Could history be rewritten? Guardiola, Man City and the 115 charges

If City are cleared of the more serious charges, Guardiola's legacy will be viewed as secure. But if the club is found to have broken financial rules, many will conclude that the wrongdoing helped City to spend more money on better players, and to lay the foundations which Guardiola then built on to achieve so much success, culminating in the Treble triumph of 2023. In 2024, Jose Mourinho pointedly insisted he won his three Premier League titles with Chelsea "fairly and cleanly", after being asked about Guardiola making a six-finger gesture after a match, signifying the haul of titles he had won. Mourinho also joked that he might still be retrospectively awarded a Premier League winners' medal, if City ended up having titles stripped from them as punishment. As manager of Manchester United , Mourinho had finished second to City in the 2017-18 season. If City were to be found guilty, there would likely be plenty of references by rival fans to the titles that Guardiola won by just one point (over Liverpool in both 2019 and 2022) and two points (over Arsenal in 2024). Of course, if City were found guilty, it would be impossible to know if Guardiola would have won less - and how much less - if the club had adhered to the rules. But such is the scale and seriousness of the charges, in such an event, critics will inevitably argue that his many accomplishments are tainted, even those that occurred after the period the case relates to. …