If there were any doubt beforehand, events of the past week have made clear that the great pivot point of English football history in the 21st century is and perhaps always will be the takeover of Manchester City by Abu Dhabi United Group. With the wealth of a nation state at their back, a club that had not won a major honor since the 1970s won eight Premier League titles in 12 years in addition to a Champions League and a host of domestic cups. The fury of so many clubs in the Premier League and beyond after news of their financial malfeasance first broke comes from none of them having the answer to the question they are all asking themselves.
How different might the last 18 years have been if all of our number had been playing by the rules? For some clubs, the likes of Stoke City and Watford, there are those cup finals that feel like once-in-a-generation moments. For others, there are questions over the lost revenue of Champions League qualification or the commercial deals that may have added tens of millions more to the coffers.
How different might the future have been for some teams if the City takeover had never happened? To understand that question, we need to survey the landscape at the end of the 2007-08 season. You would do well to notice Manchester City on the table, ninth on 55 points, the big spending under a controversial new owner, deposed Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, having really only delivered an upper midtable finish off the back of £30 million of spending designed to drag them out of the lower midtable.
City were where they had been since their promotion in 2002, safe but unremarkably so. An inner circle had been established in the Premier League, it was just quite a bit tighter than it is now. The Big Six that might be ended when Manchester City face their sanctions was a quartet, Roman Abramovich's Chelsea and the three most successful clubs in English league history: Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal.
Since the Russian takeover at Stamford Bridge five years earlier, these teams had claimed positions first to fourth on all but one occasion. They had a financial muscle that few others in the league could match. There were those who were trying, however.
Everton had been the one side to break the Big Four stranglehold on the Champions League places, albeit in the year that Liverpool got entry anyway as defending champions. There are similarities between the Toffees and City, both clubs with sizeable fanbases and rich history who could never quite avoid being compared to their more illustrious neighbors, in this case Liverpool. The consistency with which David Moyes delivered fifth or sixth without anything like the riches of those above him.
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