Manchester City cheating was ‘disgusting’ and they ‘shouldn’t see a single penny’ of Haaland sale

The idea that Manchester City were fighting the good fight against the Red Cartel is patently absurd; their cheating was ‘disgusting’.

Send your thoughts to theeditor@football365.com.

 

Cheating is cheating
Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing. So much so that S. Manchester genuinely believes that State-backed City are fighting the good fight against the evil cartel of the Premier League. His arguments are, of course, utter nonsense.

It’s easy for certain turn-a-blind-eye City supporters to just argue that all they did was spend money. As if they have only been caught over spending the budget. But that’s not true. They have been charged and found guilty of deliberately hiding their spending, deceiving the regulators and deliberately obstructing the investigation. This is not just accidently overspending. It is deliberately cheating and trying to get away with it.

Saying that “City has spent around the same as United and Chelsea in that time and a little more than Liverpool and Arsenal.” is complete nonsense. You have no idea how much Man City have spent. The whole point of the case is that this was hidden from public view.

Say what you like about the cartel and spending. But 13 of the clubs in the Premier League voted for tighter financial controls. It’s pretty hard to argue that this was some sort of elite club conspiracy when the majority of the league were in favour.

Within Europe, although FFP came in after the takeover of City, this was being worked on long before. Uefa had already identified that there was an enormous problem of clubs overspending and not living within their means. The ground work behind FFP was well underway before City’s takeover. It takes an terribly arrogant or deluded mind to believe that all the big clubs got together to put these rules into place to stop City being successful.

And if you are a City fan, consider this. Everyone thinks you are guilty. There is no 50/50 here or even 80/20. No one is defending you. The only defenders of Man City are a group of blinkered Man City supporters. For example, ask football fans of Scotland, or any other country, where they have absolutely no skin in the game. No bias towards Man United or Liverpool or any other club. Able to reason and be unbiassed supporters. Everyone thinks that City are guilty as sin and deserve to be punished.

Maybe, just maybe, you need to stop and think, and ask yourself: “Are we the baddies?”
Mike, LFC, Dubai

 

S. Manchester with a spectacular and sanctimonious load of shite in the mailbox.

Tries to pitch Man City as the freedom fighter against a cartel. Give me strength.

This ignores that their cheating has probably cost millions in lost revenue and European football for Brighton, Leicester, Brentford, Villa and trophies for Stoke and numerous others. Yes that’s a real cartel of teams that Man City screwed over with their cheating.

Financial rules allow for investment in training facilities so Man City could’ve played a slow game and built from the ground up like the teams above but that didn’t suit their gluttonous owners who wanted success, fame and ego now. They flagrantly and blatantly scammed and shammed their way to false glory at the cost of everyone else and they didn’t spare a thought along the way.

They are cheats. And somehow there are still some idiots standing by pretending they know better, despite an increasingly overwhelming body of evidence.

15 clubs would have to vote for expulsion to make it happen. Who of the other 19 wouldn’t vote for that tomorrow?
Minty, LFC

 

S, Manchester might do well to remember that plenty of people were querying, quite loudly, how the f**k Chelsea were getting their money, when it was so blatantly through ill gotten gains.

It wasn’t even that long before so doesn’t require much of a stretch.

Same can, and has, been said about PSG, whilst there are multiple articles questioning how Barcelona can get away with what they have been, where any other La Liga side, bar the obvious, wouldn’t have stood a chance.

So there are four examples. Stop crying and admit that what City has done has been hugely detrimental to football.

As for Chelsea, I still think they must be pissing themselves laughing despite the fact they also cheated.
Dan

 

S don’t get it. Manchester City’s ‘crime’ isn’t that they cheated to win all of those ‘trophies and memories’; if you cheated, then by definition you didn’t win any of those trophies and your memories are illusions based on a vacuum of truth.

The real trouble is that they weren’t just your memories. The cheating has robbed us all of that period of games…not just the trophies and the glory, but even the failures are tainted now. The relegations are not real because the playing field was never level…any team that lost to City in that period didn’t, really; they lost to a team that existed outside of the rules that everyone else was playing by.

And while a couple of clubs seem desperate to now claim trophies that they also didn’t win during those years, the truth is that no real fan wants to win retroactive cups in that way. We surely won’t get the warm fuzzy memories that come with winning them, so what’s the point? To fill a trophy cabinet that most fans never actually get to see?

