Guardiola’s defence: the charges against Manchester City
It was the performance of Pep Guardiola’s life, said Martin Blackburn in The Sun. Four days previously, the Premier League had “clobbered” reigning champions Manchester City with 115 charges of financial wrongdoing. After a four-year, behind-closed-doors investigation, the League has accused the club of breaching its financial fair play rules over a nine-year period. Among other charges, the club is accused of overstating its sponsorship income, and using a secret shadow account to double its former manager Roberto Mancini’s wages. On Friday, the team’s current manager responded with a press conference that was “pure box office”, combining drama, defiance and conspiracy theory. “Obdurate, obtuse, righteous, outraged...” Guardiola faced the media with “the febrile energy of a tormented lover”, said Kevin Garside in The i Paper. He refuted the allegations, and implied strongly that City’s jealous Premier League rivals were conspiring against the club. If it’s between “the CEOs or the owners of the 19 clubs” or the words of “my people”, he declared, “I trust my people”.
No wonder Guardiola was upset, said Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian. “City is his great project, a club built in his image.” However innocent he may believe City to be, “he is now faced with the prospect of seeing it all swept away for something that isn’t his fault”. He wasn’t even at the club for most of the period the charges relate to, from 2009 to 2018 (Guardiola took over in 2016). The proceedings will now go before an independent commission, which will have the power to impose fines, dock points, demote the club, or even strip it of the three titles won in that period. Manchester City’s journey to the top of English football over the past 15 years has been “almost frictionless”, said Jack Pitt-Brooke on The Athletic. “They have enjoyed moments that would never have been possible if the Al Nahyan family had not bought the club in 2008 and used it to promote Abu Dhabi”, investing billions in the process. But if the charges are upheld, “then this era will forever be remembered as having been illicitly achieved”.
“To put it frankly, we could have an absolute crapshow on our hands,” said Barney Ronay in The Guardian. The Premier League has long been criticised for drowning the game “in a wave of money”. If City are found guilty of “cooking the books over an entire era of English football success... they will have broken not just the rules but the spell, the sense that what you’re watching is still on some level real and credible and straight”. City are accused of violating the whole idea of fair play. If they are found guilty – and the legal process will take years – “then the punishment must be commensurately harsh”.