“Khaldoon said he would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next 10 years.” The football association, according to the email, now had the possibility “to avoid the destruction of their rules and organization.” Der Spiegel

If professional football is now a deep cesspit of global corruption, then the English Premier League (EPL) is its surface scum. The game has never been innocent but, as with everything, it is a fundamentally question of scale. Football clubs are now opportunities for billionaires guilty of despicable sins to cover their reputations in a veneer of pseudo-philanthropy, a practice now branded ‘sportswashing’.

Around two decades ago, a Russian oligarch with ties to Putin’s violent and kleptocratic dictatorship acquired Chelsea. In 2008 the Abu Dhabi royal family bought Manchester City and in 2021 Saudi Arabia bought Newcastle United. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the UK government froze Abramovitch’s assets and then barred him from being a director of Chelsea. The former heir to the Emir of Qatar is now attempting to purchase Manchester United. The sportswashing is nothing if not thorough. In my cursory research for this post, I was intrigued that Manchester City’s Wikipedia entry includes not a single reference to the controversy around its owners, nor to the over 100 breaches of the financial fair play rules of which the club stands accused by the EPL itself.

How would English football have looked since 2004 without such distortions? The crudest method to construct such an alternative reality is simply to strip the sportswashers of their trophies – the ultimate, and least likely, sanction open to the EPL in its charges against Manchester City. Whereas, in our dark reality, twelve out of 19 EPL titles, and eight (likely nine by next week) have gone to the great-sportswashed, Man City or Chelsea, in this fantasy football, with the most egregious of injustices expunged:

• Manchester United’s dominance under the last years of Alex Ferguson would have extended to a stunning succession of eight league titles, plus another two after that (testimony to his protean, ruthless managerial genius);
• Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool would have been the most successful premier league club in the last ten years, with four premier league championships;
• Arsenal would have achieved a fourth double in their history.

Most shockingly of all, Tottenham would have won the league for the first time since the Beatles were formed, and Stoke City would have won an FA Cup. So on balance perhaps there are some upsides to the venal evisceration of the English game after all.   

Is it fair to completely exclude an unsportswashed Chelsea and Man City from this parallel universe of trophy winners? I think so. There is no reason to believe that either would have collected any major accolades had they continued an organic trajectory through the humdrum bouillabaisse of the professional game.

	EPL		FA Cup
	With sportswashing	No sportswashing	With sportswashing	Without sportswashing
2004–05	Chelsea	Arsenal	Arsenal	Arsenal
2005–06	Chelsea	Manchester Utd	Liverpool	Liverpool
2006–07	Manchester Utd	Manchester Utd	Chelsea	Manchester Utd
2007–08	Manchester Utd	Manchester Utd	Portsmouth	Portsmouth
2008–09	Manchester Utd	Manchester Utd	Chelsea	Everton
2009–10	Chelsea	Manchester Utd	Chelsea	Portsmouth
2010–11	Manchester Utd	Chelsea	Manchester City	Stoke City
2011–12	Manchester City	Manchester Utd	Chelsea	Liverpool
2012–13	Manchester Utd	Manchester Utd	Wigan Athletic	Wigan Athletic
2013–14	Manchester City	Liverpool	Arsenal	Arsenal
2014–15	Chelsea	Arsenal	Arsenal	Arsenal
2015–16	Leicester City	Leicester City	Manchester Utd	Manchester Utd
2016–17	Chelsea	Tottenham Hotspur	Arsenal	Arsenal
2017–18	Manchester City	Manchester United	Chelsea	Manchester Utd
2018–19	Manchester City	Liverpool	Manchester City	Watford
2019–20	Liverpool	Liverpool	Arsenal	Arsenal
2020–21	Manchester City	Manchester Utd	Leicester City	Leicester City
2021–22	Manchester City	Liverpool	Liverpool	Liverpool
2022–23	Manchester City	Arsenal	Probably Man City	Probably Man Utd