City’s Meaningless Treble: An Indictment of the Ethics of Modern Football

We are frequently reminded that the FA Cup is the world’s oldest domestic cup competition. Nostalgia abounds around The Cup; Sir Stanley Matthews’ late career vindication, Trevor Brooking’s header in the 1981 final, players worrying about getting their teeth back before receiving their medals in the 1930s. Yesterday’s coverage on the BBC deliberately harked back to the all-day coverage of the past, when the final was the season’s only televised game.

It is patronized, sentimentalized. Part-time players in the third round, the ‘shock’ of a Championship side’s reserves being knocked out by a well-organized, motivated, fourth division team, the toe-curling ‘Magic of The Cup.’ In reality, its prestige has been on the wane for decades. The Premier League’s top-notch marketing and the bloated, money driven, oligopoly creating Champions League have made the FA Cup an afterthought. The economics of the competition mean that it is far less rewarding to win The Cup than ensuring a finish in the top four. But despite this slow and steady devaluation, there have been some genuinely exciting finals in recent years. Wigan’s victory over Manchester City in 2013, Arsenal’s comeback win over Hull the following year, Aaron Ramsey’s extra time knockout punch against Chelsea in 2017. This game was the opposite, utterly without tension, without meaning.

The opening half-hour did involve a few forays forward by Watford and if Pererya has kept his nerve in his one-on-one with Ederson, then we might have a game. He didn’t and we didn’t. Instead we were asked to watch a mauling, a humiliation. It was a bullfight where the bull had been pre-hobbled, fed a kilo of ketamine and tied to a chair, where the matador had two machine guns and an unlimited supply of hollow-points. This was not football. This was not sport.  

But should this be a surprise? This is exactly what City’s ownership have been working, spending, towards. They do not want contests, they want victory – no matter how hollow. Whether they have broken Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules or not, they have sought to buy their way to football’s top table. They have spent billions on purchasing players and paying them over-handsomely. They transplanted Barcelona’s executive and coaching teams, expensively. They have distorted the transfer market in this country and across the continent, weakening opponents. They have plucked the best players from other teams and created perhaps the strongest twenty-five-man squad in the history of football. Their reserve team would likely finish in the top four.

The consequence of their artificially deep pockets has been to undermine domestic and European competition. Would they really have earned 198 points in the last two years if Raheem Sterling had stayed at Liverpool? If Kyle Walker were still at Spurs? If they didn’t overpay their squad players, might Gabriel Jesus have chosen Arsenal or Inter Milan when leaving Brazil? Might Bernardo Silva be picking defences apart for Valencia or Sevilla? Or, counter-historically, might the one-club man Jack Rodwell have helped Everton to take a point from City, giving the title to Liverpool?

And where does all the money come from? None of it is earned, all inherited or sucked out of the earth in oil. It seems bizarre that in the same year – in the same city – where we have seen Extinction Rebellion highlight a climate emergency by gluing themselves to tube trains, that a team built almost exclusively by petro-dollars should receive plaudits for their ‘sporting’ achievements. The money coming from an absolute monarch, in a country made rich by polluting the earth while failing to pay its domestic staff properly. Its equivalent is Prince Charles using his wealth, and the revenues from his lands, to fund the purchase of the Minnesota Timberwolves, then spending even more to turn them into NBA champions. It makes one wonder what exactly is on the FA’s ‘Fit and Proper Person’ test. 

This, of course, has all happened before in England, and recently. Jack Walker purchased the title for Blackburn in 1995 and money of questionable provenance has bought Chelsea many trophies in the past fifteen years. Arsène Wenger described the latter as ‘financial doping’. The Chelsea team were so packed of unpleasant players – Terry, Lampard, Robben, Drogba – and led by the ultimate pantomime villain in José Mourinho, so the wider footballing public never forgot what they were, a Russian oil-igarch’s plaything. That City are team of son-in-laws, nice guys like Vincent Kompany, David Silva, Fernandinho, that they play attractive football has belied many. Politeness should not be conflated with morality. All of these players could have played for clubs not so heavily tainted by human rights abuses, by climate change. They took the money – let’s not forget that.

Pep Guardiola reacted furiously when the issue of FFP was raised in yesterday’s post-match press conference. He felt he had been accused of wrongdoing for alleged emoluments relating to other services performed for City’s owners. Pep missed the point, perhaps so did the journalist asking the question. Working for them at all, in this mission to undermine football, to fulfil one of the ugliest, most expensive vanity projects of all time already left him culpable, guilty. As are the game’s guardians: The Premier League and UEFA have let this happen, both are too weak, too compromised to make a stand on ethical grounds. 

Yes, City have achieved their domestic treble (well done you!) but the achievement holds no more meaning that beating your dad in the back garden – the secret’s out, he wasn’t trying to stop you.