If you woke up one morning and found yourself transported back to, say, 2003, could you prove it? This was a question posed by educator Michael Stevens, and it’s harder to answer than you might think. Specifically, what would you tell people?
Would you describe the season finale of Friends and reveal whether Ross and Rachel actually got together? Would you warn that Donald Trump will be elected President of the United States in 2016 and that a novel coronavirus will sweep across the world soon after? Everyone — your spouse, partner, best friend — would just think you were saying things. None of the above are immediately verifiable.
And there’s another problem. The butterfly thing. In any complex system, over time, one tiny, seemingly inconsequential change can lead to dramatically larger and unpredictable outcomes. Your mere presence in the past could mean that Rachel stays on the plane to Paris, Hillary Clinton becomes the first female president and working from home never becomes a culture war issue.
Stevens calls it ‘the time traveller’s credibility problem’. And it’s one English football now faces.
No Man City is an island
Just after lunchtime on Friday, The Athletic’s David Ornstein broke the news that Manchester City had been found guilty on virtually all charges relating to breaches of Premier League financial regulations.1 Immediately, the football-industrial complex went into overdrive.
Could the club face sporting sanctions and if so, might that include points deductions or even relegation? What of the reputational damage to the Premier League and to the sainted Pep Guardiola? How might this impact the broader UK-UAE relationship, with its substantial investment, trade and security ties?
On a personal note, I had to urgently check whether Tottenham ever finished second to City during the 2009-10 to 2017-18 era, just in case any league titles are scrubbed and redistributed to the runners-up. Fortunately, it never happened though, on reflection, could there be anything more Spursy than being handed a league championship, your first in 65-odd years, long after the fact and on a technicality?2
And this rather underlines the problem the Premier League faces.
Glory, glory, hallelujah
The point of football may be to score more goals than the other team, but the point of football fandom is moments. Glorious victories, agonising defeats and bore draws all shared in the company of best mates and total strangers. Sorry to sound like a TV advert for a mass-market lager but it’s true.
As is the flip side. If the 2011-12 league title is stripped from City, what is Sky Sports supposed to do — call up Martin Tyler and ask him to re-record his seminal “Agüeroooooo!” commentary? Demand that old men in flat caps who went to their graves with that line scorched onto their brains be exhumed, resuscitated and re-educated?
Then — with this being the Premier League — there is the issue of money. Will every team beaten or denied a European spot by City be entitled compensation? This isn’t hypothetical. In June this year, Everton were ordered to pay Burnley £35m over a breach of profit and sustainability regulations, which Burnley argued had a material impact on them being relegated3.
The past is a foreign signing
When we think of time, we tend to imagine it absent-mindedly flowing forward like a river. But it doesn’t, really. Rather, best as we can tell, the universe started out in a remarkably low-entropy state. That is, extremely well ordered. But as time goes by, that entropy or disorder increases: milk swirls into coffee, glass shatters into pieces, tidy bedrooms become messy.
Should City run out of legal road, they could face substantial sporting sanction. Given their alleged crimes had the effect of accelerating their rise in the early 2010s, an attractive punishment might be not a one-off relegation but a multi-year points deduction to keep them stuck in mid-table mediocrity.
But rewriting history is harder. The Agüero moment has already been swirled into our memories, shattered the dreams of Man Utd fans and made a mess of many a football accumulator.
Returning to the question posed at the start: how would you prove you are from the future? Stevens has a handy solution: a bracelet you should wear at all times. How does it work? Simply look up the year in which you suddenly find yourself, and the bracelet will provide locations of artefacts that were lost then but have since been found.
It’s a neat trick. But it doesn’t help the Premier League with its own crisis of credibility — or answer the awkward question of what to do when the record books say one thing and football fans another.
This concerns longstanding allegations that City had inflated sponsorship revenue from connected parties and made other unofficial payments to circumvent the rules.
See also: the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations final
It gets further into the weeds. In its case, Burnley argued that player sales, such as that of Dwight McNeil to, ironically, Everton for €17m, represented a depressed value as a result of the club’s relegation to the Championship and the need to raise funds.