Gary Neville wants off Manchester City games. We think he should stay in the chair

Gary Neville has asked Sky Sports to take him off Manchester City games until the club’s appeal is heard. Not off the big games, not off the awkward ones: all of them. He floated it on his podcast straight after City’s 3-0 win at Anfield on Sunday, and the most striking thing about it is that he sounded like he meant it.

“We were just doing the podcast then and said if you could take me off Manchester City games moving forward for the next few months until the verdicts have been heard, I would be absolutely delighted,” he said, as reported by GOAL.

A pundit who has run out of words

Neville has been paid to talk about Manchester City for the best part of fifteen years. He has praised them, needled them and, as a former Manchester United captain, been on the receiving end of their supporters for most of that time. What he has never done is say he would rather not watch.

His reasoning is simple. Every compliment now comes with a footnote. “We should be absolutely eulogising over a performance like that,” he said on Sky. “But there’s a ‘but’, isn’t there?”

That ‘but’ is the independent commission’s finding that City ran “sham” contracts with commercial partners as part of a “disguised funding scheme” that inflated revenues by £830m between 2009/10 and 2017/18, according to Sky Sports’ summary of the judgment. City say they are innocent and lodged an appeal at 7pm on Thursday 1 October, calling the decision “unsafe”. So Neville sat on the Anfield gantry watching champions beat ten men, Ryan Gravenberch having been sent off, and could not work out what he was actually looking at.

“If these guilty verdicts are confirmed in January or February then Manchester City are not going to be in the position they are in,” he said. That date is not a hunch. Under the Premier League’s new, faster appeal rules, Sky Sports News reports the hearing has to happen within 12 weeks of the appeal going in, last no more than five days, and be decided within 30 days. Do the maths and you land in the third week of January, unless City’s lawyers persuade the panel a case this old should run on the old, slower rules.

Gary, stay in the chair

We get it. We just think he is wrong.

The whole value of a pundit is being in the room when it is uncomfortable. Anyone can talk you through a 3-0 when the table means what it says. Explaining a 3-0 that might be erased by a three-person panel in a private hearing is harder and a lot more useful, and nobody on British television is better at saying two contradictory things at once and making both sound reasonable.

There is also the small matter of who is asking to be excused. A United legend stepping away from City games, however sincere, will be read in plenty of sky-blue living rooms as a man who has already reached his verdict. Neville seemed to sense that. “That’s the problem for the Man City staff, players and supporters, they are blameless in all of this,” he said. If he believes that, and we think he does, then the players deserve to have their football judged by someone willing to do it live, warts and all.

Will Sky actually rejig its rota? We doubt it. This sounded far more like a man thinking aloud on his own podcast than a memo to his bosses. But when the most recognisable voice in the British game says he would rather sit out the champions’ matches, the City case has stopped being a story for lawyers and started being something you feel from the sofa.

Neville and Jamie Carragher went further still on what all this is doing to the league; we pick that apart in Neville and Carragher’s warning about the Premier League “stain”.

Sources: GOAL, Sky Sports, Premier League.