It’s Saturday 31 October, and a magnificent Brighton and Hove Albion are leading Manchester City at the Etihad. Ayari scored in the eleventh minute. But what is it that I am watching? Nine years ago, I wrote a book called What We Think About When We Think About Football. I no longer know what I think about football. In fact, I’m left rather perplexed. 

Since the Manchester City verdict — guilty on 114 of the 115 charges, nice seasons of “sham” sponsorship deals, revenue overstated by more than £830 million, multiple witnesses the commission found had lied — everything has become a bit Nathan Fielder. In the first season of The Rehearsal, Fielder builds a replica of a Brooklyn bar so that a conversation can be practiced until it has, in effect, already happened before it happens. City’s seasons are the reverse. The match I am watching will probably not count. It is a game that will not have happened.

The news broke on 25 September. I heard it in London, just off a rough and delayed night flight from New York. I was finally in my hotel, napping to Radio 4, and leapt up dramatically. My first words were “bastards”; loud enough to wake my puzzled wife. Then I thought that we — by which I mean Liverpool FC — would get our two or three extra titles, the season we finished a point behind the bastards. A piece by Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian cured me of that. City have cheated each of the other 19 clubs. Once you have read the findings, the word “champions” does not transfer cleanly to the runners-up. Those titles feel soiled. The alternative is that the seasons are simply voided, which has the bizarre philosophical consequence that nearly 20 years of English football did not really happen.

Football came back on 11 October with Liverpool-City at Anfield. Desperate not to watch alone, I went over to my good pal Todd’s place in Dumbo in my full Liverpool training gear, looking like a proper prannet. What was I expecting? Cosmic justice? The universe publicly shaming the cheats? We lost, badly, 3-0, and I couldn’t have cared less. Todd had invited a friend, an Arsenal season-ticket holder no less, and we all talked for an hour afterwards, not about the game or Arsenal’s prospects (they beat us on Sunday!), but about how unreal it all felt, how You Can See Everything it all felt, where the more we see the less we know. Wilson, again, had the phrase for it: ghost football. Like the second after an incident that everyone knows VAR will check, stretched out over weeks, months, years. He is right. I want to identify what sort of ghost we’re dealing with here. 

Our game is called Association Football, and the association is not incidental. Football is the free association of human beings; a team is a fused group, in Sartre’s sense, in which the free action of each player is subordinated to the collective and elevated by it. Bill Shankly, my boyhood hero, called this socialism: “It is a way of living. It is humanity.” Johan Cruyff put it more drily: “I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.” And yet the material substrate of the game is (and always was) money — “dirty money, often from highly questionable, under scrutinized sources”, as I wrote in my book in 2017, when Gazprom used to be on all the Champions League hoardings. Its form is association; its matter is cash. I argued then that this contradiction could not be resolved and should not be, that it was “an open wound that we continue to scratch at the beginning of every match, every tournament, every season”. Delight and disgust rotate in every game we watch. Fans are not dupes. They know what is happening. And they know that for a moment, the moment of moments, the form of the game can gleam above its matter. That is what we are there for.

I believed that then. I believe some of it still. What I did not foresee was a third state. The commission did not find that City had too much money; everyone knew that. It found that the matter itself was counterfeit: sponsorship deals that were sham, an owner’s money disguised as revenue the club had earned. Cruyff was wrong. A bag of money has scored a great many goals, and the label on the bag was a lie. The rotation has stopped. What I feel is neither delight nor disgust, but flatness.

Following the great philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, I think that football is play and play is repetition. The essence of football consists in repetition: in this game, the previous game and the next game. There is no original match, no Ur-game in the wet 14th-century grass; each game is as genuine as any other because each is proof that the game goes on. From the repetitions, we build series — a season, a run, a history — and from the series we build what I called, with a slightly pretentious nod to Heidegger, football historicity. To be a fan is to live for a history of moments — for an LFC fan, Istanbul 2005, Madrid 2019, and so on — a shared memory of joy that forms a living archive of meaning from which a team can draw when it needs to come back from three down. The end of the season is unbearable — “There will be no football for months!” — precisely because the chain is interrupted.

“What I feel is neither delight nor disgust, but flatness.”

You cannot void a moment. Agüero in 2012 happened and happened to everyone who watched it. It was wildly exciting (for non-Manchester United fans). What the City verdict destroys is not the archive, but the chain. A match that may later be annulled is not a repetition of the last game and an anticipation of the next; it is a rehearsal, a performance given for an outcome that may never be counted. This is why I now watch the game I love more than life itself the way I might watch gymnastics or downhill skiing: I can admire the physical skill, but I don’t care.

Judgment must come quickly and with a very fiery sword; but it appears that it will not. City lodged their appeal on 1 October, calling the commission’s opinion “unsafe” and their own evidence “irrefutable”. Under the Premier League’s rules, the appeal must conclude within 12 weeks of its filing, and the sanction is a separate hearing. We’ll know by the new year, perhaps. Perhaps not. Meanwhile, City’s chief executive Ferran Soriano tells the staff that the whole case rests on a “single false accusation”, and ESPN reports that the appeal will argue that the money did not come from the owner at all but from the government of Abu Dhabi — so that the defense against disguised owner funding is that the funding came from a state. Which is a morally questionable defense given the probity of the state in question. 

Everton and Forest broke the financial rules too. They admitted it, took their points deductions and played and the chain held. City deny everything. That is the difference, and it is philosophical. The great and sorely missed American philosopher, Stanley Cavell, distinguished knowing from acknowledging. We know what City did. The commission knows. City know. What is refused is acknowledgment, and in Cavell’s reading of Othello that refusal is tragedy itself: Othello kills Desdemona because he could not yield to what he knew. Cavell also says, “I live my skepticism”. We all do now. Every result since 2009 carries the asterisk of a doubt that no further evidence can remove, because what is missing is not evidence. 

Fans know this, and the comic acknowledgment of it is everywhere except where it is needed: in the gallows humor of the other 19, in Manchester United restoring the counter on the Stretford End that marks the years since City last won a trophy. In humor I find myself ridiculous and I acknowledge it in a smile. City’s fans brought inflatable bananas to Anfield, the toy of the innocent Maine Road club of 1988, and did the Poznan in defiance, which is comedy as denial. The Trumpian denialism that has characterized the club’s abominable behavior since the verdict is the tragic version of the same refusal, and tragedies end with bodies on the bed — in this case football itself, our national sport, the global game, rendered completely meaningless. 

Brighton won. It was a good game. I’d like it to have happened.