Pulis: City must adopt siege mentality amid financial charges

Tony Pulis knows what it feels like to be cornered. As a manager who built his reputation on defying expectations, he sees in Manchester City's current predicament not a death sentence but an opportunity—if the club has the nerve to seize it.

City has been found guilty of breaking Premier League financial rules, and the fallout has consumed the sport's conversation. The allegations pile up relentlessly. Critics circle from every direction. The media frenzy shows no sign of abating. Yet despite all of this, City has maintained its position: the club denies the charges and is prepared to defend itself. Now, with the season underway and a trip to Anfield looming on Sunday, manager Enzo Maresca faces a squad arriving from international duty and stepping directly into an off-field battle that threatens to overshadow everything they do on the pitch.

Pulis's advice is stark and unambiguous. If he were in Maresca's position, he would gather his players and deliver a single message: no one will like you, and you must not care. This is not defiance for its own sake. It is clarity. The players themselves have done nothing wrong. They are not accused of breaking any rules. But they will be treated as though they are guilty by supporters at every away ground they visit. The hostile reception is coming. The question is how City responds.

Maresca's first job, Pulis argues, is to reassure the squad that the club stands firm—that it will not retreat, will not apologize for something it denies, and will protect both its players and its supporters. Once that foundation is laid, everything else becomes simple: focus on winning. No distractions. No excuses rooted in what happens off the pitch. The manager's word on the matter is final. This is what a siege mentality means in practice—not isolation, but unity of purpose.

But Pulis does not stop there. He uses this moment to interrogate the rules themselves. Financial Fair Play regulations have been part of football governance for years, yet clubs continue to breach them. Some have been caught and punished. Others, Pulis suspects, have not. The question he poses is uncomfortable: are the current rules actually fit for purpose, or are they simply driving clubs toward loopholes and workarounds?

The landscape of modern football has shifted fundamentally. Billion-pound transfer windows are routine. Individual players sell for more than £100 million. Massive corporations, billionaires, and even nation-states now own clubs and want to invest heavily in them—but the rules prevent it. Meanwhile, smaller academies are systematically stripped of their best young talent by larger clubs, who pay minimal compensation fees, develop the players, and sell them for enormous profits. There is no Financial Fair Play rule governing that transaction.

Pulis points to the few remaining examples of local ownership: Tony Bloom at Brighton, Matthew Benham at Brentford, the Coates family at Stoke City, Steve Gibson at Middlesbrough. These are the exceptions. They have succeeded by being smart, by making shrewd decisions without the financial firepower of the traditional giants. Brighton, Bournemouth, and Brentford have all achieved remarkable things through intelligence and careful management. Yet the rules, as currently constructed, do not reward this approach equally. They do not create a level playing field for the smart operators at clubs without deep pockets or storied histories.

The real question, then, is not whether City broke the rules. It is whether the rules themselves are adequate for the game as it actually exists. Do they need to be reformed? Or will reform simply push clubs toward more sophisticated methods of circumventing them? The answers matter not just for Manchester City, but for every club trying to compete in a sport where the money has become extraordinary and the power imbalance between the haves and have-nots grows wider each year.