Roy Keane is right that Manchester City's titles are dirty. He's aiming at the wrong people.
"If I was a player, I'd be 100% sticking those medals in the bin," Keane said on ITV. "Of course you would, it's cheating." And: "They won it on the pitch because cheating was going on." On the second point he's dead on. On the first, the image is satisfying and beside the point. A player throwing a medal in a bin changes nothing. The men who should be losing sleep this week never had to win a match in their lives.
Start with what an independent commission actually found: City guilty on 114 of the 115 charges, covering nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18. The league says the club "filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from its auditors and football regulators," to the tune of close to £900m. The BBC reported "sham contracts" with commercial partners to disguise secret funding of more than £830m. Richard Masters said City "systematically broke Premier League rules for nearly a decade." That's the machine that built the squad that won three Premier League titles, the FA Cup, three League Cups and a Community Shield in that window.
The "won it on the pitch" defence doesn't survive that, and it's the last thing City's sympathisers have left. Yes, the football was real. Aguero's stoppage-time winner against QPR in 2011-12, the one that pipped United on goal difference, actually happened. Nobody's pretending the ball didn't go in. The team lining up to score those goals was assembled with money the rest of the league was told it couldn't spend. You don't get to bring a fortune the rulebook forbids, buy the best players on earth with it, and then claim the results are clean because your feet worked properly on the day. Every rival who stayed inside the limits was competing with one hand tied. That's what "cheating going on" means.
Now, the players. Keane's own position here is more honest than the mob's. Jamie Carragher said it plainly: "The players were told everything was fine, they would never get done for anything. What the hierarchy are coming out with now, they're just gaslighting." He's right. A footballer doesn't audit the club's commercial deals. He signs, he trains, he plays. Rodri defending his own achievements isn't a crime; it's what any human being does when someone tries to erase the best years of his career over paperwork he never saw. Keane himself admitted that if it were his United medals on the line, he'd be "absolutely devastated." He should have stopped there.
Micah Richards, who came through City from the age of 14 and says he'd "die for that club," called the reports "troubling" and admitted he felt "absolutely devastated" reading the word "sham." Even he lands on "I think the titles should be taken off their list." Feeling torn about the fans and the academy kids doesn't stop the trophies being tainted.
The executives who signed off the scheme and the ownership that funded it are the ones responsible, and they've had the nerve to insult everyone's intelligence since getting caught. Ferran Soriano stood in front of staff and called the whole thing a "Premier League conspiracy theory." The club's statement insists it is "innocent" and promises to be "relentless." That's an organisation that got caught and decided contempt was the play.
City have until Friday to appeal, and the punishment itself sits with a separate hearing that hasn't happened yet. Whatever comes, a fine, a points deduction, something heavier, it has to land on the people who built this, not on a bin full of medals belonging to players who were lied to. Carragher wants the owners removed from the game entirely. That's the right target. Take the medals off the men who never earned them.
