Manchester City players celebrate in front of inflatable bananas at Anfield.
Manchester City players celebrate in front of inflatable bananas at Anfield.
We really weren’t sure what to expect from Sunday’s El Elephantintheroomico at Anfield.
Would City be extra motivated by a siege mentality? Would they be cowed and rubbish? Would Liverpool be able to level up what looked on paper very uneven teams through sheer emotion and righteous anger at the sheer injustice of everything that had happened?
Would it be a thumping Liverpool win against a barely there City? A thumping City win against an over-emotional and outmatched Liverpool? None of the above and just a draw that felt disarmingly like regular Barclays? A routine City win that also felt like regular Barclays?
We considered it all and had no idea what would actually happen. We do feel a bit silly for not just realising that, with everything else stripped away, this was a match between a Manchester City side that is right now conspicuously superior to Liverpool’s injury and £100m dud-hit one. And that, whatever else was going on in the background or on the terraces, it was quite likely really that the better side would simply beat the inferior one.
But what we’re really kicking ourselves about is our complete pre-match failure to consider what now seems a really obvious extension of such an outcome. A huge multi-agency Celebration Police unit being deployed with haste and in some cases quite staggering pomposity. Naming no names, but Oliver Holt was one of them.
We said in 16 Conclusions that Rayan Cherki’s magnificent goal/celebration combo was enough to make us reconsider the whole idea of punishing City at all. We were being slightly glib, but we do now also accept this was very much not a consensus view. We’ll concede to having our take here perhaps coloured a touch by the fact City’s three goalscorers at Anfield also happened to be our three favourite City players and we really do struggle to stay mad at them.
But – and we realise now this does make us sound like the most pathetic sweet summer child – we really hadn’t considered at that point that the idea of Manchester City’s players and fans celebrating their goals and victories post-verdict would become such a huge no-no for certain committed Celebration Police officers.
This whole Premier League season is a mess now. That’s unavoidable. The task of detangling what remains of a huge number of Premier League seasons that preceded it is such an impossibly complex one that we do genuinely if slightly mischievously believe it formed a key part of City’s arrogant certainty they would never actually be punished.
It would explain why they were sufficiently cocky not to even make the token effort of making the legit chunk of the sponsorship deals rise at all as the ruse went on.
We’re getting sidetracked. Key point: this season is a complete mess. Nobody knows what anything means any more. That’s a fair point to make – we’ve made it ourselves. The total absence of context makes the quest for locating any meaning in anything that happens for or against City this season a struggle.
Here’s where the Celebration Police enforcement officers fall down, though. Because they all accept that neither City’s players nor fans are responsible for the situation, but the sight of them celebrating is nevertheless declared ‘not a good look’.
The only real way that works is if you can make the argument stick that the celebrations are pointless because nobody knows what they’re actually celebrating.
There is the undeniably delicious and very real prospect now of Manchester City spending the season celebrating their way to comfortably the largest points haul among the 20 Premier League clubs and for a committed Officer Buzzkill to still be able to retort at the end of it all: “Look at them, celebrating like they’ve won the league.”
There are two flaws here, though. One, it would require the same standard to be applied to goals scored against City during these uncertain times. We don’t know whether they mean anything later, not while everything has a question mark and we can all enjoy saying the word ‘expunged’ out loud.
Go on, try it. Every cloud has a silver lining, and for this particularly dark cloud that lining is, in our view, the opportunity to say the word ‘expunged’ on a far more regular basis than is generally the case.
Nobody, though, is going to be telling even Arsenal they can’t celebrate goals against City, are they? Everyone will be told to chortle it right up. If anything, players will face criticism for giving it anything less than the Full Adebayor towards the banana-wielding City fans for any goal scored against the big ol’ cheats who know what they are.
We’d go further, though. Not only is the lack of context for City goals and wins now no reason for them not to celebrate, it’s the opposite.
City’s players and fans legitimately don’t know what the future holds. They really might as well enjoy being the best team in the country while they can. And let’s be honest, what football fan doesn’t enjoy boiling rival fans’ p*ss?
We remain queasy about City fans who don’t seem to have any anger or hostility towards the owners who have done this to them, but we have absolutely no such qualms about those City fans giving full and unwavering support to the players on the pitch and the manager in the dugout.
They may be laughing and celebrating a march to doom, but as Enzo Maresca plaintively and correctly put it: What do you want us to do?
What do people actually want and expect from City’s players and supporters? Muted celebrations at every game after getting pelters for 90 minutes?
City have, in a very weird and bleakly 2026 way, a season that might be wonderfully enjoyable ahead of them. That lack of context also equates to a lack of jeopardy and stress. The likelihood is that whatever punishment eventually lands on their heads means they can’t achieve anything worthwhile this season anyway beyond scoring loads of goals and winning loads of games.
Stripped of the normal context, those goals and wins become their own prize. They are no longer just a step towards a larger target. They are all there is.
So of course City should celebrate them with full-throated, two-fingers, f*ck-you abandon.
It’s absurd to expect them to go quietly into the good night.
Whatever else happens, City will go down singing. And fair f*cks to them for that.