This week’s Monday Almanac is a day late because I really felt as though I needed to compose my thoughts about the match between Liverpool and Manchester City on Sunday afternoon. In an era of hot-takes, in which we’re meant to react as quickly and angrily as possible, perhaps there’s a value to be found in sitting back for just a day and letting it marinade in your brain.
In one sense, the match went pretty much as we might have expected. Liverpool have some terrific individual players, but it still feels as though Andoni Iraola is trying to find the best way of meshing them together. Manchester City spent wildly in the last two transfer windows and have so far looked like the most likely team to win the Premier League this season, not that six matches in is the time to be making such sweeping declarations.
But the overall feeling to have come after this match is one that has highlighted the biggest issue that the Premier League faces over the rest of the season. What, in the light of Manchester City’s serial cheating over the years and the fact that they haven’t received any punishment for it yet while mistaking the concept of an appeal for a retrial, is the point in it all?
It’s a truth about football that very few people seem willing to actually address. Professional football is a world which maintains its place at the heart of international discourse because of a series of illusions, and the core of the stories that we tell ourselves to justify this thing that we do is honesty. You have to be able to trust the product that’s being delivered to you.
It was very clear that both fans and pundits had layered too much significance onto this one particular match. What were they expecting from Manchester City? What were they expecting from a club which is employing its government to layer pressure on the UK government over cheating in a sporting event, or from the players, none of whom were at the club during the period examined by the independent commission involved?
We might have hoped for a little more humility and introspection from the club’s supporters, but anybody who saw the Newcastle fans dressed MIddle Eastern headdresses when their club was bought by the murderous Saudi Arabian government should already be aware of the extent to which people will kowtow for so much as the presumption of a sporting advantage.
Make no mistake about it, those who complain about a “red cartel” aren’t doing so to make a point about equality of opportunity for all clubs within a highly unbalanced financial landscape. They’re doing so because _they_ want to be the cartel instead. If you ever wanted a snapshot of the UK is like in 2026, an AI-generated flag with “In Khaldoon We Trust” printed on it, thanking a foreign plutocrat with a dubious human rights record for tipping a set of scales firmly in _their_ favour while singing proudly about being “cheats and we know we are” couldn’t be much more on the nose.
And after the match, there was this widespread feeling of the final score effectively being a shrug of the shoulders. If we accept that there will be no huge procedural mistakes uncovered by the highly experienced team of KCs who oversaw it, or any other technicalities that allow Manchester City to escape punishment, it’s likely that any sanctions will be generationally huge. There’s every possibility that they will be starting next season in the EFL, and quite possibly in League Two.
And if they are to run away with the Premier League title this season - and there’s been very little evidence on the pitch so far to suggest that they won’t - then what, exactly is the point of the rest of the 2026-27 Premier League season? All the while this appeals process gets held up by appeals, nobody knows which way this lands. It’s much easier now to look at the Premier League results from the weekend and shrug your shoulders than it was a few weeks ago.
The media hasn’t helped with its own fatuous commentary on the match. It’s extremely clear that the broadcasters just want things back the way they were before. Saying that they’ve “sent a message” to the rest of the division is essentially saying, “look, can’t we just put this unfortunate episode behind us can get back on with the sparkly, shiny football.” No-one who said anything like that seems to have given a thought to what the message was that they were actually sending.
Make no mistake here; this had to happen. Effectively doubling your television revenue over a period of nearly a decade in complete contravention of the financial rules that govern the game is pretty egregious, and we’ve all spent the last decade watching what happens when it’s successful. The Premier League _could_ have swept this all under the carpet, but they didn’t, and the way in which Manchester City have acted before against precisely these sort of allegations demonstrated why it might have been easier for them to do so.
The cat isn’t so much out of the bag as running around the room, spraying everything it can in order to mark its territory. We may be a long way from seeing the unredacted investigation into it all and, in particular, the appendices which, on the basis of what we _have_ already seen, say exactly who did what.
But minds have been made up, conclusions have been reached, and if the Premier League think there’ll be hell to pay when it gets to the point of sanctions being announced, well, that’s nothing like what will happen should they find a way of weaselling their way out of it all. And in the meantime, they should be praying that those season-ticket holders and television subscription payers who pay through the nose for this don’t start wondering what the point of it all is, because if they do, a surprisingly high number might reach the conclusion that there’s none whatsoever.