The unanswerable questions left by Manchester City's distortion of English football

There have been moments over the past 10 days, most notably concerning the aggression ofManchester City's response, when people in football have barely been able to believe what they're seeing. That's perhaps only fitting given how this case has distorted the perspective of an entire era of English football history, right upto the uncertainty of how any appeal may go.

A core question is how "real" it was. You get a sense ofhow deep the poison seeping out of all of this goeswhen you start this process of trying to re-assess how different that football history might have been if you remove the era built on City's cheating.

It isn't just that there are so many counterfactuals but also so many layers of complexity to each of them. Would Jurgen Klopp (left) have been the defining manager of his generation if Manchester City hadn't broken Premier League rules?(PA Archive) Take the last team to finish second to City but haven't won a title.

Since Arsenal exorcised a ghost last season and Arne Slot partly fulfilled Jurgen Klopp's legacy in 2024-25 season - even if they would both argue it should have been so much more - that brings you back to Manchester United in 2020-21. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer would have been a champion and not sacked mere months later,likely transforming the outlook of the modern United.

Except, would they have even been second if Klopp's Liverpool had not exhausted themselves trying to beat City over the previous two seasons? But would Klopp have even been at Anfield had Brendan Rodgers won City's league in 2013-14?

Might Sir Alex Ferguson have left earlier had he won the 2011-12 title,ensuring the landscape-shifting moment that was his retirementhad a completely different effect? These are just the top details, since they involve the title, but it can be seen how trying to consider all of this quickly becomes a mind-bending exercise.

Would Leicester City have gone into such a tailspin had they got back into the Champions League? It's not just that it's hard to know how to feel about it all, but that the perspective on it has been scrambled.

The effect of City's cheating spilled out in so many directions over years. That matters for many more reasons than just potential blank spaces on the Premier League 's roll of honour.

It's about the memories and experiences that really matter to the game. An entire era of football has been toxified, poisoned.