Paul Dickov visits City fans in the pub the day after 115 Premier League guilty verdicts land

Paul Dickov walked into a Bredbury pub on Wednesday afternoon to deliver a signed shirt and lift local spirits. What he found was a group of Manchester City supporters still reeling from the news that an independent panel had found the club guilty of more than 115 Premier League rule breaches the previous evening.

The visit had been arranged months earlier, during the summer international break, as part of an initiative between the club and the Official Supporters Club (OSC) to reconnect with their most local fan branches. OSC general secretary Kevin Parker had flagged a growing concern: as City’s global profile had expanded, something closer to home had quietly eroded. “We’ve lost a little bit of that connection locally with the football club,” he said.

The plan was simple — signed shirts delivered to the 20 biggest supporters club branches in Greater Manchester, with Dickov along as an unannounced extra. The timing, however, had become anything but simple. When the guilty verdicts dropped on Tuesday evening, the visit could easily have been cancelled. Instead, it went ahead as planned, and for the fans gathered in Bredbury, it provided a rare moment of warmth in a deeply unsettling week.

Dickov’s arrival immediately shifted the mood. Conversation turned to York away and Wycombe away — trips from three decades ago — and for a while the verdicts receded. “It has been amazing, to be honest with you,” Parker said. “It sort of helps you realise what being a City fan is all about. These are just normal people who run their branch, for their members, for the local community, or the charities that they raise money for. It’s been a nice escape, shall we say?”

Parker, one of the club’s most vocal public defenders, had been notably quiet in the days since the panel’s findings first emerged. He had been waiting for the full official details before speaking. When they arrived on Tuesday night, he said, they floored him.

Speaking at length and visibly emotional, Parker described his reaction to reading the panel’s decision. “It’s a tough read. When I’m reading it, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, um…’ The word sham was used, and I’m thinking it’s an interesting word. Is that a legal term? So I Googled sham.”

He admitted he almost couldn’t finish it. “I didn’t even want to read that statement to the end. I didn’t want to, because it was uncomfortable to read it. But I did. And I’m on the edge of thinking, where do I go from here as a City fan?”

For a man who has spent years defending the club publicly, that admission carried its own weight — spoken not in front of cameras or on a platform, but in a pub in Bredbury, with Paul Dickov sitting nearby and a handful of supporters trying to make sense of the same question.