From Jim's chair
Morning.
Not going to talk about Spurs this week. I need to talk about something else.
Manchester City. And where this whole thing is heading for all of us as football supporters. Because I don't think people are properly reckoning with it yet.
Here's where my head is at. Whatever happens with the appeal, I don't think the Premier League comes out of this intact. If City win, half the football-watching world won't accept it anyway. If they lose, we're left with a situation where every result involving them for the last decade and a bit has a question mark hanging over it. Every title, every cup, every European night, every side knocked out along the way. It doesn't just affect City. It affects every club in the pyramid, including ours.
And it bleeds into this season too. Every game they play from here, there's a sort of asterisk sat in the back of people's minds. If someone wins the league with City in it, there'll be fans questioning whether it should count. If someone gets knocked out of a cup by them, same again. European competitions start looking at the Premier League differently. English football as a product, the thing that's grown so valuable globally, starts to lose the one thing that actually makes it valuable, which is the trust that what you're watching is real.
I'm not writing this to pile on City fans either. If this was Tottenham I'd probably be defending us too, honestly. I get it. But at some point the tribalism has to give way to the thing in front of us, which is that there has to be a clean slate, and I'm not sure how that happens with them still in the division.
Reports are the executives would vote to keep them. That worries me more than anything. Because if we as supporters don't push on this, it just gets quietly swept along, and in a few years we'll all be sat there wondering why nobody watches the Premier League the way they used to.
Anyway, that's where my head's at this week. Normal service resumes next Friday.
Keep it Lilywhite #OhSo33,
– Jim