Manchester City walked out of Anfield on Sunday with their most convincing performance of the season and a second question that would not go away. The 3-0 win was flawless. The broader picture, barely two weeks after an independent commission found the club guilty on nearly all of 115 Premier League financial charges, is anything but.
Gary Neville, in the Sky Sports commentary box for the first time since the verdict landed, could not pretend otherwise.
“That’s the first Man City game I’ve done since the charges came out a few weeks ago. We should be able to praise the win without the thing in the back of your mind.”
He still praised it.
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“Anfield is a very difficult ground to win at. Those City players and staff are celebrating together,” he told viewers.
“You can’t take that performance away from Enzo Maresca and his players.”
Twenty second-half minutes that broke Liverpool
The game turned in the 60th minute, when Ryan Gravenberch was shown a second yellow card for a foul on Jeremy Doku. Neville called the decision “very soft” on the Sky Sports commentary.
Erling Haaland punished the dismissal within minutes. Doku and Rayan Cherki added two more inside a quarter of an hour. City had put three past a 10-man Liverpool before 80 minutes were up.
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The scoreline carried a weight of its own. It was Manchester City’s first Premier League win at Anfield in 23 years.
The 115-charge verdict and the appeal
City’s win was their first match since 29 September, when an independent commission ruled they had broken Premier League financial rules between 2009 and 2018, using what the panel called “sham” commercial contracts to disguise more than £900m of secret funding from the club’s Abu Dhabi owners.
Richard Masters, the Premier League chief executive, called the ruling “the most significant in Premier League history”. Possible sanctions range from fines to a points deduction to expulsion from the league. City deny wrongdoing and have lodged an appeal, which must be heard before any sanction is set.
Maresca’s answer to the noise
Maresca, who replaced Guardiola as manager this summer, framed the backdrop in simpler terms.
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“The noise will always be there so we need to learn how to deal with that but at the same time we need to try and bring our noise, which is win games which is what we have done today,” he said.
Asked earlier in the week how long the legal process might stretch, he had given a shorter answer.
“You cannot imagine how happy I am. I don’t care.”
City travel to meet Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League on Wednesday, with the appeal hearing still weeks away.
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