City's players don't deserve a shred of sympathy. The ones feeling nervous now should have done the reading before they put pen to paper.
David Ornstein went on The Overlap's Stick to Football and discussed the fallout facing Manchester City's players. According to Ornstein, Manchester City have been found guilty on virtually all of the charges relating to breaches of Premier League financial regulations. The club is expected to appeal. Sanctions are undecided and the process is ongoing, so nobody knows yet how bad it gets.
None of this is new. The 115 charges have hung over the Etihad for years. Everyone in that dressing room could read a newspaper when they signed. Enzo Fernández arrived from Chelsea in a British-record-equalling £125m deal and said, in his own words, "I always dreamed of being at a Club as big as City." Erling Haaland put his name to a new ten-year contract. Rúben Dias signed a new two-year deal. Every one of those signatures went down with the cloud already overhead. They walked in knowing the money was enormous and knowing the uncertainty was baked into the deal. You don't get to cash that cheque and then ask the rest of football to feel sorry for you when the bill arrives.
A player could reasonably sign up for a points deduction or a fine and never imagine the nuclear option of being dropped through the divisions. Relegation to the lower leagues is a scale of punishment most footballers would never price in. Fine. But the principle doesn't move with the size of the penalty. They knew the risk was real and chose the club anyway. Thinking the risk was small doesn't mean they didn't know it existed. They gambled on the gamble being mild. That's still a gamble.
Spare me the romance about loyalty too. The suggestion that some might not fancy playing in a lower league shows exactly how shallow that bond runs. When Juventus went down to Serie B after Calciopoli, Gianluigi Buffon and other stars stayed and dragged the club back up. Nobody believes this squad does the same. The agents would be on the phone before the ink dried on any demotion. That's their right. It also shows the anxiety is mostly about personal careers.
One line from that podcast cuts deeper than any of this. "There are players who saw their careers change after not qualifying for the Champions League as a result of finishing behind Manchester City," Ornstein said. There's your sympathy, and it belongs to them. The players at other clubs who missed out on European nights, on the moves and the money that come with them, because of results that are now under a legal cloud. They never got a vote or a signing-on fee. They just got beaten.
The people who built this situation are the ones who built the club this way, and the players who joined chose to profit from it with their eyes wide open. Anxiety is the natural cost of that choice. Pay it.
