“Do you know the question that you are asking me? Today, do you honestly think it is my job to make this kind of question happen …” Cut to the long, painful pause. Chuck in a deep, shaming stare, eyes that have suddenly become death rays of betrayal and disgust and Pep Guardiola himself transformed from a man cheerfully toasting his own FA Cup final victory to a grizzled chief detective addressing a room full of convicted perverts.
Guardiola had the wind entirely at his back at this point, sitting in the Wembley press room an hour after Manchester City’s 6-0 defeat of Watford in May 2019. Success drowns out every other noise in football. To be good is also to be good, noble, virtuous. History is written by the domestic treble winners. Right up until the moment it isn’t.
The question in question was asked by Rob Harris of the Associated Press. It was basically this: information is now in the public domain that suggests Roberto Mancini received a second salary from Abu Dhabi when he was City manager. Mancini was one of Guardiola’s immediate predecessors. So had he, Pep, ever received two salaries?
Even as Harris was asking this he was interrupted by City’s press officer, saying: “We’re not going here, we’re really just not going there.” A simple “no” would have done the job. Instead the exchange ended with another beautifully executed mad-dog stare from Guardiola; not angry, just sad and disappointed. But also, let’s be honest, really angry as well.
Fast forward to this week and a clip has been doing the rounds of the same Rob Harris, now of Sky News, and still the same perky, questing figure. Harris is approaching Ferran Soriano this time, Pep’s key man through that era, and asking the same entirely legitimate things, with a very different outcome. “The Premier League maintains you cheated for nearly a decade … is all this success, as the Premier League says, based on sham contracts?”
There is no glare in return now, no outrage, no flushed moral high ground. “Thank you, thank you,” Soriano mutters, with the look of a man caught shoplifting a Twix at the local primary school fete, followed by a mute, fumbling exit.
Sunlight. Scrutiny. Awkward questions from awkward people. It turns out these are still the best disinfectant. Just as it turns out “the question” was the only one worth asking in that room in 2019. Not that anyone agreed at the time. Predictably enough the comments on social media were about scum, bias, the press as a national embarrassment. Even other journalists held a perfumed kerchief to their noses, suggesting this was all a non-issue because, er, the club had just won a treble.
It turns out the exact opposite was true. It was entirely the right moment to ask this question. That Cup final win came at the end of the main period of shammery. It was in many ways its unholy coronation. There was an industrial-scale embarrassment in that room. But it wasn’t the person asking the questions.
There is an obvious problem with the City story at this stage. It’s just too big. There is too much to say, an entire Dickensian multiverse interlayered with oddities and moments of jaw-drop. This is not, repeat not, a media story. And yet it kind of is a media story. After all, it was media scrutiny and the efforts of the hacker Rui Pinto that first winkled it out. As such, Harris deserves his moment of grace, living proof that it’s culturally vital to keep on asking questions, the same Rob Harris I have seen grilling Vladimir Putin about corruption on the hoof in Zurich, and also walking into a pillar at the World Cup in São Paulo while running off with his laptop to ask someone else something else, a man so deeply locked into the news cycle even reinforced stadium infrastructure doesn’t register.
It is also worth mentioning at moments like this Nick Harris, AKA Sporting Intelligence, who has kept going at this story relentlessly despite an unusual degree of abuse, harassment and threats, and who has every right to feel vindicated, part of a world where we can still hold power to account, where a cat can look at a king. But for now the real object of interest in this exchange is, of course, the person on the other end of it. Welcome to the stage once again Pep Guardiola, the public face of the club for the past decade.
What did Pep know? This is more than just football legacy chat. It relates to pretty much everything here, the true nature of the club, of elite football itself, and more basic things like truth, spectacle and human nature. Is believing the assurances of others any kind of defence, given Guardiola was in the perfect position to ask questions of his own? Is any kind of deniability plausible here?
The other significant statement from Guardiola in that time came after City’s two-year ban from the Champions League for a serious breach of Uefa’s financial fair play rules was overturned by the court of arbitration for sport. “We didn’t break the rules. We played the same rules as all the clubs in the Premier League,” was Guardiola’s conclusion, which seemed pretty silly at the time, given time-barring of offences was key to that decision. How does it look now?
