Sometimes you have to laugh at the sheer audacity of it all from Manchester City.
With 115 charges of breaching financial regulations still hanging over them, the Etihad Stadium outfit then had the gall to threaten legal action against the Premier League over the division’s rules regarding valuations of sponsorships in a scarcely believable move on Tuesday.
In light of that bombshell news, their chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak has complained about the ‘frustration’ of the on-field achievements of Pep Guardiola’s side not receiving the wider credit that he feels they deserve.
Last month, City became the first team in English football history to win four top-flight titles in a row, and the 48-year-old has taken a swipe at Liverpool and the other three clubs who previously stood on the brink of that feat.
FOLLOW Empire of the Kop on Instagram (@empireofthekop) HERE
As per Liverpool Echo, he said: “You know, we have to sometimes pause and contextualise. Since 1926, five teams have attempted to win four times in a row. Five teams. Huddersfield, Arsenal, you had Liverpool in the 80s and then you had Manchester United attempted it twice. None of them succeeded.
“In over 100 years of English football, never has any team been able to achieve four championships in a row. So once that sinks in, you start really appreciating the magnitude of what was achieved – the difficulty, the challenge, the tenacity required.”
Is Al-Mubarak actually serious here? Has he completely lost (or failed to gain in the first place) any ability to read the room?
Yes, Guardiola and the players responsible for the four consecutive league titles deserve credit for the efforts they put in on the pitch, but the spectre of those 115 charges and the utter brazenness of threatening legal action against the Premier League will invariably cloud that achievement.
If City are so certain of their innocence – something they’ve maintained all along – why did they feel the need to proclaim that they were discriminated against by the division’s Associated Party Transaction rules? Why are they spouting nonsense about the ‘tyranny of the majority‘ as if the team which has won six of the last seven league titles is viciously oppressed?
It’s laughable – contemptible, actually – that the club feel justified in behaving like this when they’re already in the dock over serious financial breaches, for which they’ve yet to be punished while the likes of Everton and Nottingham Forest couldn’t be hit with points deductions quickly enough.
Maybe those fans of other clubs who begged City to pip Liverpool to the Premier League title in 2019 and 2022 in order to ‘save football’ might be undertaking some revisionism about their stance, in light of how Al-Mubarak and co are conducting their business.
