Teenage tears show it’s fans that suffer, but punishing Manchester City might be impossible

My mum still reminds me of the day I cried in front of the telly.

Knelt on the floor unable to hold in the big, snotty sobs. Football can do that to you, but this time Swindon weren’t even playing.

It was June 7, 1990 and my beloved team, the centre of my teenage universe, had just been relegated two divisions for financial irregularities.

Just ten days earlier I’d been at Wembley to watch them win promotion to the top flight for the first time in the club’s history.

Now, a Football League disciplinary panel had consigned us to life in the third tier. One glorious step forward, followed quickly by two gut-wrenching steps back.

If there is such a thing as PTSD for football fans I got a bit of it on Friday when reports that Manchester City have been found guilty in 114 of 115 alleged breaches of financial rules broke. The anger, the embarrassment, the sense of injustice of it all. The feeling that ‘they’ were out to get ‘us’.

The suspicion that other teams were doing and had done just the same but our crime was being the small club that got caught. The sense that whatever happens to our club, its owners and their players, the ones who really cannot avoid the suffering are the blameless supporters.

Despite that sorry experience I’m still struggling to quantify what might prove a suitable punishment if City are indeed found guilty following any appeal. Stripping them of titles doesn’t strip them of the moment – and giving the titles to someone else represents a hollow, haunted victory if ever there was one.

A huge financial penalty for an ownership group with the deepest of pockets seems futile. A demotion or two seems, if not perfect, then something approaching appropriate. But, again, it doesn’t change the past, City will always have Aguero, Istanbul and four-in-a-row, whatever the history books say.

Setting aside the yawning chasm between the alleged scale of offending at Swindon – who admitted 36 charges of breaching league rules, 35 relating to illegal payments to players – and Manchester City, and the sums involved, the biggest difference in the two cases is that City’s achievements are there in the collective football memory, the lives of supporters and the timeless folklore of the club.

For Swindon, reinstated one division on appeal, the punishment became a sliding-doors moment. What if we’d been a first division club in 1990 and hung on for the launch of the Premier League in 1992? Instead, we went up in 1993, an older team thrust into an already changing footballing world, making the task much harder.

Noel Gallagher, the go-to City fan in moments of triumph or despair, put it most eloquently last week when asked if their achievements would now be tainted forever. ‘I suppose in the eyes of everybody else in England it would,’ he said. ‘But I know what I saw and I know what I felt.’

My tears proved more than justified – shellshocked Swindon fans never got to see, to feel and to taste what might have been. But City supporters already have and that means finding a punishment that fits the crime may prove impossible.

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