Mike and I rushed into Five and Eye the second it opened at 9 a.m. and we asked if we could get a pitcher of Blue Moon, please, and of course the waiter said, “Uh, no, we don’t serve alcohol until noon,” and we felt crazy. But the grocery store was kiddie corner, so we grabbed a 6-pack instead, and decided it was a good plan to go back to the house and watch the whole thing all over again.
City is the only Premier League team I’ve ever rooted for. I adopted them as my team back when I picked up FIFA for the first time many years ago, when the world’s favorite club was Manchester United because Cristiano Ronaldo had ascended as its favorite player, so I picked the little brother team. I had no understanding at all that they had been recently acquired by a nefarious Abu Dhabi ownership group already facing accusations of sports-washing and running the club with government money. They were fun to play with and they wore blue and they were about to get Carlos Tevez! I was very politically illiterate. Those were better times.
I think Sergio Agüero’s goal at 93:20 to beat QPR on Championship Sunday and win the 2012 Premier League is the most dramatic winning moment I’ve ever seen in team sports. I think it’s up there with Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard ‘Round the World. I need Don DeLillo to write a 40,000-word prologue about Joey Barton losing his mind and earning the red card that made the whole stupid thing possible: the last-gasp strike, Joe Hart running around and waving his arms like a lunatic, the broadcast cutting to Wayne Rooney and Sir Alex Ferguson watching the scoreboard and looking like they’d just stepped in dog shit, the of-courseness of Queens Park Rangers and old friend Mark Hughes going up 2-1 on Manchester City in a game City always should have won and never felt like it was going to until, somehow, it did.
The “somehow,” I should note, was not magical or romantic. It was an Olympic swimming pool full of money. It was Edin Džeko and David Silva and Agüero and Yaya Toure and Mario Balotelli, all world-class players brought in with big, giant checks to do exactly the thing they did. Through almost two decades of fandom, the trash talk ranged from “it’s like being a Yankees fan” in the late 2000s to “it’s like being a Dodgers fan” in the 2010s to “it’s like being a weird Elon guy” in the 2020s. As a fan of mostly tortured franchises across all other sports, I have to say: It was nice being despised and envied, for once. What a feeling, to love a team with loose purse strings and one of the sport’s best coaches, to root for a squad and actually see it win the treble in your adulthood, to have gotten in as a fan while everyone else was bandwagoning for your rivals.
Sorry your team doesn’t go out and buy good players and try to win! I’d never gotten to play that card before. We’re a long way off from the charm of American City supporters getting to claim Claudio Reyna. But, in the Premier League, it matters where your money comes from. On Sept. 29, an independent commission found Manchester City guilty of serious financial rule breaches over nine seasons, from 2009 through 2018—a stretch that includes that all-timer 2012 finale and six other trophies. Football’s financial rules give clubs room to spend based on what they earn, with limits on how much extra their owners can cover. If you disguise money from the owner as money the club earned, you can make room for spending the rules wouldn’t otherwise allow.
The commission found that City disguised money from its owners as sponsorship revenue and concealed expenses. Essentially, City had been playing Monopoly with a hidden second bank under the table. City has appealed and says they’re innocent, which is also what the Houston Astros said. The Premier League’s other teams want blood and, if you read the tea leaves, it seems like they’re going to get it.
As it turns out, the thing that makes sports any good at all is rules, and only when everyone is following them. As a fan, you can accept disappointment if you believe the result was produced under conditions everyone agreed to. You can hate a rival and still begrudgingly acknowledge its victory. Financial concealment — the erosion of fair play — threatens that dynamic. You’re watching the same match, but it’s unsettling to know you can no longer trust the conditions that brought those teams onto the field. I’ve never considered bailing on fandom before this year–and this is coming from someone whose favorite NFL team’s owner just solicited a prostitute in a trailer park. The San Francisco Giants, with their horrific treatment of the Pride Night fiasco this summer, prodded the idea most firmly, but the City thing is different in its utter lack of ambiguity. I don’t see a defensible side to consider. Most of us play fantasy sports; are you staying in a league where someone acquires Bijan Robinson for Wan’Dale Robinson — and $50 in secret cash?
Maybe it’s this particular moment in time that makes it so much more upsetting. It’s difficult to look around and see the daily American disregard for the rule of law writ large, only to be reminded that sports — big-money enterprise that it is — follows the same patterns. Rooting for the team with endless funds as they were racking up trophies over a decade felt awesome. But, you know. There’s some royal paying for your midfield and then there’s the club hiding his contributions so it can spend more than the rules allow. That changes things, doesn’t it?
I guess it’s a slippery slope. If we’re picking allegiances based on avoiding bad-guy billionaire owners, we’re going to run out of teams. Where do you draw the line, is the natural question and I think, for me, maybe the answer is just: Right here? Seems like a reasonable place. I’ve got all these jerseys, all these memories of me and friends in sports bars and U.S. City supporter meet-ups, all these times I woke up at 6 to make sure I could watch them play, and it’s not guilt I feel, but naïveté and, of course, betrayal. To the extent that a sports team is a public trust, City fans shouldn’t have to bail, least of all the ones who have been along since the early days. All the good memories still count, even if they’re tainted — but, make no mistake, they are indeed tainted. We don’t choose who owns our clubs; just ask A’s fans. We root for a crest and hope for a conscience behind it. In this case, we know better.
I think we’d all like to root for a team that would do whatever it takes to win, until we see what that might look like. Stealing signs, deflating balls, spying on opponents’ practices … they’re all unseemly scandals, but I don’t know any fans that bailed on those teams (that team?) out of some kind of moral conflict. Many fans just have the fabric of the club woven into their DNA. And for the rest, can anyone else really point to some other team with a spotless ethical record? Both are fair reasons to stay.
Manchester City, for all it’s delivered to supporters over the last decade-plus, deserves whatever sanctions come its way: stripping of titles, relegation, whatever. Ultimately, Sheikh Mansour and the ownership group will be fine; the billionaires are always fine. City will recover, and probably faster than anyone will want them to. Nobody should be holding their breath for a lesson here — ownership’s humility won’t be real, just a temporary reprieve from the audacity that allowed the behavior in the first place.
Since the charges were announced three years ago, they’ve hung over many Manchester City fans, no matter how badly we’ve wanted to hand-wave them away. Accepting the consequences is the cleanest path forward. City fans — and the other clubs and their supporters — deserve that much. Play fair, take your medicine, and make future victories mean something again. It might actually be fun remaining a supporter while they’re serving their time.
For whatever the wins were worth — and in my formative years of fandom, that’s quite a lot — I’d still rather watch Manchester City serve the punishment it deserves than keep trying to enjoy its success with that argument hanging over every trophy. Even if it means watching from the Championship.
Follow Travis Souders on Bluesky at @travissouders.bsky.social.