Manchester City have become the greatest team in world football and they’ve done it thanks to over £1 billion worth of funding. Love them or loathe them, everyone seems happy to agree on that. How do these unfathomable riches and the subsequent success change the culture and identity of a football club and a fanbase?

I expected in researching this article that I would end up having to mount a defence for the club and its fans, maligned in the same way that Chelsea were when Roman Abramovich bankrolled them to glory in the mid 2000’s. I expected I would come across lots of Man City fans who had fallen out of love with the club, had felt it had lost its identity and longed for the club of old. Instead, I found the opposite. Most neutrals are hoping that City pip Liverpool to the league title. Nobody seems to have much ill-feeling towards them. The fans themselves passionately defend the club’s spending and the track record of their owner, Sheikh Mansour, the Deputy PM and member of the Abu Dhabi Royal Family.

Why is there such a lack of condemnation over the manner that Manchester City have achieved such success? Why aren’t the supporters mourning the loss of the “old” City, the ones who gained such popularity for being an alternative to United and all their millions? Or should we be thankful for them; are they a breath of fresh air, a new name to break up the dominance of the establishment clubs? Is it possible to compete in modern football without such unthinkable investment? Who are the real Manchester City and has money and success taken anything away from the soul of their football club?

“Typical” City

Manchester City have never been a small club. That they are now or once were is a popular narrative but it is a false one. Clouded by the more recent history of the club dropping to the Third Division in the ‘90s, City are characterised as a club who wilfully embraced failure and turned up in their tens of thousands anyway. Undying loyalty despite living in the shadows of Manchester United, this image turned them into many people’s second team.

The truth is that Man City’s time in the Third Division was a massive outlier, the result of many years of financial mismanagement while trying to chase success. Success that they had once achieved. City fans of a certain generation will remember being brought up watching their team rule the roost. They remember the likes of Colin Bell and Mike Summerbee, who lit up Maine Road and drove them to a League Title, an FA Cup triumph, European silverware via the Cup Winner’s Cup and a League Cup during a three-year period from 1967 to 1970. They didn’t just win, they won by playing attacking football the envy of many, and continued to challenge for major honours throughout the ‘70s. Famously, they even relegated United to the Second Division in 1974 via a backheel from former United player Denis Law on the final day of the season.

“It’s said by some that if it wasn’t for the takeover we’d be back in League 1 but that’s nonsense as for all our problems, we were a founder member of the PL and had finished mid-table the previous season. The Etihad has never seen anything but PL football and our lowest average attendance was still 40k in Stuart Pearce’s dire final season, not forgetting near-capacity 30k crowds in League 1. So I’d say in the pre-takeover days we were very similar to current clubs like Everton, Newcastle and West Ham. We might have a good year and we might flirt with relegation in a bad year. We were a mid/lower-mid-table club with a good & loyal fanbase and our older fans (me included) had seen us win things in the 1960’s and 1970’s.” @PrestwichBlue. Manchester City fan and contributer to King of the Kippax fanzine.

After winning another League Cup in 1976, the tide began to turn and the hard-luck stories became ingrained in legend as “Typical City”. Always on the verge of success, but managing to shoot themselves in the foot. One of the most famous examples was a fixture against Liverpool on the final day of the 1995/96 season. Needing to better Southampton and Coventry’s results to stay in the Premier League, City scored two own goals to go 2 nil down. After battling back to 2 all, word got out that Coventry were losing and manager Alan Ball instructed his team to protect the result. After playing keep-ball in the corner flag, they realised they had the wrong information and they still needed a goal. Time ran out, and City were relegated. Typical City.

There are countless other examples, and in the thrilling finale to the 2011/12 season this was the main narrative. With United beating Sunderland and City flailing at home to QPR, Martin Tyler asked whether City were about to do it again. Typical City, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Dzeko’s equaliser and Aguero’s dramatic winner seemed to expel years of failure and start a new dawn.

It was and remains a unique selling point for the club. Being the plucky underdog and suffering cruel twists of fate but always bouncing back is an attractive, likeable quality in a football team and helped build their identity as an alternative to the likes of Manchester United and Liverpool. Everyone loves an underdog, and this is surely part of the reason why all these years later neutrals don’t seem to begrudge them the glory that their new owners have brought them, despite the way that success has arrived. Indeed, a major part of the reason that Sheikh Mansour chose Man City was because he had seen that the fanbase was there, even in the relegation seasons. The loyalty that City fans showed throughout the Typical City era proved that they had great potential and would be a sound investment. That loyalty has now been rewarded.

