Manchester City's fans haven't earned sympathy for how they've carried themselves since the club was found guilty. An independent commission found City guilty of almost all of the 115 charges it faced. Premier League chief executive Richard Masters said the verdict "details how the club systematically broke Premier League rules for nearly a decade." The schemes inflated the club's revenues and cut its costs by more than £900 million, partly through "sham" sponsorship deals topped up with money from owner Sheikh Mansour's own company.
On their first trip since, the loudest part of the fanbase turned up waving inflatable bananas. By one account, some wore masks of the owner's face.
The bananas have a real history worth respecting. They go back to the late 1980s, City's lower-league years, after a fan nicknamed striker Imre Varadi "Imre Banana" and somebody brought an inflatable one to a game. Genuine gallows humour from a club that spent years as a punchline. Reviving it is a nod to who City used to be, and on any normal weekend it would be a lovely bit of self-aware nostalgia.
This was not a normal weekend. Pointing at a billion-pound deception and treating it like a retro singalong sends a message: we don't accept the finding, and we'll mock anyone who does.
The online version is worse. A prominent City account called the whole thing "the biggest sham." They meant the rule itself, as though "an owner putting his own money into his club to win titles is a crime." As a defence, it falls apart immediately. The commission found the club ran ownership money through sponsorship deals to get around rules City itself agreed to. That is the cheating. Pretending otherwise is just choosing not to look.
The people who ran the schemes stayed home. Those above chief executive Ferran Soriano didn't come. Soriano sat in the away end and called it defiance. Mansour, whose company funded the top-ups, watched a fanbase wear his face and soak up the abuse on his behalf. The owners built the mess. The supporters volunteered to absorb the boos for it.
The strongest defence of City's fans is that any fanbase would do the same, that singling out City is self-righteous. Plenty of us would defend our club long past the point of sense. Loyalty that refuses to admit a near-decade of cheating becomes unpaid work for a state-backed ownership group.
The City fan who deserves sympathy grew up at Maine Road, sat through the lower-league years, and just wants the club to still be standing when the sanctions land. He never signed a sham contract. He's the one who'll pay for it.
On the pitch, none of this cost them a thing. City beat ten-man Liverpool 3-0 after Ryan Gravenberch was sent off, Erling Haaland striking just over two and a half minutes later, with Doku and Cherki finishing the job, a win that put City back top of the Premier League through October 11. That scoreline let everyone package the day as a show of defiance. It wasn't really tested, though. Anfield was a hostile away end on a result that went City's way. The Champions League hasn't delivered its own version of this yet. That arrives with PSG at the Etihad on Wednesday, a home crowd, a far friendlier room. The defiance will sound different when nobody in the stands is booing back.
None of this is finished. City are appealing, and no outcome is expected before December or January at the earliest. They've earned that right. A fanbase that treats a guilty verdict as a punchline, and aims its fury at everyone except the club found to have cheated, hasn't earned much sympathy. The owners did this. The least the supporters could do is stop offering themselves up as the human shield.
