Steven Gerrard will not accept a title in a way he never wanted to win one.
Asked on The Overlap whether he would take a retroactive Premier League medal should Manchester City be stripped of titles after the independent commission’s guilty verdict, the Liverpool captain who finished runner-up to City in 2013-14 went the other way.
“I’m not someone who’s going to sit here and say I would accept a Premier League medal or I want one that they’ve got.”
The point for him sits with everyone else.
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“What about the memories they’ve taken away from not just possibly me and the team that I played in, but over that period of nine or 10 years?”
‘Let them suffer’ for the whole decade
Gerrard wants hard sanctions, just not relegation.
“Let them suffer, just as they made everyone else suffer over those nine, ten years.”
Sending City down to the Championship, he argued, would punish the clubs trying to come up more than it punishes City, who would be favorites to bounce straight back. His preference is layered sanctions kept on City alone.
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“I think it needs to be a transfer ban, a points [deduction] over a period of time and make them suffer like they’ve made everyone suffer over the nine, ten years that they’ve done it,” Gerrard said.
An asterisk, he added, is the floor.
“There needs to be a star throughout all the years of their achievements.”
The commission’s finding
The independent commission found City guilty on every charge barring one of the 115 brought by the Premier League in February 2023, with the alleged breaches spanning nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18. The Premier League’s chief executive Richard Masters called the ruling “the most significant in Premier League history.” The club denies the accusations and has pledged to appeal.
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The medals line was the striking part of what Gerrard said. He has been asked for a decade about the title Liverpool never won, and he did not use the moment to reopen the 2013-14 race.
“I’ve come to terms with the fact that I never won the Premier League, that I was short in that department in terms of winning it.”
He turned the lens on City instead.
“The City ex-players, current players and the City owners, everyone connected with City, have got to think about the memories that they potentially have stolen from everyone else.”
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Manchester City maintain their innocence. No date has been set for the appeal hearing, and the sanctions phase of the case has not yet concluded.
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