relegation and AC Milan’s points deduction. Inter’s title remains hugely controversial, and was hastily decided in July 2006 by FIGC commissioner Guido Rossi after a three-person commission reviewed the matter. It is also viewed by many in Italy as meaningless – albeit mostly by opposing fans – but it clearly doesn’t carry the same weight as winning it outright in a ‘normal’ season.
The Premier League should avoid this by focusing the punishments on Manchester City, rather than attempting to manufacture new champions. If the Premier League believes City should no longer be recognised as champions of a particular season, it should leave the title vacant rather than hand it to a club that did not win it.
A league title isn’t simply a reward for finishing highest in a mathematical table. It is a record of what happened over 38 games. If that record is subsequently invalidated, perhaps the honest response is to acknowledge that the title can no longer stand. But replacing one club with another doesn’t restore the original competition. It creates a new one that never happened.
If Manchester City are eventually stripped of Premier League titles, the temptation will be to look down the table and find somebody else to give them to. But football doesn’t work backwards quite so neatly. Manchester United didn’t win the 2011/12 or 2017/18 titles. Liverpool didn’t win 2013/14. They finished second. If City’s achievements are eventually deemed invalid, that should have consequences for City. But it shouldn’t create achievements for somebody else.
Not every wrong needs to be corrected by inventing a different version of what happened.