Of the 27 teams relegated during those years, at least nine (the 18th place finishers) might have gone down only because City are cheats; nine 5th-place finishers perhaps didn’t see the CL because City are cheats; FA and Carabao cups involved multiple teams losing to City who might otherwise have beaten a non-cheating City; every team’s league position for nine years would potentially have been one place higher with higher attendant pay-outs.

If you cheat, that simply makes you human. If you refuse to change or admit to your cheating, then the cheating defines you. Own it or don’t, that’s up to you; but don’t sit there thinking the rest of us give a toss about trophies that are long gone, or that we want to burn the etihad or daub the supporters in red paint.

The hundreds of millions of dollars that your lot are going to pay to settle civil suits alone – at least that much, with Euro teams also waiting to sue – will provide enough schadenfreude to keep the rest of us warm for a little while. As for the penalties that the League gives you – that had better start with expulsion, because you don’t simply slap a cheat’s wrist unless you want everyone to start doing it.

It was a disgusting act – for billionaires to cheat at a game into which millions of ordinary people invest so much of their souls and existences. It wasn’t an attempt to level a playing field, it wasn’t done to avenge some great wrong – it was greed and ego writ large, and f**k the fans while we’re at it. Disgraceful, as it attempting to defend it.
G

 

Really looking forward to seeing S.Manchester taken to task in the next mailbox, that’s going to be fun!

“We didn’t cheat, we only broke lots of rules”

Bring it on
Clive LFC

 

They knew
Dear Editor,

Years ago the great comedian Bill Hicks turned the pieties of the intellectual elite upside-down by claiming that he was, unlike them, for the war, but against the troops.

That’s how I feel when I read people saying, don’t blame the players or managers for Man City cheating. Come on. They knew. Roberto Mancini knew when he was getting paid a double salary; their agents knew when the money showed up in their bank accounts; and, after 2018, thanks to the email leaks, anyone who joined City (Pep included) knew they were joining a corrupt organization. They were just happy to benefit from the cheating.

Did they win on the pitch? Of course they did. But they joined a club with the best starting 11 (and best second 11) in the Premier League because they wanted to win, and because they didn’t care that they were going to do it by cheating–as long as they didn’t have to cheat themselves, they were happy to take the money and the fruits of the cheating that took place.

F*** them, and f*** Man City, and f*** all the journalists who spent time glazing up the club while mocking the various pretenders to the throne for not having the bottle, the tactical or financial nous, or the sponsorship income to compete.

Strip the titles. Strip the honor. Burn it to the ground, and ban state ownership of clubs forever.
Ciborium (Against the club, against the players, against the sycophantic journos, against Sky Sports for taking more than an hour to take up the Ornstein report, against Michael Oliver reffing in the UAE. Basically I’m an unhappy person.)

 

Anyone that thinks or says the man city players on the field won those games and titles and not the overspending by the club is oblivious.

The initial overspending/cheating caused and created more. Better players came in and won, which was the impetus for more spending and more players. And on and on.

The team deserves to be punished way more and greater than they will.

And if by chance they get relegated and players do get sold off to other teams, that sales revenue had better not go back to city. The proceeds should be put in a fund and then proportionally divided amongst the teams directly impacted by losing to them over the years.

For every loss, x% of the sales revenue.

Put it this way, do you really think Haaland would have signed there if city weren’t already top of the table?

They shouldn’t see a single penny of his sale.
Mark

 

Get rid
I remember, after watching the movie “All The President’s Men” (one of the best movies ever btw) I became absorbed by Watergate and read everything I could find about it. What truly astonished me was that the break-in was actually a relatively minor and insignificant incident in what was a vast conspiracy being perpetrated by the Nixon Administration involving virtually all branches of government. The level of corruption and abuse of power was wilful, extensive and systematic. History shows us that time and again, these people either think they won’t be caught, they’ll be able to wriggle out of it or they simply don’t care.

So while we are all clutching our pearls debating suitable punishments, no one is asking the bigger question… does anyone seriously believe MCFC stopped there? Doping issues followed Pep Guardiola both as a player and coach in both Barcelona and Bayern. Mike Dean has already admitted to standing in the centre circle Morris Dancing or Moonwalking. Clattenberg I believe accepted bribes abroad. Does anyone think doping and bribing match officials were red lines MCFC were unwilling to cross? It puts Aguero’s 157th minute winner in a slightly different light doesn’t it?

