BfB

Manchester City have been discovered – it is said – to have cheated English Football on a scale not previously seen.

Every Premier League Rival has been robbed of titles, or glory. Every Premier League team has been damaged, the draining impact of a Man City spanking that should not have happened. Every team in the top two divisions trying to get into the top flight, or trying to deal with coming out of it, has had to deal with a rigged game happening on the top table.

Every team in football suffering from the inflation which Manchester City have brought to the game, trying to match the wages and exist in a crooked financial world. Every player in the game who could have done more, could have been more, could have lived a different life but did not because of a single team in fraud. Every fan who could have watched a different type of football.

Half of the Premier League era – more – has been played under a blackening cloud.

“I was about my Father’s Business.”

Obvious

On Thursday afternoon it became obvious that Graham Alexander was going to be joining Preston North End. Alexander is a Preston legend and Preston – storied in the history of English football – are not an easy club to be a legend for. There is a bond between the Scot and those in Lancashire which is genuine, and honest, and earnest.

Bradford City and Chief Executive Officer Ryan Sparks have handled the exit expertly while Preston claim to have conducted a full and complete recruitment process which brought them to a guy who played almost four hundred times for them and is doing well in the division below.

Over the weekend the discussions were done and by the time the news was confirmed at ten thirty on Monday morning thoughts had already turned to who would be the next manager, with some umbrage that given the inevitability City’s new manager was not appointed at ten thirty one.

Gangs

Gangs of New York is an odd film. Released in 2002 it was a passion project for legendary director Martin Scorsese which he had been trying to get made for over twenty years.

The performances in the movie – which is generally considered to be a mid to lesser Scorsese – are solid with Daniel Day-Lewis’s William Cutting a standout but Scorsese has wanted Robert De Niro to do that role. The compromises of getting the film made dictated casting. Leonardo Di Caprio – who delivers the “Father’s Business” line – and Cameron Diaz are good but no better than good. The young lad out of ET gets a run out.

Behind the Camera Scorsese is restrained compared to his other mid-90s to mid-2000s work allowing spectacle and scale to control the screen. Thelma Schoonmaker – who has edited almost all Scorsese’s movies – put together a four hour cut of the movie which is the stuff of cinema legend. The print which made it to screen is good, and worth a watch, but the editing was overseen by Producer Harvey Weinstein. Convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein.

Which puts the movie – along with many of the other best bits of 1990s and 2000s cinema – under a blackening cloud.

Ostentatiously

Former Stockport County manager Dave Challinor is ostentatiously the best replacement Bradford City could have for Graham Alexander. Personally, I do not care for him, but his credentials are so neat a fit it feels like he is almost too perfect.

Alexander’s teams play a direct, fast pace counter press as do Challinor’s sides. Both favour running beyond the backline from deep. Both enjoy a robust defence. A number of the City players have already worked with him although some might not see that as a huge positive.

Challinor has a remarkable record of having finished in the play off positions or higher in all of his seasons as a football manager, and having left Stockport County in the summer he is available.

The job may or may not go to Dave Challinor but his presence allows us to note the space which Alexander leaves at Bradford City.

Style

In the six years since Ryan Sparks took on the role running Bradford City the club has grown impressively, with front and back office populated by people going about the business of running a football club. Mark Trueman – who will take charge for Saturday’s trip to Reading – is on his third spell as Caretaker Manager and is surrounded by a support team which is not leaving any time soon.

When recruiting a manager Sparks’ former boss Edin Rahic specified that he wanted a “Head Coach” at Valley Parade without much indication as to who would be carrying out the tasks a manager would do but a Head Coach would not. If not in name, Sparks wants a Head Coach because City have a team of Coaches and Support Staff that need “Heading”.

The style of play – a style created by Alexander over three years evolving former manager Mark Hughes’ team – is defined by the squad Alexander leaves which is light on ball playing central midfielders and heavy on central defenders and deep sitting forwards. Again, with David Sharpe and Steven Gent in recruitment, the new manager need not come with a huge contact book.

So it would seem that the Bantams know what the new manager will look like. That manager will inherit a team currently top of League One and be expected to maintain a position in contention for promotion this season without dramatic changes to the squad or the style it can offer.

Extractive

There are things said and things not said about football. England lose to Spain but thoughts are on Manchester City as Marc Guehi and Nico O’Reilly both make mistakes and the inference is that there is a cause and effect. “They choose to cheat” Roy Keane tells us, but no more than that.

I am told it will be funny to see Erling Harlaad playing in The Championship, in the National League, in the Cheshire Amateur Third Division but such talk hides the reality that Manchester City’s big players will leave and the generational punishment which should follow will be carried by a generation of supporters not players.

Tedious musician Noel Gallagher tells us that they can’t take four in a row away from “Cteh” which is probably true. The streets will not forget, we are told, but there seems no punishment damaging enough if that is the case.

This is the stage of extractive capitalism we are at in 2026. Where the Premier League is tainted and one of its clubs is to be disgraced but no one can conceive of a narrative of how that will happen. Does it matter? Capitalism shrunk your Mars bars so they are tiny now, it made your rivers full of shit and your movies are all garbage. It has extracted all the money from Manchester City, and now it can be dumped at the side of the road.

Chaos

Graham Alexander is going to find it hard at Preston North End, but good luck to him. His time at City I shall remember all the better for how often it felt like it was succeeding despite itself, like a chaotic movie that only comes together at the final cut it fed off the chaos.

This season promised more of that creative tension as Jake Beesley is pushed into place, and Antoni Sarcevic is played at the head of an odd no-midfield midfield and so on. It could have been great but Alexander has made a choice which – one assumes – feels like a homecoming for him returning to a club he was at so long. That he has a clear blue sky of emotion for.

It is difficult, against a backdrop of black clouds and football as a meaningless thing, to object to passions such as those.