City get their comeuppance

DESPITE it all, despite the magnificence of their football, despite the extravagance of their goal-scoring prowess, it was never easy to warm to the new Manchester City. The City who were almost opposite in every way to what they used to be.

Part of us wanted to enjoy their spiky indifference to the order of things. We wanted to applaud their capture of Carlos Tevez from across the city with their bold and deliberately provocative ‘Welcome to Manchester’ billboard. Who doesn’t enjoy a seeing a finger poked in the eye of the established order? For the non-United aligned amongst us you couldn’t help but get a kick out of watching the Blues storm Old Trafford 1-6 in 2011 and remember this wasn’t the present day sick man of the Premier League Manchester United, this was Fergie’s United. They were reigning champions at the time.

What held us back from exalting too much in City’s rise, in this fresh story, in this crashing of the old-boys club, was the feeling that City didn’t just want to break the establishment, they wanted to become it, by hook or by crook.

Their ambition was vaulting and worrying. Dominance on a domestic, European and even a world scale was plotted with satellite clubs dotting the world. The football leaks revelations showed a ruthless and almost unscrupulous organisation, with a certain disdain for the financial fair play regulations.

This indifference seems to have finally caught up with City, with UEFA finding them in breach of FFP (by basically overstating their commercial income and instead being propped up by their owners in Abu Dhabi) and banning them from the Champions League for the next two seasons. For once UEFA seems to be taking its own rules and self-stated principles seriously and it feels, to us at least, a positive development. City’s drive was monopolistic when football needs to be about genuine competition on a level playing field. What it will mean for City should the Court of Arbitration for Sport uphold the UEFA finding could be quite profound. The squad so expensively assembled could be broken up. Their star coach could depart and really they’ll have nobody but themselves to blame. Sympathy, we suspect, will be in short supply.