Maresca defends City's Anfield celebrations after guilty verdict: 'Criticised for what?'

Enzo Maresca has defended Manchester City’s jubilant celebrations after their 3-0 victory at Anfield on Sunday, the club’s first match since an independent commission found them guilty of 114 breaches of Premier League financial rules. Erling Haaland, Jeremy Doku and Rayan Cherki all scored second-half goals as City won at Liverpool for the first time in years, prompting scenes of wild celebration on the pitch and in the dressing room that drew criticism from pundits and opposition supporters.

The commission’s verdict, delivered last week, found that City had benefited from more than £900 million in disguised funding and had operated sham sponsorship contracts. Against that backdrop, some felt the scale of City’s post-match celebrations was inappropriate. Maresca was having none of it.

“Criticised for what? We won 0-3 at Anfield. What do you want us to do?” the Italian manager said. “And even if it was 0-1, it was exactly the same. We work every day to win games. It’s the only thing, again, that we can think, we can be focused on. The rest is just things from outside that we need to deal with. But we were so, so, so happy inside the pitch, and you cannot imagine inside the changing room.”

Captain Ruben Dias was equally unapologetic, standing firmly behind his manager’s position. “I very much stand by the manager’s words as well,” the Portuguese defender said. “It’s a win at Anfield. In whatever circumstance, so be it now, maybe earlier in the season, so be it later in the season, anytime, I will — I think we will — enjoy it just as much and we will celebrate. And it will obviously be a show of how much it means to us.”

The result does little to resolve the broader questions hanging over the club following the commission’s findings, but Maresca made clear he intends to keep his squad’s focus entirely on results rather than the ongoing fallout from the verdict.