For many, the longer-than-usual international break was going by quite uneventfully until the bombshell news dropped on the Manchester City charges.
For others, particularly myself, our bandwidth was stretched to its limits with the Ireland and Israel games, the enormous debate, drama and controversy that emanated from it, culminating in Ireland playing both games, winning one and drawing the other, and getting out the other side without anyone really feeling any better about it. But it’s done now, and the prevailing impact is that Ireland may have roused enough awareness around Europe, and the prevailing lesson being Uefa will likely try and keep the two apart going forward.
To be fair, they’d been warned.
Now, we move swiftly back into the warm bosom of professional sports capitalism with the Premier League, along with the bombshell of Manchester City’s guilty findings for the long, drawn out investigation into the 115 charges.
The landscape of the Premier League has changed irreparably since we signed off from club action, when City beat Sunderland 5-3 and charged into a three-point lead atop the table. Everything we knew about it has been put into question and the trajectory of the league going forward has been thrown into a loop.
City visit Anfield this weekend in what’s sure to be one of the liveliest and, let’s face it, funniest possible returns for them following the massive news. There’s no doubting the Liverpool fans will play their part, especially given they were at the receiving end of City’s financial doping for several of the seasons in questions, and went toe-to-toe with them for many seasons after the fact when, seemingly, City had put pause to their chicanery, but were clearly still making hay under Pep Guardiola.
Punditry and coverage around the weekend’s action will be dominated by the story. Not only does it leave us wondering where City’s future may lie, with talk of expulsion to the lower leagues, points deductions and other ramifications that might impact their success in years to come, we also now immediately must put an asterisk over everything we knew about the Premier League over the past fifteen or so years.
Several amazing City players have come and gone, along with inarguably the best manager of the century. Many joined after the charge period which stopped in the 2017 season. But how do we now evaluate pretty much everything City have achieved? How do we speak about Guardiola going forward, who bailed this summer, rather conveniently?
What happens if the titles are stripped, leaving a Lance Armstrong-like hole in the history books? There are so many players, managers and clubs impacted by that, including several who now grace our screens and algorithms talking about this very topic every weekend.
The ownership under Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan and CEO Khaldoon Al Mubarak is also now in limbo. They surely now fail any meaningful ownership test, while the recently introduced Independent Football Regulator has a seismic case to stress test its arrival, in terms of overseeing the character and ownership transparency of British football owners. The same club invested massively in the playing squad during the summer and are on course to returning to the summit of the league. Do we take that spending at face value, granted its long after the fact? Do we assume the City group conveniently stopped juicing their numbers around 2017?
And it goes without saying, the tens of thousands of football fans in and around the league who’ve been impacted, one way or another, by City’s shenanigans, and that includes City fans themselves.
In some way, I’m glad to escape this particular international break and dive back into re-learning what it is to be a follower of the Premier League. Because the one we left a mere three weeks is now unrecognisable.