I saved Man City from collapse – but I can’t support them now

David Bernstein is telling a story about the advice his future father-in-law gave him before hemarried his daughter. “He told me: ‘You can lose your wealth and win it back but you can only lose your reputation once.’” The man who as chairman steered Manchester City from the third tier of English football to the Premier League, from Maine Road into what is now the Etihad Stadium, has no doubt the club will recover from the scandals that have enveloped it. If City are relegated, they will come back. If players like Erling Haaland are forced to leave, there will be fresh heroes. If the owners from Abu Dhabi quit, new ones will be attracted by the club’s history and fanbase. However, whether Manchester City will ever regain its reputation is another question entirely. Pending an appeal, they stand condemned of blatantly subverting financial rules that were designed to ensure some semblance of fair play. “We all believe in redemption and the chances of Manchester City winning back their reputation depend on how they handle things now and once the appeal is done,” Bernstein tells The i Paper. David Bernstein has been a City supporter for 70 years (Photo: Action Images) “If they hold their hands up and apologise, if the people who oversaw this debacle go and are replaced by others who will work within the rules, then they have a chance.” The signs are not encouraging. In a leaked video to staff after the club was found guilty of inflating its revenue by more than £850m, City’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano, who is accused of presiding over six years of dummy contracts, fake sponsorship deals and hidden payments, insisted they would use all legal avenues to protect the club and seek compensation from what he termed a “Premier League conspiracy”.“These are people who don’t resign easily,” says Bernstein. “They are going to fight it out. They come from the Donald Trump school of never back off, always strike back harder, never admit anything and drag it out for as long as possible. To use the word ‘conspiracy’ is desperate and Trumpian stuff. “I knew there would be things coming out but when I read the report I was shocked by the extent of it. The case is subject to appeal, but these verdicts are damning in the extreme. The allegations could not be more serious with falsified documentation and falsified accounts on a massive scale. I am shocked by the cold-blooded premeditation of it all. “Once they have been designated by the independent regulator as not being fit and proper people to run a football club, people have to resign. You can hardly be ‘fit and proper’ if, after the appeal, you’re convicted of calculated misdemeanours. “My feeling is that City should have their titles taken away from them. The success they have had after the period that’s been investigated has been built on what has gone before. Our total record is tarnished and I include what was achieved after 2018 [which falls outside the Premier League inquiry]. Manchester City captain Roy Paul holds the FA Cup aloft in 1956 (Photo: Getty) “And it is our record. I have been a City fan for 70 years; 5 May, 1956 was one of the great days of my life. Manchester City won the FA Cup on the day of my bar mitzvah. “When we play Liverpool on Sunday, I want us to win. I will always support the team but I cannot any longer support the club until the consequences of this are dealt with.” Two years ago Bernstein published We Were Really There, about City’s rise from the humiliation of relegation to the third division of English football. “It is almost the complete reverse of 1998 because then you had a club that had for many years been neglected, which suffered from under-investment, appeared to be 50 years behind Manchester United, played in a run-down old stadium and did not have a proper training ground. It was failing badly on the pitch. “This is everything in reverse; a club that has enjoyed success beyond belief and created wonderful facilities, owned by people who have invested not just in the club but in east Manchester.” In Bernstein’s living room is a photograph of Queen Elizabeth examining a model of how the City of Manchester Stadium would be converted into a football venue after the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Nine years later, Etihad Airways bought the naming rights to the stadium for £400m, which was 45 times their annual profit. The Liverpool owner, John W Henry, asked which bid had come second. More on Man City Tim Rich: English football owes Arsene Wenger an apology Pete Hall: Yes, Man City broke the rules. But the rules are also a nonsense “A lot of people went along with this, closing their eyes, happy not to think too hard about how this was happening or how it was being funded.” But hold on. City have not been accused of bribing referees like Barcelona. They have not bribed opposition players to throw games as Marseille did in the 1990s. Their money has helped transform east Manchester. The men from Abu Dhabi delivered in everything they said they would do. They were merely dishonest about how they would do it. “I am afraid this is the road to perdition,” says Bernstein. “It means might and money are always right and, just because it has achieved some good things, you should allow the wealthy and powerful to get away with anything. “Once that happens then society, let alone football, is finished.”