The MCFC ownership makes Abramovic’s indiscretions seem like philanthropy in comparison and it’s not like they are going to take their spanking and behave are they? Surely the question needs to be asked if they meet the “fit and proper” test.

The one thing they have craved is legitimacy and by having a seat at the table they have had, and used that power and influence. The only thing that will really hurt them is taking their chair away and removing them as owners.
Adidasmufc (Though I must say, a deduction of 114 points would also have a certain poetic justice to it)

 

Trickle-down economics
Further to Manchester City’s verdict, obviously a lot of clubs and their fans feel aggrieved and believe City’s trophies should be awarded elsewhere. However, the money spent by City during this period has filtered down throughout the football pyramid and affected outcomes everywhere.

For example, there is another, much smaller story that illustrates just how complicated football’s financial ecosystem can be.

It starts with Jack Grealish and ends with Ben House.

In August 2021, Manchester City paid Aston Villa £100 million for Grealish, at the time a British transfer record. Villa embarked on a major rebuild that summer. One of the players they signed was Danny Ings from Southampton for a reported £25 million. Southampton, having lost Ings, then bought Adam Armstrong from Blackburn Rovers for around £15 million. Later that month, Blackburn spent around £500,000 to sign Tayo Edun from League One Lincoln City. Lincoln’s recruitment model involved developing and selling players and reinvesting the proceeds. A few months later, in January 2022, they went shopping considerably further down the football pyramid. One of the players they bought was Ben House, a 22-year-old striker playing for Eastleigh in the National League.

So a chain can be drawn:

Manchester City
↓ £100m for Jack Grealish
Aston Villa
↓ ~£25m for Danny Ings
Southampton
↓ ~£15m for Adam Armstrong
Blackburn Rovers
↓ ~£500,000 for Tayo Edun
Lincoln City
↓ undisclosed fee for Ben House
Eastleigh, National League

£500,000 of City’s spend on Grealish trickled down to Lincoln City and the a further undisclosed transfer fee went to Eastleigh, a National League club for a player they developed. Then the story takes a rather lovely turn.

Ben House proved to be an excellent signing for Lincoln. He became their leading scorer and Players’ Player of the Year in his first full season and established himself as an important League One striker.

Four years after Lincoln plucked him from non-league football, House was still there. On 21 April 2026, Lincoln travelled to Doncaster having already secured promotion but with the League One title within their grasp. They won 2-0. Ben House scored both goals.

The player Lincoln had bought from National League Eastleigh had scored the goals that confirmed them as League One champions and sent them into the Championship as title winners.

None of this answers the questions surrounding Manchester City’s financial case. Nor does money subsequently flowing to other clubs negate any competitive advantage City may have gained if financial rules were breached. Those are separate questions.

But it does illustrate something that can get lost when football finances are discussed purely in terms of winners and losers. Money entering football doesn’t remain with the club that first spends it. It moves. A £100 million transfer at the very top can trigger spending by the selling club, which triggers spending by another club, which eventually reaches clubs several divisions below. Sell-on clauses, solidarity payments and subsequent transfers spread it still further.

So when considering the effect of the enormous sums introduced into English football during Manchester City’s transformation, the consequences aren’t confined to Manchester. Somewhere at the other end of one particularly convoluted financial thread was a young striker playing non-league football for Eastleigh. Four years later, he scored twice to make Lincoln City champions.

This is just one story.

When City bought Mahrez for £60 million, Leicester then bought Danny Ward for £12.5 million which triggered a release clause meaning £1.25 million of the Mahrez transfer went straight to the then supporter-owned, non-league Wrexham in tier 5.

Had Wrexham not received the unexpected Danny Ward windfall in 2018, the supporter-owned club would have entered the following years in a weaker financial position. That money helped fund the playing squad and necessary stadium infrastructure. Less than a year later, the approach that ultimately led to the Reynolds and McElhenney takeover began. It can be argued that Wrexham had become a much more attractive club to acquire.

Neither of these stories prove that City caused Wrexham or Lincoln’s subsequent success, but when addressing the question as to “who benefitted or lost out due to City’s spending?” it becomes extraordinarily complicated once you follow the money beyond the first recipient.