It doesn’t, however, tell the whole story. City spent huge money for the era in the ‘70s trying to bring success back. They were one of the founding members of the breakaway Premier League, much maligned as a move of greed that would forever damage the ability of the rest of the Football League to compete. They intended to float on the Stock Market in the ‘90s, following in the footsteps of their rivals at United. Before Sheikh Mansour was Thaksin Shinawatra, described as a “Human Rights abuser of the worst kind” by Amnesty International. Nobody seemed to mind.

Manchester City pre-2008 was a club that had tasted success, and was one of the biggest clubs in England. It had a huge, loyal fanbase that wanted to see their club go back to playing the football they were brought up watching, to compete again at the highest level. To do so, the club tried everything that the likes of Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United did to achieve a financial dominance. The only difference was that they kept getting it wrong. They were an alternative to United and their place on the stock market, their deals with Nike and Vodafone, their worldwide fanbase and the “prawn sandwich brigade” that came with it. But this wasn’t because of a feeling of righteousness or a desire to be an alternative, people’s club. It was because they tried but kept failing to keep up.

In some ways, “Typical City” does a disservice to Manchester City. The real, typical City to many is the free-flowing, successful teams of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Typical City is playing in the top echelons of English football in front of large, fiercely loyal crowds. They did suffer hard times which led to the famous “gallows humour”, but they were never a minnow.

@richardcooke. Image from the final match at Maine Road, City’s spiritual home.

In other ways, it’s a tag that has served to protect them, and position them as alternatives to Britain’s biggest clubs. It has given them likeability, even sympathy, which ignores that they tried all the corporate stunts that everybody else did in chasing success. Which perhaps makes it more understandable that a self-styled alternative, people’s club were later happy to embrace and defend the unfathomable riches that the Abu Dhabi Sports Group pumped in.

The Perfect Owners

When the Abu Dhabi Sports Group bought Manchester City in 2008, there was widespread scepticism over their intentions. British football had become accustomed to seeing foreign owners promising the world only to deliver nothing but suffering for supporters. They famously helped quell these fears when they managed to seal the marquee signing of Robinho on transfer deadline day, the first day of their stewardship.

Immediately, after years of mismanagement, they began to transform the club from top to bottom. They identified massive structural problems: the lack of adequate training resources, youth facilities and scouting systems, and immediately rectified them by investing heavily in the training ground, academy complex and recruitment team. Khaldoon Al-Mubarak, Chairman of the club and key Government Advisor, was shocked that there was no HR department and very quickly an office block was built to incorporate one, and help turn City into a properly managed, professional outfit.

Perhaps even more important was that effort was made to understand the supporters, too. A fan-zone was set up with restaurants and bars, and the walls of the stadium were adorned with fan’s own stories of their first matches. In Sheikh Mansour’s direct letter to fans in the aftermath of the takeover, he called City fans “the greatest in the world” and spoke of his desire to engage with them in the following weeks. He spoke of his huge ambitions for the club, while also talking sensibly about needing time, as well as about the importance of the club for the community. It was in many ways the perfect introduction to make, and 11 years later he has practically delivered on everything, except (for now at least) European honours.

That they knew to say all the right things shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Contrary to the narrative from their detractors, Premier League football is big in the UAE, and it is believed that Mansour and Al-Mubarak were football fans growing up and have at least some understanding of the game. Like many of the top advisors and members of the ruling family, they got their university education in the west and would have been exposed to its sporting culture. They will have seen the money pumped into the game from other foreign owners and realised that they could build something themselves. It wasn’t a pot-shot from people with more money than sense, they knew exactly what they could bring.

There is also no sign of them backing out and leaving the club in the lurch. While in his limited public appearances Sheikh Mansour has maintained that the investment was a private one based on its economic potential, many of his advisors including the City Chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak have pointed out the immense PR potential that owning a Premier League football club brings. All signs indicate that they are in it for the long haul, and as Man City grow as a football club they will arguably naturally become more and more self-sufficient and less dependent on the Abu Dhabi wealth. Even if they did back down in a few years time, Manchester City aren’t going anywhere.

“That was an important trigger, the realisation that when you buy an English Premier League club it is a totally different ball game, the public persona, the image, the public relations side of the deal, was very much bigger than the investment. That had been underestimated.” Khaldoon Al-Mubarak, interview with The Guardian.

The only complaints that supporters have of going to Manchester City games under the current ownership aren’t so much the fault of the current owners as they are of the way that football has naturally changed over time. Fans talk about a lesser atmosphere than at Maine Road, of being priced out of games, things that fans of almost every other Premier League club complain of. While undoubtedly there are things the ownership can do to aid the matchday experience, they aren’t unique in that regard.

