Best known in recent times for his bizarre and viral “dead man walking” speech, Swindon Town manager Ian Holloway nonetheless struck at the heart of the controversy surrounding Manchester City this week. Amid the media whirlwind and fierce debate sparked by the independent commission’s finding that City are guilty on 114 of 115 charges, relating to “sham contracts” with commercial partners designed to artificially inflate revenues, reduce costs and hide the state of their finances from regulators, Holloway said:
His words were so striking because they went to the very soul of English football, which the cheating scandal severely threatens. For a long time, football has been treading water in denial about its true identity. Clinging to the myth that it is the “beautiful game” of the working class, fans seem to have blindfolded themselves to the reality of the modern sport. At the risk of cliché, they spend their hard-earned money on overpriced season tickets to watch overpaid athletes kick a ball around. But at least they believed that what they were watching was real and that, in Holloway’s words, they were watching one team fairly defeat another.
Indeed, what makes the City scandal so depressing is that they did play beautiful football, they did win trophies and they did bring joy to their fans. There has been much talk of stripping City of their trophies or even awarding them to the runners-up. This misses the point. Firstly, rewriting history in this way would be slightly ridiculous. Can we really prove that City’s overspending directly correlated with winning every one of their trophies since the Abu Dhabi-backed takeover in 2008? And what kind of pyrrhic victory would rival fans take from being handed a trophy from over a decade ago? I’m not sure many fans would celebrate a 90+1 winner scored by… the independent commission.
This uncertainty over who should have won what, however, is exactly the problem with City’s breaches: it makes us question to what extent anything City won was on merit. Effectively, it renders every year of English top-flight football since 2008 shallow, if not meaningless. It not only colours the achievements of wonderful players and a genius manager and makes futile the efforts of the teams chasing them; it tarnishes the very validity of English football and, with it, English culture.
“Ian Holloway Aitor Karanka December 2014” by joshjdss is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
