Football is morally and financially bankrupt, but The Back Page has a solution. Relegate Man City to Step Four.
A hill I will die on is that the most vindictive punishment ever inflicted on any football club was in 1992, when the reformed Maidstone Invicta began life in the 13th tier, at the bottom of the Kent County League. There was no sympathy, no outrage and hardly any media coverage. I lived a mile from the ground and had no idea when Invicta were playing. This is not a problem Man City will face, wherever they land next season.
The idea that excluding City from the Premier League would be commercially disastrous for the 19 other clubs, and the league itself, is complete bullshit. The top flight coped without them well enough when they went down to the third tier and we were all Man City fans in 1999, when they scored twice in stoppage time to deny Gillingham in the play-off final.
Even as they moved into a different realm, no one really hated them in the way people used to hate Ferguson-era United sides.
The problem City have now is that they have, to borrow a line from John Still: “fucked everyone off”. Fans will take any amount of abuse and will still be there for the next match. Players come and go. Managers are expendable. Politicians go to the highest bidder and journalists are easily bought (email us for our rates). But if you fuck everyone off, you eventually run out of friends.
Football authorities like a bit of pleading. One of the reasons Maidstone’s punishment was so severe was because Jim Thompson didn’t do contrition. You only had to watch what happened at Anfield on Sunday to see that City don’t know how to do it either. If they’d had gone down the Chelsea route they might have got away with a slapped wrist, but unlike Chelsea they weren’t able to blame the previous owners for their chicanery. Corporations only apologise as an act of last resort, but City are guiltier than OJ Simpson and they’re going to at least need to learn how to fake feeling sorry fairly quickly.
The scale of the cheating is breathtaking and is going to demand an equally breathtaking punishment. Relegating them to non-league level might seem ludicrous, but there’s something non-league about the entire scandal; the under the counter payments, the duplicate contracts and the transparently fraudulent “sponsorship” deals.
Khaldoon Al Mubarak is no different to Stan Flashman or Jim Thompson; he just speaks better English. Pep Guardiola is Steve Evans with a more expensive taste in knitwear. Rayan Cherki could be Ken Charlery who, when he was at Boston, had a contract saying he was on £620 a week, unaware his club had filed a separate contract with the FA that said he was on £120 a week.
Wherever they land, City will be at the centre of a centrifuge of excrement. It’s not out of the question it’ll be in the National League, where we might end up playing them (as we did in 1983 for Kenny Hill’s testimonial).
According to the Independent Football Regulator, six National League clubs would be losing money even if their players played for free which, at the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, they aren’t. 60 percent of clubs in the EFL and the NL are “technically insolvent” according to the report, and its remit only covers the top five tiers of the game. The effects of wage inflation are trickling, or rather cascading, all the way down the pyramid.
So maybe relegating City to say, the North West Counties League, is the solution. When Maidstone finally did get elected to the Kent League, in 2001, one of the selling points was that 200 away fans would boost the revenues of the other teams in the league. Imagine what the presence of 5,000 banana-waving simpletons singing “We’ll Cheat When We Want” could do for the clubs they meet on their way back up.
