Man City faces hostile Anfield return after financial charges verdict

Manchester City will walk into Anfield on Sunday carrying the weight of a guilty verdict that has upended English football. An independent panel found the club guilty on more than 100 counts of financial rule-breaking spanning from 2009 to 2018. This is the largest scandal in Premier League history, and the timing of City's first match since the verdict—against Liverpool, one of the clubs most damaged by the years in question—reads almost like deliberate narrative cruelty.

Liverpool's supporters have every reason to be furious. Under Jurgen Klopp, the Reds finished second to City by a single point in both the 2018-19 and 2021-22 seasons. Those were extraordinary title races, the kind that pushed both teams to historic point totals and elevated the standard of play across the league. Yet if City's financial breaches gave them an unfair advantage during those campaigns, Liverpool's near-misses may have cost them titles they earned on the pitch. There is a growing belief among rival clubs that any titles City are stripped of should be awarded to the runners-up or finalists from those seasons. For Liverpool, however, the two closest calls came after 2018, outside the investigation window. But there is one title that sits differently in the Anfield memory: the 2013-14 season, when Liverpool finished second to City by two points under Brendan Rodgers. Steven Gerrard's slip against Chelsea in that campaign has lived in infamy for over a decade. A retrospective award of that title would finally give Gerrard, now a club legend, a Premier League winner's medal—and would end Liverpool's wait for a top-flight title since 1990.

The anger at Anfield will be palpable. Former Manchester United captain Gary Neville predicted the reception would be unlike anything City has experienced there. He spoke of banners, chanting, a day that would be brutal. The current City players and staff will absorb this hostility despite most of them having nothing to do with the breaches. Phil Foden, one of City's few remaining players from the investigation period, is suspended for the match. Manager Enzo Maresca only arrived in June; he was a youth-team coach at City in 2020-21 and an assistant to Pep Guardiola in 2022-23, but he had no role during the years under investigation. The irony is sharp: those who built the advantage are largely gone, and those who remain must answer for it.

City has protested its innocence and filed an appeal. The club maintains it did not breach the rules as charged. Yet the independent panel's verdict stands for now, and the backlash will follow City through the season regardless of what happens in the appeals process. The potential consequences are severe—a massive points deduction or even expulsion from the Premier League. City currently leads the league with five wins from five games, all played while the accusations hung over them. Now that the guilty verdict has landed, the real test begins: how will the team perform under this cloud, and how will their own supporters respond when the future of their club is genuinely uncertain?

What unfolds at Anfield will be the first real measure of the scandal's weight on the pitch. The football will matter, but so will the atmosphere, the banners, the chants—the collective voice of a rival fanbase that believes it was cheated. City will have to play through it, and Liverpool will have to decide what justice looks like when the damage is already done.