Man City Were Found Guilty on Every Serious Charge. Their Manager Says the Titles Aren’t Tainted.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2026 — Let’s rewind the tape to the press room at the City Football Academy on Friday morning. Enzo Maresca walked in knowing exactly what was coming. For three days, every football show in England has been a courtroom replay: Manchester City, found guilty of all charges related to serious breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules across nine seasons, from 2009/10 to 2017/18 — plus the majority of the non-cooperation charges. Sham contracts. A disguised funding scheme worth more than £900 million. And now, finally, the manager — hired in June to replace Pep Guardiola — was going to say something about it. Forty-eight hours before the biggest game of the season, the whole country leaned in.

And oh, did he say something. “I trust the club completely because I trust the people and this is also the reason why I joined,” Maresca said. “There is not another club in the world where I would like to be. I am very happy to be here. I am very proud.” On the appeal itself, he kept it tight: “There is a process ongoing, and in this moment I completely trust the club.” And when asked whether he had spoken with chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak about the verdict, the answer came with a grin you could hear: “I spoke with the club, for sure. We all trust. The right moment to speak about that is when we win that appeal.” When we win. Not if — when. A guilty verdict lands on every serious charge, and the response is a press conference that sounds like a wedding toast. This is the part of the movie where the defendant’s family gathers on the courthouse steps to tell the cameras what a good boy he is.

Then came the two questions that actually mattered. The Times asked the sharpest one: Maresca replaced Guardiola in the summer — the former Chelsea manager returning to the club where he’d served as Guardiola’s assistant during the treble season. Would he still have taken the job, they asked, if the guilty verdict had landed before his appointment? “100 per cent,” Maresca answered. No pause, no caveat. Then the one everyone’s been arguing about in group chats all week: are City’s titles — including the 2023 treble that Maresca himself helped win from the dugout — tainted now? “Absolutely not,” he said. “The last time I was here was the treble season, I know the effort from the players, from the club, from the manager in that time, Pep, so I know the effort that was needed to make that achievement.” He knows the effort. Nobody ever disputed the effort, Enzo. The commission disputed the accounting. That’s like getting caught with the answers written on your arm and arguing you still studied really hard.

All of this — the trust, the defiance, the smiling — gets its first real examination on Sunday, at Anfield, against an unbeaten Liverpool. Maresca was asked if he was concerned. “I am always concerned,” he said. “I know Anfield is a nice pitch and the reason I came to this club is for this kind of game… The environment at Anfield is nice, and it will probably be even worse because of this situation.” He’s not wrong. The Kop has never needed much encouragement, and a guilty verdict is premium fuel. Asked whether his players can handle that kind of heat, he reached for Enzo Fernández: “He played in Argentina. Almost every game [there] is like going to Anfield, so it is not a problem.” And the mood inside the building? “The noise is there but the players are relaxed. They are just thinking about how they will beat Liverpool.” Meanwhile Jose Mourinho, asked about the case, delivered the only honest press conference of the week, joking that he and City’s lawyers “are both in our 60s and we’ll need to be lucky enough to still be around when the final verdict arrives.” When the lawyers need a pension plan to see it through, you know the process is working exactly as designed.

The verdict

And here’s the moral clarity, since somebody has to say it: the joke is not on the supporters, and it is not on the players. The fans paid for tickets, not the accounting. Haaland is out here telling everyone to smile through it, which is either leadership or Stockholm syndrome with better cheekbones. No — the joke is a billion-pound institution that cooked its books for nine seasons, got convicted on the serious charges, and rolled out the new manager to stand in front of the cameras and say everything was legit all along. Guilty on the charges, innocent in the press room. That is not a defense strategy. That is a vibe. And vibes, historically, do not win appeals. Our verdict explainer has the full breakdown of what was proven and what happens next — and our sports desk has Sunday’s trip to Anfield, which just became the most hostile away day in football.