Whatever ultimately happens with the accusations against Manchester City, and whatever decisions football authorities may eventually make about titles from that period, there is one thing no document can change: what actually happened on the pitch.
Manchester City played those seasons. They won the matches. Their players celebrated. Their supporters celebrated. Their opponents tried to beat them — and failed often enough for City to finish as champions.
That happened.
You can change a record book. You can put an asterisk next to a season. You can issue a statement, sign a document, remove a trophy from an official list or declare that history should now be interpreted differently.
But you cannot travel backwards in time and change what millions of people actually experienced.
And that distinction matters.
Football does not belong primarily to administrators, lawyers, committees or governing bodies. Football belongs to the people who actually make football exist: the players who play it, the coaches who build teams, and especially the supporters who invest their time, money and emotions in it.
A bureaucratic decision cannot retroactively erase the moment a supporter watched his team score the goal that effectively won a championship.
It cannot erase the celebration in the stadium.
It cannot erase the frustration of the opposing supporters.
It cannot erase the tactical battles, the mistakes, the brilliant performances or the tension of a title race.
Those things happened in the real world.
That is football history.
This is why, even if Manchester City were eventually stripped of titles, my personal view of those seasons would not change. On the pitch, Manchester City finished as champions. I watched it happen. Everyone else watching football at the time watched it happen too.
The official record might someday say something different.
Memory will not.
And perhaps football supporters should remember that distinction more often.
The emotions we experience through football should never depend entirely on what someone sitting behind a desk decides years later. Administrators do not own those memories. Institutions do not own them either.
The supporter does.
A bureaucrat was not sitting beside you when your team conceded in the 90th minute.
He did not spend the week thinking about the next match.
He did not buy your ticket.
He did not feel the stadium explode after a decisive goal.
He did not go home furious after a defeat or spend the following morning replaying a victory in his head.
So why should a signature on a piece of paper suddenly become more important than everything that actually happened?
Football is alive precisely because people care about it far beyond regulations, balance sheets and administrative decisions.
Rules and financial regulations have their place, of course, and the allegations against Manchester City should be dealt with through the applicable process. But that process and the lived history of football are not exactly the same thing.
One belongs to institutions.
The other belongs to us.
And if one day somebody officially writes that Manchester City were not champions of a season in which millions of us watched them become champions, they are free to write it.
The paper may change.
What happened on the pitch will not.