I got a message from one of my oldest friends over the weekend. He has been a Manchester City fan his whole life. He sent me a couple of pictures of a dozen or so of our mates taken at a service station on the southbound M6 on May 30, 1999.
There were red-and-black City tops, yellow-and-black City tops and a couple of classic sky blue shirts as well. Arms were raised, scarves aloft. Spirits were high. City were about to play in the Second Division play-off final against Gillingham at Wembley.
After an impossibly dramatic finale, City won the match on penalties and were promoted to what is now the Championship. Some say it was the biggest game in City’s history. It has come to symbolise the defiance of the old club, the club before Abu Dhabi. Among some City fans, that Blitz spirit has resurfaced in the wake of the revelation of the guilty verdicts against the club in its long-running case with the Premier League.
‘Presently digging out the Kappa gear, inflatable bananas and Frank Sidebottom masks,’ my mate wrote in the message below the pictures at the service station. ‘Bring it on.’
I have read other sentiments elsewhere from the City diaspora. Colin Shindler, the author of Manchester United Ruined My Life, wrote in The Times at the weekend: ‘Since the takeover by Abu Dhabi in 2008, Manchester City have won endless titles, but lost their integrity. Maybe this new turn of events will allow my beloved club to look in the mirror once more and take pride in what they see. They don’t need to win any titles to do that.’
And Mark Hodkinson, the author of Blue Moon: Down Among the Dead Men With Manchester City wrote in The Observer: ‘Those years without trophies and that spell in England’s third tier taught the villagers of Manchester City to be patient and faithful, and generated an authentic communal but pragmatic spirit, which has been passed on to the next generation of fans as a wonky heirloom.’
Between 2018 and 2024, City won the league title six times in seven seasons, a level of dominance that has never been achieved before in the English game
Yet some fans yearn for the days of being underdogs again, the days of the 1999 Second Division play-off final (above)
Most City fans are angry. Of course, they’re angry. At the moment, many of them seem to be most angry at those who broke the bad news. They want to shoot the messenger. It is an age-old instinct.
In time, perhaps they will turn their ire on those responsible for the multiple breaches of rules that leave the club facing a whole range of severe sanctions, its reputation in ruins.
But there is another emotion, too. Among a sizeable number of City fans, it is possible to detect a certain relish about the idea of being underdogs again, about being on the outside again, about going back to their roots. Some believe, erroneously or not, that perhaps this way, they will get their club back.
And that relish says something wider about exactly what the top flight of English football has become. The Premier League appear to have won their battle to prove that City cheated in the pursuit of an unprecedented period of success in English football but whether we should persist in calling that a victory remains to be seen.
In many ways, City’s defeat is the Premier League’s defeat, too. It is the most egregious example of just how dysfunctional and greedy and arrogant the top flight of the English game has become. It is a symbol of quite how far the league has become detached from the welfare of its supporters.
Friday’s news of City’s fall came against a backdrop of a Premier League many of whose clubs are engaged in open warfare with their most loyal supporters.
Manchester United are the most obvious example of a club that is purging season-ticket holders and attempting to sell more seats to tourists and corporates whose matchday spend dwarfs that of regular match-goers. It is a form of social engineering. United are doing it. City are doing it. You can hear it in the atmosphere at our grounds. Corporates don’t sing and tourists don’t sing.
The people who’ve paid top dollar to be part of the Tunnel Club at the Etihad don’t sing. Anfield does not generate the noise that it once did.
If the Independent Regulator has any teeth at all, then English football must never allow a nation state to buy one of our clubs again
City’s fall and the deplorable way in which the whole sorry saga has been allowed to last so long and blight so much should be used as a line in the sand
Perhaps that’s a digression but City’s shaming is a symptom of a wider malaise in English football. It’s a symptom of a top flight that is moving further and further away from its traditional supporter base by pricing them out. It’s a symptom of a top flight that is more in thrall to power and greed than ever before.
City’s fall and the deplorable way in which the whole sorry saga has been allowed to last so long and blight so much should be used as a line in the sand. This Premier League ‘victory’ should be less a cause for celebration and more a wake-up call. If we don’t recognise how we got here and how we fix it, it will happen again.
If the Independent Regulator has any teeth at all, then English football must never allow a nation state – be that Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Russia, Canada or Australia – to buy one of our clubs again.
The fabulous wealth at their disposal, the geopolitical complications and the potential for falsely inflating sponsorship deals has led City and the league to this point already.
Some of City’s fans and acolytes, like some of Newcastle United’s fans and acolytes, blame the Premier League’s financial rules – rules they signed up to – for limiting their ambitions.
The Squad Cost Ratio system is far from perfect, just as FFP and PSR were far from perfect, but they are better than the alternative, which is a nation state-owned club winning the league in perpetuity.
Between 2018 and 2024, City won the league title six times out of seven, a level of dominance that has never been achieved before in the English game. And that was when they were restricted by financial rules.
Or at least when we thought they were restricted by financial rules. If it were a free-for-all, no one would have touched them.
Why should we feel sorry for a repressive regime using an English football club to try to take attention away from the way they treat their own citizens?
Yasir Al-Rumayyan, Governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, is also the chairman of Newcastle United
And yet their acolytes would have us believe we should feel sorry for City and for Newcastle. What? Feel sorry for two repressive regimes who are using English football clubs to try to take attention away from the way they treat their own citizens? Is that really the legacy we want for English football?
If the Premier League want to survive this farrago, if they want supporters to be able to believe once more that what they are watching is real, if they want supporters to be able to believe that what they are watching is fair, it will not happen by magic. It will need a series of reforms.
A fairer way of limiting spending is one issue. The banning of nation-state ownership is another. A salary cap is another. The dirge of VAR is another. An end to the betrayal of loyal fans is another.
It is little wonder that some do not see banishment from the top flight as a penalty at all. The Premier League is in crisis. Manchester City, once the standard-bearers for its excellence, are now merely the standard-bearers for its shame.
