At half-time in the 2014 League Cup final, Sunderland led Manchester City 1-0. Yaya Touré equalised with a casually brilliant 30-yard clip 10 minutes after the break, and City went on to win 3-1. City, we now know from the independent commission, were at the time involved in a prolonged and calculated act of cheating, while Touré, the leaks in Der Spiegel suggested, was being paid via a dual contract to disguise exactly how much City were spending. Although precise details were left to the appendices, the commission’s report refers to payments “not recorded in an employment contract … but instead recorded in a consultancy agreement”.
Had Sunderland won, they would not merely have ended a 41-year wait for a trophy but would have qualified for the following season’s Europa League. It’s possible, of course, that the strain the extra games placed on the squad would have led to relegation in 2015, rather than the familiar trope of sacking a manager, in this case Gus Poyet, midway through the season, and surviving thanks to a bump under his successor, Dick Advocaat.
But it’s also possible that the greater exposure brought by European football, the surge of positivity engendered by unfamiliar and unexpected silverware, may have led to Premier League consolidation, stability and semi-regular European qualification.
Should Sunderland feel cheated? Of course they should, just as those who came second behind Lance Armstrong should feel cheated; just as Liverpool and Arsenal should feel cheated over the League Cup finals of 2016 and 2018; just as Stoke should feel cheated over the 2011 FA Cup final; just as Manchester United should feel cheated over the Premier League titles in 2012 and 2018 and Liverpool should in 2014; just as every club who played in the same competitions as City between 2009 and 2018 should feel cheated. But does that mean the 2014 League Cup should be taken from City and awarded to Sunderland?
These are two different questions, and it’s probably best to deal with the latter first – and this, unfortunately, is where subjectivity is unavoidable. I can’t speak for other Sunderland fans but, personally, I wouldn’t want it.
Perhaps this comes from never having seen my club win a major trophy. If it happens, I want it to be pure. I want images that will be remembered down the generations, like the highlights of 1973 – Ian Porterfield’s goal, Jim Montgomery’s save and Bob Stokoe’s celebratory skip across the pitch in mac and trilby.
I want the surge of adrenaline when a goal is scored, the agonised wait of injury time, the rush of the final whistle. I want tears and hugs and community and togetherness, all the things my dad’s generation banged on about. I want to get drunk and sing on a train. I don’t want to find out via an alert on my phone 12 years after the fact as I unpack the dishwasher.
Others may feel differently but the arithmetic of trophies won seems far less important than the experience of winning and the memories and sense of comradeship it provokes. Glory denied cannot be rectified a generation later by an independent commission, no matter how august.
Awarding rivals league titles seems even less satisfactory. In the 2017-18 season, for instance, the league was effectively over by the end of January with City 15 points clear.
As City went on to amass 100 points, there was little point in the four sides behind them – Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Tottenham, who were separated by five points – exerting themselves to try to rein City in.
Their priorities changed. United, Chelsea and Spurs all reached the FA Cup semi-finals. Liverpool got to the Champions League final. In those circumstances, why would any of them have prioritised the league? To award United, who finished second, the title, would seem not just empty but arbitrary.
That, though, does not mean City should not be stripped of those titles. They won them unfairly; why on earth should they be allowed to keep them? (And yes, something similar could be said of Chelsea, but that’s an argument for why Chelsea should also have been stripped of titles, not for why City should not be).
How can those trophies be left in the record books for future generations unquestioningly to see? How can City stand as the fourth-most successful side in league history when so much of that success was achieved by cheating?
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The argument will be made that City’s players strived hard for those trophies. But so did players for those other teams, the ones who weren’t cheating. And how much easier to win in a deep squad full of high-grade players, drawn to City by the money they were offering, money whose source, the independent commission concluded, had been disguised in contravention of Premier League regulations.
Euphoric memories cannot be expunged, but it is for City fans (and players and coaching staff and directors) to decide what to do with them. If they still want to exult in Sergio Agüero’s 94th-minute winner to claim the 2012 Premier League title, nobody can stop them. But the rest of the world knows what it was based on, that as the rest of the Premier League played to regulations voted in by the clubs themselves, City did not.
That would mean that there was no Premier League champion in 2012, 2014 or 2018, no FA Cup winner in 2011 and no League Cup winner in 2014, 2016 or 2018 (and it does not seem unreasonable to wonder, when all this is done, whether there might be more to be investigated after 2018). If there are blanks on the roll of honour, let them be; there was no honour there.
Let the spaces stand as testimony to what those seasons were. Let them stand as a memorial to the years when a foreign entity tried to subvert English football, when a foreign entity took this country’s greatest cultural mode, and all the passion and all the feeling, all the sorrow and all the joy, all the love it has entailed, and tried to twist it for its own political ends. Let them stand as a warning of the dangers of laissez-faire capitalism, when everything, no matter how beloved, could be sold off to the highest bidder.
And let them stand as a monument to a Premier League that finally – belatedly? – took action, to a process that maintained its independence, to an institution that, at no little risk to its own wellbeing – a risk that has not gone away – in the end preferred justice and fairness and decency over grubby deals with the rich and powerful.
Let the years without a champion stand for ever vacant, both as a rebuke and as a tribute. Sometimes, emptiness can be the most eloquent statement of all.