Manchester City: From Aguero's Magic to the Premier League's Biggest Scandal

It may seem unimaginable given the pain they are currently inflicting on English football, but there was a moment when Manchester City entranced the nation.

From the beginning, there were questions over the provenance of their funding and the warping effect that the Abu Dhabi billions would have on the Premier League, questions which have now been emphatically answered by the independent commission which found City guilty of 114 of 115 breaches of financial rules. It was, however, hard not to get swept up in the thrill of it all down the stretch of the 2011-12 season as this newly-enriched outfit battled the demons that they seemed to have carried over from Maine Road.

Before the takeover, before the spending, before the geopolitics, City's reputation had been that of a team who could never quite get out of their own way. This was the team who played out the last minutes of the 1995-96 season playing out the draw they thought would ensure their survival when they actually needed a winner. The only team to be relegated as reigning champions of England, there was a reason why their supporters had developed a sort of gallows humor, a belief their club was plagued with "City-itis." Eternally in the shadow of their more glamorous and successful rivals, their rallying cry was "we're not really here, just like the fans of the Invisible Man we're not really here".

Even with a nation state's wealth at their beck and call, City just couldn't get over their hang-ups. On the verge of a first league title in 44 years, they utterly fluffed their lines around April, dropping seven points from nine against Stoke, Sunderland and Arsenal. They roared back into the race with a win over Manchester United at the Etihad Stadium and then... they blew it again, 2-1 down to Queens Park Rangers as the clock ticked past 90.

You probably know the rest. Even now, as the misbegotten nature of that title and the seven that follows becomes clear, you would do well not to be swept up in the thrill of "Aguerooooo," the final day drama bettered only by Anfield 89. Not just for what it meant for those in sky blue, but the football community as a whole. Anyone who had even a passing interest in the game probably knows where they were when City turned it around. [In the unlikely event you're at all interested, revising for my final exams, briefly doing some actual revision when it seemed that Jamie Mackie had delivered the sucker punch, terrifying the rest of halls with my guttural cry of shock at the winner].

City fan or not, there was a thrill to this. Manchester United, the great bogeyman of the English game, had had their palace desecrated by their noisy neighbors. If you weren't a United fan you had probably spent the last two decades wishing and hoping that anyone but that lot would emerge victorious. That Sir Alex Ferguson and company were downed by a club they had viewed so dismissively for so long, how could that not leave some indelible mark on you, whatever your allegiance?

City's curious status among neutrals would linger long after the questions began over how they had propelled themselves into the monied elite. It is as if the footballing public instinctively understood what it would take such judicious work from the independent panel to prove: the success of Roberto Mancini, Manuel Pellegrini and Pep Guardiola was irredeemably compromised.

Jamie Carragher was right when he wrote in March that City had become the neutral's favorites in their title race with Arsenal. He just misidentified the root cause. The rest of football might have disliked the meat walls, the physicality, the defense that so infuriated their team, but really Guardiola had the swing voters because City weren't Arsenal. Any win for the former could be explained away: the playing field was never level so these titles were always bound to have an asterisk alongside them. The same was true when Jurgen Klopp attempted to keep pace with the Etihad juggernaut.

Of course no one was quietly rooting for City when it was a cup final against Watford or Crystal Palace, but when their success could be explained away, why wouldn't you? If your team can't win the league, why not the one you suspect is not playing by the rules?

This was not a team that provoked the same enmity as the United side they beat in such dramatic fashion 14 years ago. Realistically, most football fans who lived outside the Greater Manchester area were far more likely to have to put up with the crowing of a triumphant Arsenal or Liverpool fan than anyone with a Manchester City allegiance. Seeing them win was the most tolerable alternative to a footballing ecosystem that seems ever more incapable of delivering positive stories of genuine purity. Every fan of a traditional powerhouse could look at City hoisting a trophy and mutter to themselves, "at least it wasn't our biggest rivals."

And that mindset engendered by the great City sham is a corrosive force that will last into their post-punishment era, whenever that might be. Conspiracy thinking comes easy to football fans whose weekend can be decided by the interpretations of the official in the middle. It is easy to explain away every setback a club has suffered because the other team cheated. Now, well, there was certainly one team who weren't playing by the rules.

How then can one's eyes believe what they see in the future when what they saw in the past was so clearly untrue? That is far from the only way that City have damaged the league, but the corrosive impact they have had on the stories the footballing nation tells itself is no less important than the financial chaos they have wrought.

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_Originally reported by [CBS Sports](https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/manchester-city-rival-fans-aguero-to-biggest-scandal-premier-league-history/)._