Given that they have invested so heavily in the foundations of the club as well as in the team, delivering a wealth of trophies along the way, it is hard to argue that they are anything but the perfect owners for a football club. Especially for a football club who desperately wanted the successes of old back, who had to watch their neighbours rule the game for two decades. Can anyone blame the fans for embracing its new ownership?

@oldelpaso. Jubilant scenes at the Etihad after Manchester City’s dramatic title victory in 2011/12.

The two biggest question marks that have caused varying levels of scrutiny have been the question of “financial doping” and the human rights record of the United Arab Emirates.

Again, it is maintained that the purchase of the club was a private venture. But it is impossible to separate the ownership of the football club from the state. The owner, Sheikh Mansour, is part of the Royal Family and is the Deputy Prime Minister of Abu Dhabi. Along with being Chairman of Man City, Khaldoon Al-Mubarak also runs several companies on behalf of the state, including Mubadala where his role is to prepare the Abu Dhabi economy for a time when the oil runs out by investing in other business ventures. He is also the chairman of the Executive Affairs Authority, advising on PR and image management for the nation. The club is essentially owned by the state and, whether it was the initial intention of Sheikh Mansour or not, has become a key part of its PR wing.

Consequently, Man City become uncomfortably interlinked with the failures of the state. A state whose Human Rights record is largely terrible, and its treatment of workers internationally condemned. Many people have been arrested, imprisoned and “forcibly disappeared” for criticising the country on social media, an offence under the country’s strict defamation laws. In one of the most famous cases, a peaceful, online human rights protestor, Ahmed Mansoor, had his passport and car stolen, his bank account emptied and was followed and beaten twice in a week. Eventually he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Furthermore, Human Rights Watch accuses the Emirates of 87 unlawful attacks in Yemen, some of which were “likely war crimes” which killed nearly 1000 civilians between March 2015 and 2018. It also found that they are running two detention facilities where political opponents have been detained despite release orders, and abuse and torture has been reported by victims.

The Emirates models itself as a tolerant, multi-cultural country. It follows the Sunni version of Islam, considered substantially more liberal than other Middle Eastern states. Yet, marital rape isn’t considered a crime there. A 2010 Supreme Court ruling allowed for husbands to beat their wives if they don’t “leave physical marks”. Women require a lawful excuse for not having sexual relations with their husbands.

“We judge other states in terms of “human rights” and while there’s no doubt that things like the treatment of migrant workers and the transparency of the justice system could be better in the UAE, there’s a lot of things that reflect social, religious & cultural norms there that have been in place for hundreds of years and aren’t likely to change. Also, it’s a very young country and it took us over 700 years to get from Magna Carta to universal suffrage. So while there are things that I think could & should change quickly for the better, there are always going to be elements of their lives that we may find unacceptable but are an accepted part of life in these countries. Likewise for them, looking at us.” @PrestwichBlue.

By investing in an English football club, the Emirates can build bridges with the west and show a different image of itself, ranking alongside the grand hotels, skyscrapers and luxury shopping centres that have been drawing an ever increasing number of tourists.

“The UAE’s enormous investment in Manchester City is one of football’s most brazen attempts to ‘sportswash’ a country’s deeply tarnished image.” Amnesty International, November 2018

As far as owning a football club goes, Sheikh Mansour and the money from the UAE make for perfection. Infrastructure, investment, a conscious effort to engage with and listen to the supporters. They have delivered a world-class team that has brought joy to a success deprived fanbase, who stuck with their underperforming team for years, through thick and thin. But there is a massive moral conflict when considering where that money has come from that has gone largely ignored by Manchester City supporters, as well as fans of other clubs and the media. Why?

“I judge them far more on how they’ve run my club than how they run their country. They have indeed been fantastic owners and there’s more to come from them, including further redevelopment of the area around the Etihad and of the stadium itself. They have a strategic partnership with the city council that’s probably unrivalled in the sporting world.” @PrestwichBlue.

What is clear is that English football supporters in general are far less political than many of their European counterparts. Outside of Glasgow there is no rivalry defined by politics or religion, and although certain fanbases are more left or right wing than others, it’s never to a militant degree, and football always comes first. The British love for the game is a pure one, where until our clubs are brought to the brink of extinction, we tend not to concern ourselves too much with what’s going on at boardroom level.

Plus, if City were a big club suffering hard times rather than embracing them, a club open to corporate deals and the murkier financial side of the game that an “alternative” club might not be, then there isn’t as huge a moral dilemma in welcoming Abu Dhabi to use their club as a propaganda tool as we might originally have thought.

