So welcome Marc Guehi, signing number 21 for Manchester City since the jaw-dropping moment the Premier League slapped the club with 130 charges of breaching competition fair play regulations.
It feels quaint now, looking back at some of the headlines. You couldn’t help but feel like the tectonic plates of the Premier League were shifting in some way on that February morning back in 2023 but a line sticks out. “Business as usual” was what City sources said. But it’s been nothing of the sort.
When Guehi joins from Crystal Palace, he’ll join Antoine Semenyo, Tijani Reijnders, Rayan Ait-Nouri, Rayan Cherki, James Trafford, Gianluigi Donnarumma, Sverre Nypan, Marcus Bettinelli, Omar Marmoush, Nico Gonzalez, Abdukodir Khusanov, Vitor Reis, Savinho, Juma Bah, Ilkay Gundogan, Josko Gvardiol, Matheus Nunes, Jeremy Doku, Mateo Kovacic and Claudio Echeverri in a recruitment drive as aggressive and relentless as any club in Europe.
It’s a £711m spend in just shy of three years – £500m net – and that only skims the surface of what has been going on. Erling Haaland has renewed his contract for 10 years, Pep Guardiola for another two.
Man City’s five biggest signings since charges
- Josko Gvardiol £77.5m
- Antoine Semenyo £65m
- Omar Marmoush £65m
- Jeremy Doku £55.5m
- Matheus Nunes £53m
Work continues on the super-sizing of the stadium and to East Manchester’s skyline has been added a world-class indoor arena that will also help fund City’s ballooning commercial revenue. If there is a sense of impending doom at the Etihad, those in charge are hiding it very well.
City’s line has always been that the club are innocent of all charges, reassurances that have been relayed to every single prospective signing and Guardiola himself.
That conviction has been enough to persuade some of the best players in Europe to commit themselves to the club, adding to the surreal feeling that the independent commission into City’s alleged wrongdoing exists in some parallel universe.
It doesn’t, though. For all that City look like a club without a care in the world, they have no idea which way the verdict is going to go and no one else does either.
Despite the speculation that has surrounded the case since 2023, information around it is very scarce. We don’t even properly know what the club are accused of, much less what the specifics of the case are.
It’s a farcical situation that reflects horrendously on one of the most prestigious sporting competitions in the world. Supporters of rival clubs talk about unfairness and as City hoover up some of the brightest talents on the market, it will always feel like an asterisk next to their name.
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For City, too, there’s a weariness. There have been plenty of false alarms around the verdict being imminent, with football finance experts being put on red alert so many times that they’ve stopped taking the whispers seriously.
Guardiola himself said the decision was coming in Spring – only for another six months to pass with radio silence.
These things take time – we get that. The independent commission has had to wade through 250,000 documents. But even those familiar with this sort of thing think a year is a long time to come to a conclusion.
As Guehi steps through the door at City, certainty is what we all crave. Without it, the credibility of the Premier League is being eroded slowly.
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