For what it’s worth, as the Profitability and Sustainability Rules are very arbitrary and would have been broken by Liverpool if they were retrospectively applied to their spending in the 1960’s, I think a fair punishment would be a transfer ban and a 60 point deduction. This would effectively relegate City and give them at least two years without the Champion’s League, but it would at least provide a sporting opportunity for City to fight against relegation with a 95+ point season and to still qualify for the Champions League by winning it, but they would just have to fight for this on the pitch rather than in the courts.

I also like the potential scenario of City being in 18th on 33 points on the final day of the season, with a much superior goal difference to Spurs languishing on 35 points in 17th, so both teams have to go for a win, and neutrals win either way as either team going down is funny!

Kind regards,
Matt Ellis

 

Billionaire playthings
Listening to the self righteous fans of other clubs handing it out to Man City feels like billionaires comparing Rolls Royces and horses. You know you want to make it about money, but it really isn’t.

For instance Arsenal. Why didn’t they buy Haaland? They literally funded the purchase of Haaland by Man City for £50m by buying Gabriel Jesus for £50m within the same week.

But he wouldn’t have come, because…Pep Guardiola. Of course, Arsenal could have had Pep as well, if they’d spent 3 years batting their eye lashes at him, employed his best mate from Barcelona as Sporting Director and then bought every player that fitted with Pep’s new system before he’d even started. But they didn’t. They went a different direction and eventually bought in Pep Light.

They could have also bought De Bruyne for £55m, Yaya Toure for £24m, or even Aguero for £38m…but they didn’t. But really, it’s all about the 115 charges.

As for ManU, their Bonfire of the Vanities after Ferguson had established them at the top of the pile easily cost them as much in transfer fees and wages over the same timeframe, but it’s all about cheating, and not their spectacularly inept management.

Of course as an Ipswich fan, I just want fairness and instant relegation for those cheating b#stards. As long as it happens before the end of the season, my honour will be satisfied.
Matthew (ITFC)

 

It’s not actually that funny
I’m really struggling with this City news. As a United fan it’s objectively funny that we’ve spent 16 years belittling their success, whilst begrudgingly acknowledging the class on the pitch (and in many respects off it) to find out that after all these years, it was indeed built on a pile of horseshit. We’ve decried their dodgy, human rights abusing, sportswashing owners whilst being jealous of their untold riches and seemingly flawless club management compared to our own cockroach owners and more recently hapless tax dodger, Jimbo Ratcliffe. Turns out there are worse owners than INEOS and the Glazers as even with all that money they still had to resort to cheating to get their results on the pitch. And in the process of denying everything they’ve been found guilty of they’ve further dragged the name of Manchester City and the Premier League into the mud.

This is not just City’s problem, funny as it is to laugh at the potential of Erling Haaland plying is trade in the National League. The Premier League have been absolutely shafted by City’s owners here, there’s no doubt about it. On top of the years of investigation that have already happened, which have surely created an irreparable rift between City and the league, there’s going to be countless court cases lasting for years, FA, EFL and potentially government acction, all likely opposed strongly by City’s owners, while we continue watching the Premier League which has been irrevocably changed due to City’s shenanigans. And that is to say nothing about how we now look back on the Abu Dhabi years.

As many have said, what can we really feel about the past 16 years as football fans? Was it all real? I’m not in the Andy Robertson club of saying it had nothing to do with what went on the pitch. Andy needs us to think it still meant something because if we write off the last 16 years we write off Liverpool’s finest period since the 80s. For a United fans it’s tempting to write it off purely because we were bloody useless. And even then, without City’s cheating we might have won three more titles. Fundamentally, even if we accept the on pitch events as canon, the last sixteen years have to go down as the equivalent of the Star Wars Prequel trilogy – fundamentally enjoyable at the time but morally void and lacked the grounded reality of the originals (yes I am talking about a space opera).

I think John Nicholson is right, the only way for the Premier League to get over this is a restart, maybe a rebrand. They’ll need to start by banning the City Group from owning an English football team again.

And while we’re at it, can we sort out the owners at Old Trafford as well?
Ash

 

ROFL at PGMOL
Premier League referees taking paid work in the UAE deserves another look after the Man City charges

With everything coming out about the Manchester City charges, I think this is worth bringing up again because it never really got the attention it deserved.

And before anyone jumps to conclusions, I’m not saying referees were bribed or that City were paying referees. There isn’t evidence of that.
But there absolutely was a situation where Premier League referees were taking paid refereeing jobs in the UAE while officiating in the Premier League.

In September 2023, Michael Oliver, Darren England and Dan Cook travelled to the UAE to referee Sharjah v Al Ain.

