Man City fans should remember that ‘supporting your club’ has never had an implied ‘blindly’

The greatest trick football club owners ever pulled was so thoroughly convincing so many fans that the idea you should always ‘support your club’ has an implicit ‘blindly’ near the start.

It’s an obvious nonsense, but we see it time and again. At its core, it’s related to the shift in what ‘tribalism’ has come to mean in reference to football supporters.

Go back far enough, and it was how non-football supporters would describe football supporters back in the days when treating football supporters like scum was very much the order of the day for your average chancer politician, rather than the modern trend for prominent politicians to pretend to be football fans and sound ridiculous whenever they have to actually talk about it. (Or in the case of Keir Starmer, to actually be a big football fan but still sound like a ridiculous chancer politician talking about the sport like an alien who’s just discovered its existence.)

Now the us-v-them tribalism is no longer football fan v non-football fan, but fan v fan. There has always been rivalry. Football fandom has never been an altruistic, banter-free zone. But we are certain it was once a more collective experience.

Football fans are losing that shared experience and retreating deeper into their own club-based tribe. We’re certain the decline of traditional media and the rise of carefully curated – either by one’s own hand or by an algorithm – club-specific content is part of it. But it’s not all of it.

And it’s absolutely not a new thing. And there are still times when it can be countered. There was genuine unity, for instance, in the campaign against the Super League, with the clubs directly involved as vocal if not more vocal than anyone else. It’s telling how much that seemed to catch those six clubs by surprise.

Because it runs completely counter to what we’ve seen football fans do time and again. It’s never #AllFans, but it’s enough. Whether it’s Liverpool fans falling in behind the party line that the most important part of the phrase ‘racist Liverpool player’ was ‘Liverpool player’. Or Newcastle fans gleefully welcoming their Saudi overlords.

We see it time and again in whatever dreary VAR debate is currently top of the agenda. Arsenal and Liverpool occasionally like to convince themselves their only interest is the greater good of the game, but we all know the truth. Fans are entirely inconsistent on everything except for wanting more decisions to go the way of their team. It is the absolute core of the ‘All we want is consistency until all we want is common sense’ and whataboutery that poison every VAR debate.

But we don’t think we’ve ever seen it more clearly demonstrated until the behaviour of prominent Man City fans, pundits and former players since the confirmation of the enormous scale of their cheating over an enormous period of time.

The club’s owners cheated and lied and then lied about the cheating and cheated about the lying. They will continue to do so for as long as they possibly can while they retain hope that they can somehow wriggle out of responsibility and avoid facing justice.

And in this quest they have vast swathes of support from the very people who should be most disgusted, most vocal in their fury at the wanton acts performed in the name and service of Manchester City.

Manchester City fans themselves. When we looked at the top 10 clubs most affected by the Man City Scandal, we took it as read that it was the top 10 other clubs most affected, because top of that list is obviously Man City.

There is widespread anger at the damage City have done to English football with their concerted long-term bid to defraud the game at the highest level. But that anger should be felt most keenly by supporters of the club that was used to commit that damage.

Fans of other clubs feel cheated out of their biggest and best moments. We’ve addressed this elsewhere; the righteousness of the forlorn anger of your Mauricio Pochettinos and Tony Pulises. Not for the titles they lost but the opportunities. Stoke lost an FA Cup final to Manchester City, their biggest game in decades. It’s not that they didn’t win the trophy, it’s that they didn’t even get the chance to compete on an even playing field. That’s what’s been lost.

But City will be the biggest losers. There will be the obvious pain at the surface with the punishment, which seems certain to be unprecedented in its scale. It will set City back years on the field if it’s done right. Everything they’ve won in almost 20 years will either be formally or informally removed from their record; even if they aren’t officially stripped of their assorted titles, nobody else will now consider them legitimate ever again.

And there’s the deeper suffering City will face. The name of their club is now mud. And the stain of the biggest scandal in English football history may never truly disappear. This is who City are and what they will be known and remembered for.

Their fans should be absolutely furious about that. Incandescent. And they are. But not, for the most part, with the people responsible for all of that.

For vast swathes of their support, the anger they feel is being directed not at those who have used and abused their club but anywhere and everywhere else. At the Premier League. At the ‘Red Cartel’ (imagine using that phrase unironically and not cringing out a lung in mortifying embarrassment). At the rules themselves.

Anywhere but inward.

And what’s more, those now running Man City’s arse-witted attempt to defend and deny this wrongdoing absolutely know they could rely on that support. It’s at the core of their defence and appeal because ultimately it’s all they’ve got. As long as Liam Gallagher’s still onside, they can continue fighting the fight.

It’s not easy to rail against this instinct. It’s by no means unique to City. Every football fan should stop to consider truthfully how they’d feel in the opposite boat. Easier here for City fans, we’d imagine, to admit to themselves they’d be gunning for justice and vengeance. Harder for most of their howling opponents to be entirely honest with themselves about how readily they’d accept the need for their own club to be fired into the sun in the same circumstances.

Even those ‘neutrals’ we have seen fall even slightly towards City’s side have been fans of either Aston Villa or Newcastle, and even here the same tribalism is in play because what they’re really campaigning for is not the Robin Hood righteousness of City upsetting the Red Cartel’s Apple Cart like some kind of tiki-taka Robin Hood, but for their own clubs’ right to benefit in the same way please and thank you.

For bad-faith owners and CEOs and chairmen of football clubs, the unique captive nature of fans who don’t really have the option of just changing football clubs the way they could shift brands in any other aspect of their lives is a huge part of the appeal. A club’s fans are a valuable resource and almost limitless cash cow who will just come back for more after every beating.

It already feels likely, for instance, that at least one massive club and it will probably be Manchester United, will make a concerted attempt to eliminate or at least massively restrict the number of season tickets. There’s just more money to be made from the once-a-year tourists, and that’s all that matters.

And enough fans will go along with it to make it work. Just as they would anywhere else.

Using and abusing the fans reaches its zenith – and we’ve heard plenty of this kind of chat from the outside with regard to City, and we’ll start to get it from the inside once they accept the near certainty that there is no plausible route to a successful appeal here – that it would be a tragedy and gross injustice for the innocent fans to suffer as a result of wrongdoing that is not theirs.

It’s funny, though, that these owners never have that same concern for the fans when the wrongdoing is actually happening.

It’s a cynical deployment of fans as human shield. And all the more galling because it works so well and so, so many are happy to deploy themselves in the role unprompted.