Manchester City have been found guilty of 114 breaches of Premier League financial rules covering 2009 to 2018, and one of the seasons in that window ended with Sergio Aguero’s goal against QPR and Manchester United losing the title on goal difference. If the 2011-12 crown is ever taken off City, should United’s players accept it? Paul Scholes says yes, emphatically. Wayne Rooney says no. Rooney has the better case.
Both men have now set out their positions in full, as the Mirror reported on Wednesday morning. City have appealed the Independent Commission’s verdict and maintain their innocence, and the Mirror notes that the chances of the runners-up being promoted to champions appear remote for now. This is a hypothetical. It is also a revealing one.
Scholes: “I would take it”
Scholes, who has 11 Premier League titles, was challenged by Paddy McGuinness on The Good, The Bad & The Football. His answer was not subtle. “Why not?” he said, before adding, with a word we will leave out, that he would take it. “I only played 14 times somewhere in the last six months of the season. But yeah, I would take it.”
Then came the argument: “We lost on goal difference that year. Do you not think the rest of our team, our teammates, the manager and the staff are working their bollocks off all year to try and win the league? And just because a team did it wrongly, cheated, that we wouldn’t want it?” It follows an Instagram story in which he described himself as “a greedy” so-and-so who wants his medal.
Rooney: “We didn’t finish first”
Rooney’s position, set out to Kelly Cates and on the Stick To United podcast, starts from the same place as Scholes and ends somewhere very different. “I’m assuming all the players didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “They went onto the football pitch and won the league, while we finished second. We didn’t finish first. Why would we want a medal for finishing second?”
He went further on the podcast, and this is the line that settles it: “I don’t think we deserve it, we didn’t do enough that season to win the league. I think we were six or seven points clear with four or five games to go and we threw it away.” He does not defend City’s owners. “Should they get it stripped for what the owners have done? Yeah maybe, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable accepting it.”
Where they really differ
Strip away the language and the two are not arguing about City at all. Both accept the breaches were wrong. Both accept that City’s players did not decide the club’s accounts. The disagreement is about what a title is.
For Scholes, it is a reward for a season’s work, and the work was done: United’s players and staff took the title race to the final day. If the winner is disqualified, the reward passes down. That is a coherent view.
For Rooney, a title is a result, decided on the pitch on the last day. United did not get that result, and in his telling they had the chance to and threw it away. A medal handed over by a commission years later would record a decision, not a win.
Our verdict
Rooney is right, and Scholes’s own words help him. “We lost on goal difference” is an admission, not a grievance: it means United had every match in their hands and came up one goal short over 38 games, after, by Rooney’s account, being several points clear in the run-in. City’s breaches may have shaped their squad. They did not stop United winning the games United failed to win.
Scholes is right about one thing. The staff and the players who worked that season deserve better than to be told they “wouldn’t want it”. Wanting it is not the problem. Accepting it would be. If the Premier League ever does reallocate 2011-12, the honest response from Old Trafford is Rooney’s: the record can say what it likes, but United finished second.
For the bigger picture on City’s verdict, read Neville and Carragher on the Manchester City stain and Miguel Delaney’s grim forecast.
Sources: Mirror.
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