The people who built Manchester City's edge weren't out on the pitch. They were signing contracts that said one thing and paid another. So when Andy Robertson says City's players are "not to blame," he lands somewhere near the truth, even if he got there with his eyes closed.
On 28 September 2026 the Premier League announced that an independent commission had found Manchester City guilty of all 80 charges relating to financial wrongdoing, and 34 of 35 charges for failing to cooperate with its investigation. The mechanism was sham contracts: sponsors were billed less than the paperwork claimed, and the club's owners quietly covered the difference, inflating revenue by around £900m over the years in question. City were charged in February 2023 with 115 breaches spanning 2009 to 2018. The club says it's innocent and will appeal. No punishment has been decided yet.
There's no footballer anywhere in that account. A left-back doesn't structure a sponsorship deal. A striker doesn't route money through a scheme built to make the books look fatter than they are. This was accountancy, done by executives and signed off by an ownership group with a state behind it.
On the question everyone's fighting about, the players profited from a system they didn't design. They showed up, trained, and played well enough to win. No one has produced a shred of evidence that a single City player sat in a room arranging a fake invoice.
The complicity line, that anyone who cashed those wages must have known where the advantage came from, is seductive and empty. Everyone in football suspected City were spending oddly, but suspicion isn't proof of fraud. You don't get charged for playing well at a rich club, and you don't get to pour a boardroom's guilt over whoever happened to pull on the shirt. The strongest version of the opposing case still runs into the same wall: without proof a player personally knew about or arranged a specific illicit payment, hanging a club-level fraud on him just punishes him for being employed there.
Robertson's defence is weak even though his conclusion is right. He reached it without bothering to look. "I haven't actually seen the news," he said, adding, "I don't know too much about the charges and stuff like that." Then he defended the club anyway: the players "showed they were good enough on the pitch," and "they had an incredible team, one that I loved battling against."
Nobody charged City over the football. They were charged over the money behind it. Telling us the squad was brilliant is like answering a fraud case by praising the defendant's handwriting. True, and it has nothing to do with the crime.
His former Liverpool manager, Jürgen Klopp, said he'd throw a party if City had trophies stripped. Robertson shrugged and talked about how much he enjoyed the games. Both are gut reactions, but only one of them bothered to find out what actually happened first.
Stop wasting the anger on the men who kicked the ball. If you want someone to answer for £900m of invented revenue, go find the people who invented it.