To this day Guardiola’s stance remains slavish adherence to the promises of his paymasters, as evidenced by his first statement on the matter on Wednesday. Guardiola says he will be getting through the current unpleasantness with the club and its fans, sticking together as always. But were you together, really? Because City’s fans have some urgent questions of their own now. The majority believed what they were told, and put their faith in the “irrefutable body of evidence” schtick. That ring binder of truth really is going to have to do a lot of instant high-speed kung fu when it finally comes screeching into the appeal room on its trail bike. Not to mention explaining where it’s been over the past three years of information exchange.
Guardiola will face his own questions too, and on a level that will hurt him. The coach who only stays for three or four years stretched this out to a full decade at a club where 80% of that time was spent under a cloud of sham contracts and casual hubris. Through all this he had a deeply personal relationship with his chair, Khaldoon al-Mubarak. The pair of them are seen whispering tenderly in the recent Prime documentary, in which Guardiola is presented as the most genuine and heartfelt of truth-seekers, a lone castaway on Integrity Island, Jedi-like in a tailored hoodie, eyes brimming with tears as he talks feelings and eternal truths, like a dad in the pub on Christmas Eve.
In his farewell hagiographies, Guardiola was routinely described as the greatest modern manager. He invented the Messi role for Messi. He reimagined the basic texture of the sport in this country. If this guy isn’t good, nobody’s good. On the other hand, the only logical conclusion on the facts as they stand is that all his City trophies were won with the benefit of concerted macro-cheating.
During the period embraced by the charges, City’s net spend on transfers was, according to Transfermarkt, almost £400m more than Manchester United in second place, and five times as much as Liverpool and Arsenal. From 2016 to 2018, the key period in building the Pep supremacy, they massively outspent every other team. After which they won the league on the final day or by a single point three times. There were little things throughout, like digging out an extra £25m for Kevin De Bruyne, stretching those fine details in your direction. How is it possible not to see that success as unrelated to stolen margins? This is an era that will now be defined by sham-ball, trophies hoisted with a hand behind your back and a thumb on the scale.
Pep can only double down now and ride this to the end. His life’s work, his vast and all-consuming reputation is at stake. “We will get through this together,” he says in Wednesday’s statement. Well, you have no choice now, Pep. Wherever that destination might be.
There are others who must now enter the matrix of who knew what. Soriano, subject of the second Harris grilling, is utterly bound up in this. He’s there right at the start, speaking to us in the leaked emails published by Der Spiegel. “We will need to fight this,” Soriano writes in one leaked memo, “and do it in a way that is not visible.” Hmm. How’s that part working out?
Soriano’s own pre-City past has already been sliced and diced by those who wish to see a pattern. For the record, and as a basic statement of fact, he was at Barcelona during the period when the alleged, unproved, time-barred refereeing scandal happened, but not implicated or punished. He was at Air Spain when it collapsed, but cleared of any wrongdoing. And now he’s been at City in the period of inflated income that has, in effect, left the club dangling over the edge of a cliff. It is certainly an unfortunate chain of coincidence.
Others who will be asked what they knew, or not asked because he’s not going to speak to you, include the owner, Sheikh Mansour. This has an added element. It speaks to the ultimate test, some way down the line, of fitness to run a football club. How is it possible to spend so much family money on this thing, to dole out what are in effect government contracts, and not know the actual process here?
But let’s face it, we all knew really. Weren’t the sham dealings obvious? It was there even in the absence of furious statements of support from the independent directors at First Abu Dhabi Bank, Etihad Airways, Experience Abu Dhabi, Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi, Aldar Properties of Abu Dhabi, Masdar Energy of Abu Dhabi, e& telecoms of Abu Dhabi. Come on, chaps. Stand up for the investment. No word either from Dude Wipes, the club’s official male-oriented toilet-paper partner. Although who knows, we may now be entering full Dude Wipes territory.
We knew about the sportswashing aspect, knew that City was a soft-power vehicle for the state of Abu Dhabi, which has a record of alleged – and of course denied – human rights abuses and so on. And of course City’s fans must have known this too, or felt it on some level. It was there cooked into the blueprint, the sense of something brutally high-end but strangely cold.
JG Ballard coined the phrase “the death of affect” to describe the institutionalising of public feeling, rage and triumph commodified as a spectator event. Some champion teams have a strut. City’s basic vibe was always closer to an unceasing V-sign. Perhaps there was even a buried unease here. No one really enjoys being treated as a glove puppet, even when it is done gently and with a hand held discreetly under the desk. On which note, Pep? Any other questions now? Is this a good time?