They were paid separately for doing it and PGMOL gave them permission to go. The Times later reported that officials were earning four figure sums from these assignments.

England and Cook then flew back to England and less than 48 hours later were VAR and assistant VAR for Spurs v Liverpool.

That was the game with the infamous Luis Díaz decision where a perfectly legitimate goal was disallowed and PGMOL subsequently admitted there had been a significant human error.

Michael Oliver has also taken refereeing work in Saudi Arabia. He was reportedly paid around £3,000 plus business class travel to referee Al Hilal v Al Nassr in 2023.

Eventually PGMOL changed its approach and stopped senior Premier League referees taking these lucrative one off assignments in Gulf leagues.

This is where I think the obvious conflict of interest question comes in. Sheikh Mansour owns Manchester City through Abu Dhabi United Group/City Football Group. He is also Vice President of the UAE.

So Premier League referees were being allowed to earn additional money refereeing in the domestic league of the same country whose Vice President owns one of the clubs they are responsible for refereeing in England.

Again, that doesn’t prove corruption and it doesn’t prove anyone favoured Manchester City. But how was this ever considered an acceptable arrangement?

At the very least I think PGMOL should be completely transparent about it. Who actually contracted and paid the referees? How much did each referee receive? Who paid for their flights, hotels and other expenses? Were there any other payments on top of their match fees? How many Premier League officials took these jobs? And did PGMOL carry out any conflict of interest assessment before allowing them to do it?

You don’t need to believe there was some conspiracy to think Premier League referees accepting lucrative outside work in the UAE creates a completely unnecessary perception of a conflict of interest.

Given everything that’s now being scrutinised around Manchester City, I think those questions deserve proper answers
Culk the Younger

 

Corporal punishment
I was surprised to read recent mailbox discussions about the repercussions that City should face. You lot were aiming way too low! The owners (and I stress, not City fans) need to pay for decades of deceit and destroying the integrity of every competition City have played in since they took ownership of the club.

Relegation? No chance. Complete expulsion from league football and a multi-million pound barrier to entry for whichever non-league organization they then wish to enter.

Fines? Yes but the fines shouldn’t only go to the other millionaires of the Premier League. Going forward,  City should pay for the season tickets of every fan in the Premier League for each year of their malpractice. In fact, they should do that for every fan across all professional leagues in England, since all those leagues have been contaminated by City’s misdeeds in some way (e.g. early FA and League cup rounds).

Redistribute titles? The shieks would bite you hand-off for that, so no. Firstly, every title this ownership group ‘won’ needs an asterisk. Then, going forward, every title they win under this ownership needs to be asterisked until City pass a full financial audit each season.

The point of a punishment is to achieve justice for victims, deter a recurrence of repeat behaviour and for the guilty party to reflect on their wrongdoing. I concede, my suggestions sound far-fetched but football is all made-up anyway. So why are we limiting ourselves when penalising an organization that has limitless wealth and has negatively affected our lives to varying degrees for over a decade?

C’mon mailboxers, how medieval can you get?
Nilesh, Harrow

 

Fully agree with Ian Watson’s take. If/when City are found finally and unappealably guilty, they should be stripped of all their titles from 2009 to date, and competitions should reflect a gaping void in the winner column for those years. Let us never forget their crimes against sporting integrity in football. And in trying to correct the injustice of a losing 97 point season by Liverpool, let us not commit the injustice of crowning a mediocre Man United side who finished 20 points off the pace.

None of those seasons mean anything anymore. There are no victories in there, just bitter loss. If/when City are found guilty, there can be no mercy. Everything they’ve fraudulently built must be totally dismantled, every asset sold to compensate as many victims as possible.

On the subject of frauds, particularly the bald kind, Pep must not be allowed to escape shame. Same for all the current and former players and every fan whose defence is that they simply believed what they were told. That level of credulity is not a defence. I do have sympathy for how seductive the whole thing must have been. But please just cop to believing what was personally convenient to believe instead of what was likely to be true. Perpetrators and apologists aside, we can all find one positive in this: sportswashing is shitting the bed.
Rob, LFC, NYC

 

Dear Editor,
Long time reader, first time writer. I think the appropriate punishment for Man City is to move them to the Scottish League. Forever.

Cheers,
Tee

 

Wow, when City aren’t put on a rocket ship and fired into the sun, you lot are going to be really mad!
Graham