POCHETTINO
Pochettino named what we lived through
Pochettino was our manager through the entire window the Premier League was investigating. So when he says on Monday that we lived through a period of deception, that is not punditry. That is the man who took us to a Champions League final on a budget City was outspending by a hundred million a year saying the obvious out loud. We have been told for years not to say it. Pochettino just did.
What he actually said on Monday
The quote is short and he did not soften it. Speaking before the United States played Chile in a friendly, Pochettino was asked about the reports that Manchester City had been found guilty of almost all of the 115 charges brought against the club for alleged financial breaches between 2009 and 2018. He did not pivot to neutrality. He answered.
If it is true that the 114 rules were broken, then we lived through a period of deception, he said. And then the line that I am going to remember longer than any result we have taken this season: ultimately a lot of clubs followed the rules and others didn't.
The Premier League has not officially confirmed the verdict. Several outlets reported on Monday that an independent commission had passed it down. City's chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak was out on Saturday protesting innocence. None of that changes what Pochettino just did, because the part he was commenting on is not the legal finding. The part he was commenting on is the decade.
Why this lands different coming from him
It lands different because Pochettino was our manager from 2014 to 2019. He took us to second in 2016-17 and third in 2017-18. He took us to a Champions League final in 2019. He did it with a wage bill that was a fraction of what City, Chelsea and Manchester United were running. He did it without a sugar daddy, without a sovereign wealth fund, without the kind of sporting project that the rules of the league were apparently written to make tolerable.
He also, earlier this month, called for Chelsea to be stripped of the 2016-17 Premier League title for the seventy-four breaches of FA regulations that the matter concerned. Chelsea finished seven points ahead of us that season. The punishment Chelsea eventually received, on appeal, was a ten million pound fine and a suspended two-window transfer ban. The title stayed.
So Pochettino has form. He has the receipts. And on Monday he chose to use them in public, in a press conference about a United States friendly, when nobody forced him to. He could have stayed on the basketball side of the line. He did not. He said the word deception, on the record, in front of microphones, and pointed it at a decade we have been told to move on from.
What we were doing while all of this was happening
This is the part that is not in anyone else's summary. While the Premier League was supposedly policing the rules between 2009 and 2018, we were doing this. We hired a young Argentine manager off a Southampton team that had finished above us. We gave him a sporting director who knew what he was doing. We bought Dele Alli for five million. We bought Harry Kane's minutes carefully. We reached third in 2015-16, the season Leicester won the league, and only ended up 2.1 goals worse off across the whole campaign. We pushed Chelsea all the way in 2016-17 and took it to the last day. We went to Wembley and won it in the rain. We finished third in 2017-18, behind a City side we are now told was buying its way through the rules. We took that same City side to four points across the two league games that season. And in 2018-19, after the window closed, after the rules were already in the dock, we walked out at the Wanda Metropolitano and competed in a Champions League final, and lost to a Liverpool side that was allowed to spend what Liverpool spent.
That is what a club that follows the rules does. Pochettino knows it because he built it. The investigation was about what the other lot did with the head start the supposed policing never policed. We were never the investigation. We were the receipt.
We did not move on. We have been told to move on. There is a difference. I have carried the receipts of this era through every result we have taken since 2019. I am not letting anyone tell me that carrying the receipts was the problem. Pochettino just confirmed that the receipts were the point.