How can playing for Manchester City fit into Marc Guéhi’s moral universe? | Barney Ronay

I felt unbelievably ponderous. My head was made of Aztec stone. I realised I didn’t want to be with all these people. Somebody came at me, a huge individual in silver and blue. I fell at his feet and grabbed one shoe. I started untying the lace. He kicked away from me. I got up and walked off. I was exceedingly hungry.

Not my words. Also not the words of the Manchester City centre-back Marc Guéhi, despite what you were thinking there. This is instead a condensed quote from the mind of Gary Harkness, existentially curious college running-back and the narrator of Don DeLillo’s great American football novel End Zone.

This passage describes a moment where Gary plays a game having been urged by his friends to smoke pot beforehand to discover whether it improves his understanding of time and space, or just makes him want to lie down and untie someone’s laces. It marks a turning point for Gary. To this point football has been a comforting world. He sees clarity in its militaristic rituals, finds in sport “the illusion that order is possible”, hears hidden truths in the coaches’ shouted instructions. Button up. Get fetal. Get fetal. Get fetal. Run with reckless abandon.

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Now the illusion has collapsed. Gary walks off the football field and begins instead to fixate on cold war fears and nuclear apocalypse. Death and political power have entered the chat.

Now, I’m not saying Marc Guéhi is Gary Harkness. You might be saying that. That’s your choice. But Guéhi has seemed a bit distracted in the last few weeks. Oddly for an agile and technically sound centre-back, he has seemed brittle and absent, vulnerable to being pressed.

There have been a couple of things said about City’s players in this regard. The first is that their minds might not be wholly on the game, that in the middle of a game against Croatia, for example, concerned only with manoeuvring through tiny pockets of space, Nico O’Reilly is also thinking: “Hmm, but how is it possible even by omission to honestly contravene rules E.3 and E.4 which state clearly that …oh. Wait, no. Oh dear.”

Football doesn’t work like this. The physical game is a place of total focus. But still, nothing is watertight. And this speaks to the second thing people have said, repeated like an absolute truth, that the players are entirely separate from all this. They cannot be questioned here, or indeed expected to ask questions of their own. The players are simply avatars, employees, free from any kind of agency. Players don’t have access to Google. They cannot make moral judgments. And yes, this may not be true of any other human in any other field. It may be the case that elite footballers are in fact unusually empowered, free to do whatever they want. But the consensus is clear. It is not a footballer’s business to have opinions on their employers, or what happens out of their line of vision.

This does help to avoid some tricky conundrums. Guéhi, for example, is a man of absolute public principle. Fair enough. I respect his willingness to resist popular pressure and personalise his support for the rainbow armband by writing things about Jesus on top of it. This is living your values. It’s free speech, figuring out your own moral universe. Doing so by following the absolute tenets of his religion. Go for it.

At the same time, Guéhi is playing for a club that has been convicted of cheating and lying. People are free to disagree with the rules. But if others are sticking to them, this amounts to deceit, stolen win bonuses, stolen glory. And the Bible is very clear on this. Thessalonians 4:6: “No one should transgress and defraud his brother.” Proverbs 20:17: “Bread gained by deceit is sweet to a man, but afterward his mouth will be full of gravel.” Now, I don’t believe these words to be divinely ordained. They’re great words. Totally dig the vibe. But Guéhi does believe these things to be an absolute instruction. How does this fit together in his head? How does that gravel (pending appeal) taste right now?

Again, fine if you can square it. It’s a personal journey. Park the apparent moral dilemma. See if your legal team can come up with a better final outcome. But things have changed in one significant way since the verdict dropped, an element that is now unchallenged, and which has been largely unremarked in the middle of the chaos. Understandably so. This stuff is gruelling. Everyone just wants to watch some football in the brief lull between legal rage events. But there are two points worth making in the interim. The second of which is an admission that affects many other things.

