Manchester City kick off at Anfield at 16:30 BST on Sunday with the best record in the Premier League and the heaviest cloud in its history over them. Five games, five wins, 15 points, top of the table — and a 40-page judgment, published on 29 September, that found the club guilty of almost all of the 115 financial charges it faced across the 2009-10 to 2017-18 seasons. The independent commission used the word “sham” eight times. It put the disguised funding at £830.69m of inflated sponsorship revenue, part of what the Premier League describes as more than £900m of inflated income and suppressed costs.
Enzo Maresca, appointed in June, has spent the week trying to shrink all of that to the size of a football match. “We completely understand the seriousness of the situation,” he said. “But it’s our duty and our job to try to control the noise.” Asked whether he would still have taken the job had he known the verdict was coming, he answered: “100%, yes.” Asked whether the medals he won as a City coach in the 2023 treble were tainted: “Absolutely not.”
A perfect record with an asterisk attached
On the pitch, City have been close to flawless. Erling Haaland leads the Golden Boot race with five goals and has now scored against all 25 Premier League opponents he has faced. City complete 83.0% of their passes under high-intensity pressure, the best rate in the division — a number that matters enormously against a Liverpool side that presses 48.9% of opposition touches in the final two-thirds, the most in the league. Win on Sunday and Maresca becomes only the fourth manager to take his first six Premier League games in charge, after Carlo Ancelotti, Pep Guardiola and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
The problem is what any of it is worth. Sanctions are a separate hearing, and no date has been set. City lodged their appeal on 1 October, which goes to a private Appeal Board. Until both processes conclude, every point City accumulate is provisional in the public mind, if not in the table. The range of available punishment is wide enough to be meaningless as a guide: a fine, a transfer embargo, a points deduction, in the most extreme readings expulsion. Everton’s six-point deduction and Nottingham Forest’s four in 2023-24 are the only live domestic precedents, and both concerned a single season’s profit and sustainability breach rather than nine years of accounts.
Anfield has been waiting for this
No crowd in England has a sharper sense of grievance. Liverpool finished second to City in 2013-14, 2018-19 and 2021-22 — twice by a single point, including the 97-point season of 2018-19 that remains the highest total never to win a title. Supporters who spent a decade being told their complaints were paranoia now have a commission’s findings to wave at the away end, and they will wave them. Merseyside Police have put enhanced security measures in place, with the 2018 attack on City’s team bus outside Anfield an explicit reference point.
This is also the first Premier League meeting between the two clubs without either Jurgen Klopp or Guardiola in a dugout since March 2015. Andoni Iraola’s Liverpool are sixth on nine points, unbeaten but drawing too often: two wins and three draws, with Alexander Isak (thigh) and Cody Gakpo (ankle) both ruled out. Haaland is fit, and scored here in February’s 2-1 City win after failing to do so in his first three Anfield visits. City have not won back-to-back league games at Anfield since 1953.
What comes next is not football
Iraola put the week better than anyone connected to City has managed. “The worst thing probably is the uncertainty,” he said, “that no one knows what’s going to happen.” That is the condition City now play in, and it is not a condition any English champion has faced before. CAS overturned UEFA’s two-year European ban in 2020 and cut the fine from €30m to €10m, largely on time-bar and unproven grounds — the exact ground City won on then has been taken away from them now. No Premier League title has ever been stripped; the question of whether three of them should be is no longer hypothetical.
Opta’s model makes City marginal favourites at 40.7% to Liverpool’s 34.6%, with the draw at 24.7%. The result will shape the title race, assuming there is a title race to shape. What Sunday cannot settle is the larger question hanging over the league leaders — whether a season played out while the punishment for a decade of rule-breaking is still being decided counts for anything at all.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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