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Enzo Maresca has defended his Manchester City players after they were accused of over-celebrating victory against Liverpool when they had been found guilty of 114 charges of breaching Premier League financial rules by saying they did nothing wrong.
City won their first match since an independent commission ruled they had benefited from more than £900m in disguised funding and after a verdict said they had sham sponsorship contracts.
Erling Haaland, Jeremy Doku and Rayan Cherki scored second-half goals at Anfield on Sunday and, while pundits and opposition supporters found fault with City for their wild celebrations on the pitch and in the dressing room, Maresca and captain Ruben Dias believed they have nothing to say sorry for.
“Criticised for what? We won 0-3 Anfield. What do you want us to do?” asked the Italian. “And even if it was 0-1, it was exactly the same. We work every day to win games. It’s the only thing, again, that we can think, we can be focused.
“The rest is just things from outside that we need to deal with. But we were so, so, so happy inside the pitch, and you cannot imagine inside the changing room.”
Defender Dias was unrepentant, too, adding: “I very much stand by the manager’s words as well. It’s a win at Anfield. In whatever circumstance, so be it now, maybe earlier in the season, so be it later in the season, anytime, I will, I think we will enjoy it just as much and we will celebrate. And it will obviously be a show of how much it means to us.”
Dias, the Manchester City captain, also insisted that the squad all trust the club hierarchy despite perhaps facing relegation or expulsion from the Premier League after the guilty verdict.
City are appealing against the verdict of an independent commission, who ruled they had more than £900m of disguised funding.
Dias became the first member of Enzo Maresca’s team to directly address the guilty verdict but was adamant he remained calm and that the City players will not be distracted by the potential penalties or by being called cheats by the Liverpool crowd in Sunday’s win at Anfield.
The defender said: “I feel like when you build yourself as a player, you build yourself against any kind of noise. So be it the word you just described, so be it any other kind.
“Personally, and I really feel like I speak for the whole group, we’re very calm. We trust the club, we’re very calm and we’re very focused on enjoying football.
“We know the team we’ve got, we want to make the most out of it, we want to win and that’s the only thing in our minds. If there’s more or less noise or whatever the reason the noise is, at the end of the day, it’s all the same. Same as before, because people don’t love us winning and we love to win.”