The first issue is: do you actually understand the basis of the Manchester City appeal? That evidence has seemingly been leaked. The irrefutable body of evidence, Body Of Evidence 2, the long-awaited tribunal-based Madonna erotic thriller vehicle, contains a vital detail: the additional money in City’s coffers, almost a billion, did not come from the owners, the Abu Dhabi United Group, which is owned, like City, by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan. This would be against the rules. It came instead from the Abu Dhabi government, which is essentially the Abu Dhabi royal family, of which Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan is a member; as he is also, wearing a different hat, of the Abu Dhabi government.

And maybe this means it’s fine. It seems the government often tops up the sponsor companies like a benevolent uncle. In the period the charges relate to there was no need for sponsor deals to be of market value, as there is now. So if we accept all this, if we can establish a binding principle of wearing different hats in different rooms, this may be a way out. Maybe.

This is a familiar concept in the high court, in an age of shell companies and tricky fiscal flows. Mega-million cases hang on whether ownership really is separate, or whether this is, to echo a phrase, a sham process. The person on the Clapham omnibus might not buy any of this. Do these really seem like separate entities? Or a bit like adopting a French accent when the bailiffs ring up and maintaining that, no, Monsieur Ronay is not here, and he definitely doesn’t run this dry cleaners. That, instead, is me.

If you make the case you win the case. This is all in the end about the application of rules, and that is a good thing. But the key point here is the secondary issue derived from this. City’s leaked defence, in making their case, is also saying, without pretence or mucking about, that the club is indeed funded by the Abu Dhabi government. This is something City’s fans have at times weirdly denied. But we have it in plain sight now, not just admitted but insisted on. The ultimate source of the dizzying success of the club that has defined a Premier League era is the government. Guéhi is, in effect, an Abu Dhabi civil servant. Perhaps the United Arab Emirates national team should have six stars on their jersey, one for each Premier League won. But there is no way of covering your ears now. City actively want us to accept this.

What are the consequences of this new fact? It comes with two urgent questions. The first is the moral one. Back again to Guéhi as the best example. This is what he is promoting here. And Guéhi is a man entirely guided by the principles of his faith. A private matter perhaps, except that it’s not, because Guéhi’s church explicitly orders its members to go out and proselytise. Guéhi is a member of Ballers in God, which actively tries to awaken Christian faith in the dressing room. He plays with Christian messages on his matchday kit intended to make you, the reader, think yes, maybe I too should follow this evangelical church.

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And here is the key thing. This is a criminal offence in Abu Dhabi. Under UAE penal code, giving out Christian leaflets will get you arrested. A Christian pastor in the UAE was sentenced to a year in prison for giving a Muslim a Bible. Some Americans were deported for giving out Christian literature in the Dubai shopping district. Spreading the gospel, which Guéhi is morally bound to do, is illegal in the place that pays his direct employers.

Are players just avatars, empty shells? How much do you really believe in this? These are, more than ever, very interesting questions. And they don’t just apply to issues of personal principle.

The regulator now has this information, too. Abu Dhabi funded the purchase of Nolito. Abu Dhabi dictated the flow of English football finance. The same pocket that paid for this is also funding at arm’s length the civil war in Sudan, the hospital massacres, the piles of bodies so high they can be seen from satellite imaging. Abu Dhabi, which criminalises homosexuality, which crushes dissent, is openly identifying itself as the mega-funder of a Premier League club. Is this a fit and proper influence?

There are very obvious reasons why this is not desirable. Governments spy and wage war and break rules. They have a sacred trust to promote their own interests by any means necessary. It is hard to see how this kind of owner fits the regulatory framework. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had to twirl through semantic hoops when buying Newcastle to establish it was an entity at one remove from a government, as opposed to a government entity. In making the opposite case for their funding City have not only exposed their own live-your-values central defender, they have put themselves in a place where, even if you win on one front, you’ve started to look like a very strange presence.

This deserves to be unravelled in all its wider implications. It may be the biggest issue here, whatever the final verdict. How can this be the right thing? How can City’s fans look their own autocratic government-funded club in the eye? The quiet thing has been said out loud. And its implications are bigger than the game, bigger than legal opinion. Enough, perhaps to make you question the existential point of this thing, where the best course of action really might be to walk off and look for the nearest cheeseburger.