How to interpret the history being written in front of our eyes…
Pep Guardiola and Manchester City have finally done it. After all of these years, all of the money spent on transfers, and all of the domestic dominance with international failures, Manchester City have won the Champions League for the first time in their history. Over a decade in the making, the City project has finally reached its apex point. And all it took was one last signing, one last player to really push City over the top…
…John Stones, the best midfielder in the world.
The fact that I am only half kidding about that is really indicative of the point, isn’t it? The legacy of this moment, and of the City Football Group project as a whole, is quite complex. Morally, financially, in football and in the boardroom, there is quite a bit of stuff to unpack here. The large sweeping generalizations that many have said about Man City, both in favor and in opposition, do have legitimacy but also do not tell the whole story. It is weird, it is messy, it is complex. And it is the state of modern football.
The bedrock of the Manchester City question is one simple fact: that you cannot separate Manchester City from their owners. Once you know how the sausage is made, so to speak, you cannot look at it the same way. This point was never better illustrated than tonight in Istanbul, where City Football Group chairman Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan sat in the directors box at the Atatürk Olympic Stadium to experience only his second Manchester City match in 15 years. Sitting next to him? His brother, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the President of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Abu Dhabi.
There is no misunderstanding who is in control, and who has been bankrolling, Manchester City for the last decade and a half.
I have hammered on the idea of state ownership and sportswashing repeatedly on this blog. My views on it are very clear, and I will not explain myself further and keep beating this dead horse. But whether people involved with Manchester City like it or not, this is now irreversibly a part of the legacy of this club. This is not the first sportswashed moment in the history of European football, but this is the one that truly defines the era we are entering. Manchester City have shown that a key to unrivaled, unprecedented success is positioning yourself on the bankroll of a wealthy government that commits human rights violations on an incredibly regular basis. As long as the product on the pitch is even pretty good, not even at the spectacular level that City have been at for the last several years, then everyone will certainly ignore the obvious blood stains on every bank note involved in every transaction at that club.
This is the society that allows us to look at a Qatar World Cup, state-backed takeovers of other clubs, the Saudi-backed takeover of professional golf, and the potential for a Saudi Arabian World Cup in 2030 and not even bat an eye. A society where many will not only ignore the obvious problems present here but will raise their war banners and come to the defense of those involved. We have been sportswashed. The tactic has worked. It has found its true home in the hyper-partisan, tribalistic world of football. There is no going back now.
The financial aspect of this story has an angle purely on the pitch as well. While I think the idea that City have bought their success is complex and not wholly accurate (which we will discuss later), it is hard to deny just how much Manchester City have spent to assemble this super team. Since 2017, they have spent over £1 billion on transfer fees, a spending number that gets even higher when you consider the extra spending required to assemble one of the largest payrolls in the sport. Since Sheikh Mansour and Abu Dhabi United Group bought the club in 2008, that transfer spending number nearly eclipses £2 billion, which can really only be even rivaled by Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea. The backbone of the most successful era in Manchester City’s history, the vehicle for assembling this ridiculous team, is a level of spending that 99.9% of football clubs in Europe cannot even come close to rivaling. City’s spending total on purely defenders could rival the amount spent by their opponents today, Inter Milan, in total over the last five seasons.
Manchester City are not the only offenders in this regard, but they are among those teams responsible for the rapid inflation of transfer prices over the last decade. The ability for City to spend without any regard for profit or loss allows them to shell out utterly ridiculous amounts of money to assemble a true super team in a way that might drive other clubs into financial distress or crisis. We live in a world where the price needed to be competitive is too steep for everyone except around ten total teams on the continent, and City are very much among those responsible for creating this reality and absolutely would not be the club they are without that exorbitant level of financial backing.
And this does not even begin to touch on the multiple investigations against City for breaches of various Premier League and UEFA Financial Fair Play rules, including the 115 charges levied against them by the Premier League earlier this year. It ignores how their FFP case against UEFA was only dismissed by the Court of Arbitration for Sport on a technicality. It ignores the alarming number of articles published by journalists pointing out several of City’s sponsors being companies with no employees, no real operating field, or other irregularities that make you question the legitimacy of the company involved. It ignores the fairly genuine questions about where this ridiculous amount of wealth is even coming from, whether these sponsors with state-owned Emirati companies are what they say, whether any of this is even legitimate. While we may never know the truth, these accusations will never leave them.
But now I need to be a little bit of a hypocrite. I have no choice, it is the only way to truly explain the whole of the legacy of this moment. Earlier on, I said that it is impossible to separate Manchester City from the source of their funding and everything that comes with that. That is still true, but I am going to try and separate them now. From a purely sporting perspective, this is a remarkable historic moment and adds complexity to the idea of City wholly “buying” their success.
To put it bluntly, this Manchester City team might be the greatest team I have ever seen.
I have watched this sport with a growing and now nearly-religious fervor for over a decade and a half, and I have never seen a team this talented individually and this together collectively. There are players all over the pitch and even on the bench for City that you can consider among the best in the world in their position, and yet the whole is somehow still greater than the sum of its parts. Even with all of the changes, forced and otherwise, and all of the evolutions that Guardiola’s tactics have undergone since he became City manager in 2016, they have still only gotten better over time until they arrived at this point, quite possibly the best they have ever been. This is a team that is nearly faultless, almost perfect in basically every way. A team that has such a ridiculous level of individual talent while also being so fervently committed to their roles and to Guardiola as a manager that there is zero question, zero ego, zero deviation from the message and goal.
