Liverpool fans with a message for Manchester City during Sunday's Premier League match between the two rivals at Anfield. Photograph: Alex Pantling/Getty Images
The victorious, banana-festooned Manchester City section at Anfield was a darkly magnificent sight. As the players and fans celebrated, they were like the crew of a pirate ship, brazenly revelling in their plunder.
The days of living a lie are over. Finally City can openly be who they really are.
Many of those fans have spent years furiously insisting, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that their club had never broken the rules. The mental contortions must have been tiring.
Now that the verdict is in and City have been found guilty of organising the biggest cheating scandal in English football history, the same fans have flipped to insisting that it doesn’t matter that they are guilty. Actually, they are exulting in their renegade status. They taunted Anfield with a song that declared: “Cheating bastards, we know what we are.”
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“We didn’t break the rules” was always a tough position to take seriously, given what we all know about City. “Yes, we broke the rules – but they deserved to be broken!” is a position you can get behind.
The message coming loud and clear from City’s fans and players is: it was all worth it. They won title after title during the years for which they’ve been found guilty, they kept winning titles in the later years not covered by the investigation, they’re still winning. This is the Premier League, where crime pays.
On Friday, Enzo Maresca claimed he still absolutely trusts his employers, despite the text of the recent judgment suggesting that might not be very wise. Maresca even said that his representatives had never discussed the question of the looming 115 charges in the negotiations to take him to City (negotiations which began while he was still the manager of Chelsea).
It was Friday when he introduced the word “noise” to the discourse and at Anfield, he repeated the word 16 times in a 5½ minute post-match press conference. It was one of those moments when a word gets repeated so much you find yourself beginning to lose your grasp on what it means.
Liverpool fans hold up a banner taking aim at Manchester City and the financial scandal enveloping the club. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images
“My message is that the noise will be there because, if I say no the noise is not there, [it] is not true. The noise will be there.
“So it’s how we learn to deal with the noise, but at the same time it’s our duty to make our noise – and our noise is to win games in the way we won today and be happy at the end of the game.”
“Noise” is something sportspeople often say they are ignoring and they usually mean things like media froth, excessive criticism or praise, speculation about their chances of winning or losing, “pressure”, etc.
You have to remind yourself that Maresca is using this word, “noise”, to refer to his club being found guilty of the biggest systematic cheating scandal in English football history.
Some ex-City players and coaches are now saying that whatever the final outcome, “they can never take our memories away”. And maybe it does give them genuine pleasure to think back on all the titles they won on easy mode, with Abu Dhabi’s thumb on the scales, cantering away from all the poor saps who were playing by the rules.
Outside the defiant banana-waving City pirate bubble, those titles no longer mean anything to anybody.
In the 40-page document giving details of the judgment against Manchester City, a table catches the eye. The first column shows Manchester City’s reported sponsorship income every year from 2009/10 to 2017/18. The second shows the actual amount of said income that was paid by Abu Dhabi sponsors. The third column shows the amount of money that the club’s owners, Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), paid in to make up the difference.
Liverpool fans made clear their feelings towards Manchester City before and during Sunday's Premier League match at Anfield. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images
We see that ADUG topped up the sponsorship income by £22.5 million in 2010, £28.5 million in 2011, £70.75 million in 2012.
What’s interesting is that the top-up sums just keep getting bigger. £107 million in 2015. £120 million in 2016. £129 million in 2017. £134 million in 2018.
And that’s where the table cuts off, as the recently-concluded investigation did not go beyond the 2017-18 season. (The Premier League announced the investigation in December 2018, following the Spiegel/Football Leaks publication of City’s internal emails).
We are left to wonder: what happened in 2019? Are we to assume that City abruptly changed their whole way of doing business that summer – that ADUG’s contributions went from £134 million in 2018 to £0 in 2019, that everything from that point on was totally legitimate and above board?
In the absence of the sort of evidence Rui Pinto provided on the earlier period, we can only observe that City’s reported sponsorship income continued to grow and grow post-2018. In 2024-25 they reported the highest sponsorship income in world football: £4m more than Real Madrid, £109 million more than Manchester United, £151 million more than Arsenal. A truly extraterrestrial performance by the hardworking commercial department.
That City ran away with the game at Anfield only after Liverpool were reduced to 10 men following Chris Kavanagh’s decision to send off Ryan Gravenberch only heightened the pleasure for the City fans.
As Erling Haaland clubbed in the opener, you had to wonder again, why were City the only club clever enough to sign him for £51 million from Dortmund? Rivals only have themselves to blame for once again being outsmarted by “the Apple of football”.
Admittedly, it doesn’t take much these days to outsmart Liverpool, a club that has been run in a clownish fashion for the last couple of years. Who spends £230 million on Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz, then appoints a manager who plays 100mph rushball that doesn’t suit either of them?
The supposedly “Premier League proven” Isak is actually the bigger of the two flops, but he gets less criticism because he plays fewer games.
Liverpool at least will get most of their money back on Wirtz, who will go to Bayern and be a superstar. It’s clear that joining Liverpool in the summer of 2025 was the wrong move at the wrong time.
Still, it could be worse. He could have joined City.