In his final weeks as Liverpool manager, Klopp was asked what he'd do if Manchester City were ever found guilty of their 115 financial charges. He laughed, took a breath, and described a bar tab in Majorca that would run into the thousands — the whole club invited, the honours list extended.
That tab is now open.
City have been found guilty of all charges related to breaches of the Premier League's financial rules — £830m in commercial revenue artificially inflated through what the Premier League's 40-page redacted verdict calls "sham" contracts "clearly intended to circumvent" its own regulations. The offending period: 2009 to 2018. The average annual inflation: roughly £100m.
What those numbers actually mean for Liverpool's record
This isn't just an accounting scandal. That kind of money, pumped through the books over nearly a decade, doesn't sit idle — it funds squads, wages, and the infrastructure that lets a manager like Pep Guardiola build something dominant. Every pound artificially added to City's balance sheet is a pound that shaped the competitive landscape Klopp was navigating.
The clearest flashpoint is the 2018/19 season. Liverpool finished with 97 points — the most ever accumulated by a side that finished second in the Premier League. They lost once. One defeat, at the Etihad in January, when John Stones cleared Sadio Mane's effort off the line with 11mm of the ball still in play. Leroy Sane scored the winner. City took the title by a single point on the final day.
Three weeks later, Liverpool beat Tottenham 2-0 in Madrid to win their sixth European Cup. The resilience was extraordinary. But the question the verdict now forces is a legitimate one: should that season be viewed differently? Victory in that January match — had City been operating within the rules — could have made Liverpool the first side to go unbeaten and reach 100 points in the same Premier League campaign. The Champions League was already theirs by June.
The legacy question has no clean answer
The Premier League's investigation formally covers up to 2018, which means the only competition where Liverpool are officially due potential reconsideration is the 2016 Carabao Cup final, lost on penalties to Manuel Pellegrini's City. The broader moral reckoning — what those inflated revenues meant for Guardiola's squad-building across his entire tenure — is harder to quantify and harder still to remedy.
Klopp himself is unlikely to say any of this publicly. He's now Germany's national coach, preparing for a Nations League fixture against Serbia, and was running training sessions in Herzogenaurach on Wednesday while English football processed the verdict. He'll speak to the media soon enough, and given he has never been shy about matters he considers unjust, the City questions will come.
City deny all charges and will appeal. That process could drag on for another year or more, meaning any formal consequences — points deductions, title redistribution, anything — remain distant. The competitive picture in the Premier League right now is unaffected. City's odds for the current season don't shift on the back of a ruling that covers a period ending seven years ago.
But the historical picture? That shifts considerably. Klopp's Liverpool were already one of the great sides of the modern era. The 2018/19 team, in particular, deserved more than silver medals. The verdict doesn't hand them anything back. It just confirms what they were up against.
Somewhere in Majorca, there's a bar waiting.