And that man is the biggest winner of today when it comes to legacy. Pep Guardiola could retire tomorrow and would likely be remembered as the greatest manager in the history of this sport. He has won at historic levels in three different countries, now has won the Champions League three times, proven that he can win Ol’ Big Ears without Lionel Messi, and led Man City to becoming only the second English team ever to win the Premier League, FA Cup, and Champions League treble. If it was not for a plucky Southampton team knocking them out in the semifinals of the Carabao Cup, we might be talking about the first English team to ever win all four major trophies in one season. He is the architect of a level of dominance that the Premier League has never seen before. He is the man behind the success of 2022/23 Manchester City and 2008/09 Barcelona, which are the two teams that might be remembered as (and in my opinion are) the two best teams of all time. On top of all of this, he is now becoming the roots of a coaching tree. His three main protégés, being Mikel Arteta, Xavi, and Vincent Kompany, are beginning to find notable success and acclaim. This is a cemented legacy for Pep, one that has nothing to do with money spent.
This is why I do truly believe that the idea, shared by a whole lot of people, that Guardiola has “bought” his success is not totally true. Yes, City have spent a boatload of money and potentially violated multiple rules, that cannot be ignored, but it does not tell the whole story. Manchester City have two era-defining superstar players. One of them, Kevin De Bruyne, left the match today injured after 35 minutes. The other, Erling HÃ¥land, was abjectly poor and touched the ball maybe a total of seven or eight times. City still won and were still relatively in control for most of the game.
It goes back to what I said at the beginning of this post. John Stones was the best player on the pitch for City today. A player, who mind you was exclusively a center back before this season and played with only varying levels of regularity, put out a performance in midfield that most midfielders in the world could not come close to matching. A truly world-class midfield performance, an all-time performance from a player who has been a midfielder consistently for maybe seven months. That is wholly on the coaching and belief of Pep Guardiola. The level of Stones, Manuel Akanji, Nathan Aké, Riyad Mahrez, and Ilkay Gündogan this season, players not regularly thought of as City’s superstars, is wholly down to the work of Guardiola. Even Jack Grealish, the man derided as the biggest bust in Premier League history and thought of by many to be the most anti-Pep archetype of player, has turned into a quietly incredibly useful and effective, nearly undroppable, player for Man City because of Guardiola. They even willingly got rid of João Cancelo, one of the best fullbacks in the world, and decided to invent some crazy “upside-down 4-2-3-1” formation that literally had zero fullbacks on the pitch and they were still unbelievable. This is not just about money.
Building a successful team is not just about shelling out money and signing the biggest superstars. We have seen Manchester United, Chelsea, PSG, and others shell out stupefying levels of cash on transfers in the last several years and come no closer to even being remotely successful, let alone as dominant as City. Man City have spent ridiculous amounts of money, yes, that is undeniable, but that is not the whole story. They spent to a plan. City, mainly through Guardiola and sporting director Txiki Begiristain, had an image of the team they wanted to build and the players needed to build it, and they moved with surgical precision to acquire that team. They did not just shell out money for big name superstars, and many of their players, including very key players, did not really become the stars they are until after they arrived at City. They have even been precise in signing their “role” players, those who were much lower reputation players who have become indispensable to the team like Akanji and Gündogan. If this was simply about spending money, then it would not only be Liverpool that was consistently rivaling City over the last several years.
On top of all of this, doing what City have done this season is immensely difficult. Even winning the Champions League by itself is very hard to do because of the nature of knockout competitions, as City have demonstrated the last several years. They have undoubtedly been one of, if not the best team in the world for a while now, but this being the moment they finally win the European Cup after so many years of trying shows how unforgiving the Champions League can be. The past seven years has included one defeat in a final to Chelsea, two improbable defeats to underdog Monaco and Lyon teams, rather chaotic eliminations at the hands of Tottenham and Liverpool, and a semifinal elimination to Real Madrid last season that if you turned it into a movie script and handed it to a Hollywood film studio it would probably be rejected for being too unrealistic. Surviving that gauntlet, which this season included Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, as well as emerging through a domestic cup and being champions at the end of a difficult 38 game season is a ridiculous achievement. Sure, Arsenal were not the most difficult title challenge that City have faced, and it absolutely does not rival City having to come back from 2-0 down on the final day of the season to beat Liverpool to the title in 2021/22, but it was still a grueling run that City have handled with an almost-unbelievable level of poise and dominance.
If you are able to put all of the baggage City come with to the side for a moment, this achievement becomes incredibly ridiculous. This is history. This is the coronating moment for one of the greatest teams ever, a moment that is tremendously deserved for the players and for Guardiola.
The issues is, though, that the baggage cannot be moved. Man City as a football team cannot be separated from Man City the football club, which cannot be separated from City Football Group, Abu Dhabi United Group, and the undeniable involvement of the UAE. Every aspect of this story, warts and all, will be in the history books when they discuss this Manchester City side. This is the complex legacy of this project, one that has set the tone for the future of sport as a whole, its involvement with mega-rich but less-than-reputable owners, and our understanding of the word “sportswashing”.
Welcome, my friends, to the new age of football.
SoccerKakis 