Malachy Clerkin: Pep Guardiola said Manchester City destroyed football â he didnât know how right he was
There is no sanction that will feel satisfactory for their cheating, no way of undoing what the serial Premier League champions have done
Sun Oct 04 2026 - 06:00
Thereâs a Pep Guardiola speech that bubbles up every once in a while on the internet, like the gristly foam on the surface of a boiling ham. Taken from one of the Amazon glaze job documentaries, itâs always a good reminder that youâre spending more time than you should in the For You wastelands of X. Sort of like Robin Williamâs gag about cocaine being Godâs way of telling you you make too much money, just with added Bernardo Silva.
Itâs from the end of the 2017/18 season, Guardiolaâs second at Manchester City, their first league title won under him. Except they didnât just win it; they swallowed it in one gulp. They put up 100 points; they set or equalled records for consecutive wins (18), consecutive away wins (11), and consecutive wins in all competitions (20). They scored 106 goals, 22 more than the next-highest. They finished with a goal difference of +79, a full 33 better than the next best.
It was a Pantera season, a vulgar display of power. And in keeping with the general tone of muscular, macho bravado, Guardiolaâs speech to his players, captured by the Amazon cameras, leans into the language of obliteration. The supposed intent of it is to deflect praise from himself on to them, but thereâs a serious bang of the humblebrag off it too.
âCan you imagine a ball boy?â Pep begins. âIn his own country, a small country. Going to the academy when heâs 13 years old. And after playing in the first team, his own team, in his heart, who stayed there a lot of years and after became the manager â 37 years old and in four years he destroyed football.
âItâs me. I had the privilege to live that. I destroyed football like you destroyed the Premier League. Like you destroyed the Premier League this season.â
Sheesh! Talk about saying the quiet part out loud. Just to put a bit of context around the season Guardiola is eulogising here, City went into it off the back of a summer window in which they bought Ederson, Kyle Walker, Bernard Mendy and Bernardo Silva. They added Aymeric Laporte in January. This was on top of the previous season where they bought John Stones, Leroy SanĂŠ, Ilkay GĂźndoÄan and Gabriel Jesus. Of those nine players, six went on to feature in at least one PFA Team of the Year over the next decade.
They didnât come cheap either. Ederson cost a world record fee for a goalkeeper. Stones was the worldâs most expensive defender until they bought Walker, who held the tag for four months until being passed by Laporte. Silva played 460 games for City, Ederson played 372, Walker 317. Stones, GĂźndoÄan and Jesus all played at least 200 matches; Laporte played 180. The money did what it was supposed to. It built Guardiolaâs best-ever team.
We know now that it was all a con job. The Premier League confirmed on Tuesday that City had been found guilty of inflating their sponsorship totals for a decade leading up to that season, that they filed inaccurate accounts to hide the true state of their finances and that they arranged sham contracts with commercial partners. This was worth almost ÂŁ900 million to them over the period that was investigated. City have stated their innocence and are appealing.
In the forest of numbers, itâs useful to try and find a clearing where we can give ourselves room for a better look. Helpfully, the report breaks down Cityâs connivance on a season-by-season basis. And so we are able to see that in 2017/18, the club recorded ÂŁ145.73m (âŹ166.34 million) in commercial revenue, with only ÂŁ11 million (âŹ12.56 million) paid by actual sponsors. That means Cityâs owners put up ÂŁ134.73 million (âŹ158.38 million) in disguised funding for that season, against the rules.
Cut to Guardiola standing in front of a white screen in a Holiday Inn meeting room in 2018, all grave tones and manly gesticulation, giving his players their due for destroying the Premier League. âThis belongs to you,â he says. âThe football, guys, belongs to you. It doesnât belong to me. It belongs to you.â
It belongs to them all now. Guardiola presumably didnât mean to be quite so on the nose with all his talk about destroying football and so on, but look where it has all led to. Nobody has been able to give a proper sense of where this is going to end up for City, but regardless of what form their punishment ultimately takes, football has been destroyed here.
Not just Premier League football, either. English football as a whole is going to have to wrestle with what to do with them over the rest of the decade. The past 15 years of European football is a tainted, asterisked thing too. Thereâs no satisfying way to sanction them, no undoing what theyâve done. You canât take the eggs back out of the cake once itâs baked.
The cometâs tail is going to be longer than we can even imagine here. Cityâs rapacious, lawless tentacles have been attached to every corner of the elite game throughout the Abu Dhabi adventure and so their name is blackened permanently for future generations. They were one of the greatest club teams the game has ever known, playing football that reinvented an entire sport.
But who even cares about that now?