Anfield is City’s first cauldron in Premier League’s surrealist phase

Ceci n’est pas defeat.

The significance of today’s result remains to be seen – but for a different reason than in past seasons, writes Rory Smith

11 Oct 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport

Rory Smith

Manchester City’s fans will know, so far as it is possible to know, what is coming. They have, after all, been amply forewarned. Their club might continue to perform its defiance, to insist on its innocence, to protest long and loud and with the slightly odd support of the prime minister that the legal process is not yet over, that it will – eventually – be exonerated, vindicated, avenged.Mark Leach/Offside/ Getty Images Banana drama: City fan groups are encouraging supporters to brandish the inflatable fruit as they did in the 1980s, as a reminder of the club’s history.

The fans, though, will be well aware that the wholly informal court of public opinion works much more swiftly and much less subtly than that. A verdict, conclusive and indissoluble, was reached two weeks ago. A sentence has already been passed: City’s name tarnished, their reputation trashed, the glorious achievements of the last decade and a half either asterisked or erased.

And now we are at the part where the perpetrator is dragged to the pillory. That City’s first game since an independent panel concluded the club had cheated on an industrial scale should be at Anfield is, depending on your perspective, either an ironic twist of fate or evidence that the universe operates according to the same narrative conventions as most lunchtime soap operas.

It was Liverpool, after all, that lost out most obviously to City in their imperial phase; it was Liverpool with whom they shared the defining rivalry of the modern Premier League, a feud that contrived to be both enthralling and deeply petty at one and the same time. It feels somehow fitting, then, that Anfield should be handed the first rotten tomato.

That scorn and fury will be directed not just at Enzo Maresca and his players, of course, but at the City fans, 3,000 strong, tucked into the corner of the Anfield Road Stand, armed only with an unyielding faith in the club’s hierarchy, a widespread conviction that the rules have been rigged against them, and dozens of inflatable bananas.

The latter is at the request of several of the club’s fan groups, who have asked that the trip to Anfield be turned into an “old-school away day”, encouraging supporters to turn up wearing retro shirts and brandishing blow-up fruit, a relatively unlikely staple of City folklore for close to 40 years.

The precise origins of the bananas are somewhat contested. They first appeared among City fans at Maine Road in the late 1980s. Even the club’s official website is not entirely sure how they came about: it was either an absurdist response designed to undercut the menace of hooliganism, or it was for the rather less intellectually satisfying reason that fans had decided to rename Imre Varadi, the club’s striker, “Imre Banana”.

Either way, the symbolism – given the circumstances – is fitting. The bananas first appeared when City were in the second division; they were revived a decade later, when the club was demoted again, falling as far as League One. The surrealism was deliberate: none of this could possibly be happening. Ceci n’est pas Preston, perhaps.

In City’s current context, then, the message is pretty clear. The bananas undermine the solemnity of the situation; they are a way of meeting what the fans perceive as the moral grandstanding of their critics, opponents and the league itself not with anger but with levity. They deny their foes the satisfaction of a rise.

More than that, though, they are a way of indicating not only that the club has survived challenging times before, but that it has a history that pre-dates the current ownership. They are a reminder that Manchester City, the club, and Manchester City, the Abu Dhabibacked soft-power project, remain distinct entities.

The problem, of course, is that the parallel does not take into account the vast differences between then and now. The soundtrack of those wilderness years played with much the same idea. The lyric was later borrowed by the midfielder Paul Lake for the title of his autobiography; as City entered their golden period, it remained on the songbook, although its meaning shifted to be more celebratory: We’re not really here.

Back then, the song expressed a sense that watching City playing York and Mansfield must be some sort of illusion; now, that is exactly what the independent panel has declared this incarnation of City to be.

The club in its current form only exists because its owners found a way to inject £900m of extra capital or cost savings into their accounts, a shortcut to the superpower status they craved. Over the course of three and a half years, it was found that City were not here, really.

That is the part of the response – from Anfield, initially, but from every other Premier League ground that Maresca and his team will have to visit between now and the point at which whatever sanction the club are given, pending that appeal, comes into effect – that City’s fans will not, and cannot, anticipate.

Anger is normal. It is part of football’s emotional landscape.

So is disdain and mockery and contempt. That is what City seem to be anticipating today: Anfield, only more so, an atmosphere perhaps akin to the clubs’ meeting in the Champions League in 2018, when smoke wreathed outside the ground and at least one missile hit City’s bus on its way to the stadium.

Since that point, nobody has believed in the myth of Anfield more than City’s hierarchy; they have, as is generally the case, requested that Merseyside Police lay on extra security for the game this weekend to ensure players’ safety, a story that has as always been widely reported.

And that is, most likely, what they will get, certainly initially. What is less easy to predict is what happens afterwards. This is, after all, uncharted territory for the Premier League, certainly; probably for English football as a whole; maybe for all of sport, for a generation or more. A game in which the very meaning of the event is contested.

As the case winds on – three months to prepare the appeal, five days for a hearing, another month for a finding; and then the sanctions, and the appeal to the sanctions, and on and on – it is not clear what City’s games mean in a practical sense. What good are three points at Anfield if, some time in January, the club is to be docked 60, or 80, or 200 points?

But it is also difficult to grasp what they mean in a more philosophical one, too. The Premier League’s case only extends to 2018, of course, but the stain of cheating is a spreading one; it sullies everything it comes into contact with. Does losing to City hurt as much as it might, even for a rival like Liverpool, when 40 pages of the panel’s “final award” make it clear this is not a club playing by the same rules as everyone else? Is it real? Is it meaningful? Or is it a bit like being beaten to the line by an East German sprinter?

Perhaps, at Anfield, Manchester City’s fans, like the rest of us, will get the first hint of an answer to those questions: a first taste of the Premier League in its postmodern era, its surrealist phase, when the line between the symbol and the truth, the material and the artificial, is blurred to indistinction.

Anger is one thing. Apathy is another.

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