Chunga Chewe

🚨 Sir Alex Ferguson on Manchester City being found guilty of breaching the Premier League’s financial rules: “I read the news and the first person I thought about was Carlos Tevez. Funny, isn’t it? After all these years. We wanted Carlos to stay. David Gill spoke to his representatives, we made our offer, they said we’d left it too late and eventually he went across Manchester. Then City put up that bloody ‘Welcome to Manchester’ poster. I remember looking at it and thinking, ‘They haven’t just signed one of our players. They want us to know they can.’ That was when I called them a small club with a small mentality. But there was something else happening around that period that people forget. Suddenly City could walk into conversations for players that previously would have been choosing between United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Madrid, Barcelona. I remember one summer hearing that Adebayor had agreed to join City, then apparently his people were still contacting us and Chelsea. I thought, ‘What a strange situation. Players who would rather be somewhere else are signing for City anyway.’ At the time, you simply accepted that they had enormous financial power. You competed with it. That’s football. But if you then discover years later that rules were being broken during the period in which you’re trying to compete with that financial power, you’re entitled to look back differently. Because people will say, ‘Ferguson was just angry because City became successful.’ No. I was angry before they were successful. I was standing there in 2009 watching them take Tevez, chase players everywhere and put his face on a building to celebrate taking him from us. Imagine telling me then, ‘Alex, one day the Premier League will investigate how all of this was being financed.’ I’d probably have pointed at the poster and said, ‘You might want to start there.’ And that’s the part people miss when discussing what happened afterwards. Once you change the financial strength of one club, you don’t only change that club. You change where players go. You change what everybody else has to pay. You change which manager gets which footballer. You change title races before the first ball is kicked. People can spend the next twenty years asking whether this player would’ve joined United, whether that player would’ve joined Chelsea, whether somebody else would’ve gone to Arsenal. Nobody can prove those alternate histories. But I know this much. When I was fighting them, I thought I was fighting Manchester City. Apparently I should’ve brought an accountant.”