It hurts me to read this. I read it last year's end and this year's from Mark Ogden. It is deligitimizing. The same that Mark Cuban did to the Miami "Heat's" first championship. The same that Donald Trump did to Barack Obama, that Trump did in 2016 and 2020 and is doing in 2024, not just in the election this year but in his criminal trials. For the deligitimizers there's always a conspiracy: that City cheated, that the refs jobbed them, that Obama wasn't born in America, that elections and criminal trials are rigged. Only when they get their way, as Trump did in 2016 do they disband the conspiracy.
The deligitimizing is the same but of course all conspiracies are not created equal. It's not a conspiracy if there really was cheating. Here is the distinction between the Fat Cuban Horse and the Fat Orange Orangutan on the one side and Manchester City on the other. There is no evidence for the former, there is for City.
Whether the "set-offs", City Football Group’s spending on Etihad Stadium, in the Manchester neighborhoods, on youth soccer groups, in growing the sport in the U.S. with New York City Football Club and around the world with other clubs, all of which are permitted to be deducted from transfer fees and player salaries under Financial Fair Play, are enough to establish innocence, as City Football Group strenuously maintains, or to mitigate punishment for wrong-doing, will be seen. A hearing is set but the Premier League gendarme don't have to, and haven't, announced when it will be.
City's accusers acknowledge, as Jonathan Liew does here, that money alone does not buy happiness or championships; that the right players must be procured and the right man chosen to manage them; that the Premier League is operating as a Dickensian Chancellery Court, years after the facts. dragging their verdict out which would deduct points, perhaps relegate City, and may inflict retroactive punishment vacating titles, but those concessions are addendum, footnotes to the main point: "City became too good for their own good." That will remain the point until the verdict is rendered.
The Guardiola supremacy: how City became too good for their own good
A seventh title in 10 years is proof of how incredible wealth has eroded any sense of competitive balance in the Premier League
(Jonathan Liew)
...back home to begin the excruciating 12-month countdown until City can win the Premier League again.
The problem, of course, is that at some point in the Guardiola supremacy City just became too good for their own good. Too good not just for their competitors but for the competition, for the product and the people whose job is to sell it.
