Gaslit Man City fans can’t keep titles or memories from tainted legacy

The 114 guilty verdicts handed down to Manchester City is one massive head f*** for their supporters. Especially while everyone else revels amid the grief of learning that everything they thought to be true is actually a litany of lies and deceit.

Inevitably, it begins with denial. Some City fanatics, blinded by loyalty to their regime, won’t get past that first stage and they can’t be helped. The more reasonable ones, the vast majority, deserve some sympathy because they have been betrayed like the rest of us. Even if most egged City on long after it became apparent their success may be built on unscrupulous foundations.

Some City fans, dazed in the wake of Friday’s news, are choosing to focus not on what they’ve lost, but what they think can’t be taken away.

“You will never take away all the memories of all those moments and trophies from City fans,” one told the BBC, encapsulating the feeling of many. “Those will live on regardless what happens over the next weeks, months and years.”

They won’t, though, will they?

Sure, those in Istanbul in 2023 can reminisce over a belting weekend away. And the party on that Sunday in May 2012 will be fun to recall from the comfy chair by the big window in years to come.

But when they come to talk about those memories, who the f*** will want to listen?

And that is important. In any sport, especially one as tribal as football, how success is seen by others matters. Respect matters. Often, the more begrudging, the better.

Achievement without recognition means nothing. Those memories, of celebrating illegitimate, if not entirely meaningless, triumphs are made hollow by City’s proven cheating.

The moments – like Agueroooooo, Kompany’s claim for a statue, Gundogan’s doubles and so many more besides – cannot possibly mean the same to City fans because they no longer mean anything to everyone else.

“I know what I saw and I know what I felt,” said Noel Gallagher on Friday. But what they felt then, as we know now, wasn’t real.

Consequently, assuming the verdicts withstand the appeals process, City will go down as football’s Lance Armstrong.

Both defied expectation and suspended belief for eras. But City fans clinging to their memories need look at how Armstrong is remembered.

No one recalls the stage wins, the sprints, the mountain ascents and descents, at least not with any fondness. Just that he cheated. And that he denied it until it was entirely irrefutable.

That’s his legacy, as it will be City’s. And their titles should be treated the same.

The revelation of the guilty verdicts prompted an immediate trolley dash through the Etihad trophy room, their rivals laying claim to honours denied.

City’s cheating, though, rendered those titles meaningless far beyond east Manchester. It devalued the competitions, not just the outcomes, in a way English football hasn’t previously seen. Which is why City ought to face sanctions to match.

Sure, strip City of their titles, but don’t dish them back out. Blank winners’ lists tell a more accurate story of the times than rewriting them.

It’s one City fans will have to tell alongside every tale they regale from their ‘glory’ days. Defending the indefensible should quickly see them reach the anger stage.

They ought to embrace and channel that properly, towards their own club, because they were duped the same as everyone else – but gaslit far worse by City’s continued insistence of innocence.

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