For this reason, garnering far more attention and condemnation from football fans have been the accusations that City have cheated UEFA’s Financial Fair Play Laws, and that this has led to an uneven playing field.

Financial Fair Play- Protecting the Game, or Protecting the Establishment?



Just a year after Abu Dhabi’s riches arrived in the blue half of Manchester, UEFA agreed in principle new regulations to ensure that clubs could no longer spend beyond their means. It limited the amount of debt that a club could be in at the end of each year, ensuring that money could no longer be pumped in from external sources unless earned through sponsorship deals, transfer income, ticketing and television income. Clearly, this posed a threat to Manchester City’s new model; after one year of Arab ownership, they recorded a loss of over £150 million.

Michel Platini described the new regulations as an attempt to protect clubs from unscrupulous owners and safeguard their futures. Anyone who knows anything about UEFA will have been sceptical about their good intentions from the beginning, but in general Financial Fair Play has seemed to work to at least some extent; within three years of its implementation, the combined debt across all top European leagues was reduced by over 600 million euros.

It isn’t, however, without its critics. Understandably, most of those are from either Paris or the blue half of Manchester.

The accusation is that the regulations have helped only to maintain football’s status quo. The likes of Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and Manchester United have already played the financial game so well that they have a monopoly of massive sponsorship deals that will forever allow them, even within Financial Fair Play laws, to spend huge sums of money on the best players. For smaller clubs, it is impossible to compete with those transfer fees without outside funding.

And are deals with Chevrolet, Vodafone and Dunkin Donuts, even if they have been earned “organically” via on-field success, any more relevant to the game of football and what it is supposed to represent than petrodollars from the Arab Emirates?

The question at the centre of it all is whether it is possible to compete for major honours without external investment. And even as a football purist, it is extremely hard to argue that it is. In England, Liverpool and Tottenham have drawn compliments for running their clubs in the “right” way, with Liverpool recording the world record profit last year before being outdone by Tottenham in recent weeks. They have managed to compete while spending within their means; but they’re yet to win anything.

Liverpool are on the verge of their greatest ever points return in their storied history, and yet they will likely still fall short to Man City’s all conquering, 2 world class players in each position, behemoth. Tottenham have competed but when their smaller squads have fallen short they have been mocked for a lack of “bottle” rather than being praised for even keeping pace to begin with.

Across Europe, the story is the same. Borussia Dortmund achieved great success, until time finally ran out on the sustainability of losing their best players to Bayern Munich every summer. In Spain, Atletico briefly threatened the status quo of Barcelona and Real Madrid by winning the league title in 2014. But under the greatest manager in their history they have been unable to keep up long term. Ajax and Monaco have produced incredibly exciting young teams, only to see them picked apart by the big boys. There are the odd miracles, Leicester City the most noteworthy, but their success was never going to continue, and by the time they lost their opening game of the season in their defence of the title, things had seemed to go back to normal without much delay.

Manchester City fans are presented with an option. Watch their team win thanks to huge external investment from a questionable regime, or watch their team suffer in the lower echelons while their neighbours win everything instead. On a footballing level, it’s a no-brainer.

“Football is now a business and, like most businesses, clubs need investment to get a consistent return. I did initially wonder if the level of investment would detract from any success we had but it didn’t. Success still has to be achieved and many clubs have spent big without achieving it. In the last 5 years Liverpool & Everton have spent nearly £1bn gross between them but won nothing. We spent the money mostly well and that was the only way we would have won anything so I don’t feel guilty.” @PrestwichBlue

It’s also interesting how quickly these things are forgotten. We talk about English football’s “top four”: Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea, as if that’s always been the way. 16 years have passed since Roman Abramovich bankrolled Chelsea and now that their spending has settled down slightly and they’ve become a global brand, they’re accepted as an establishment club.

City are far from the first team to welcome foreign investment and benefit greatly from it. According to journalist and author David Conn, who has spoken frequently to the board at City and written extensively on the topic, the ownership team are shocked and confused by the criticism of their spending. They grew up watching the Premier League, barely a club remains that is under local ownership, in many ways they feel that they aren’t doing anything new. The main difference, they might feel, is that while many foreign owners have come in with false promises, they have delivered on all of theirs.

However, the Abu Dhabi ownership of Manchester City, as well as Qatar’s ownership of PSG, have undeniably taken spending on to another level entirely. Entire states owning football clubs is a new precedent, and it leads to the question, what next?

“I’m not against the concept of financial regulation in football but FFP is not the way to do that. I certainly do believe there’s a large element of protectionism by the old G-14 in the introduction of FFP. If we accept that investment is necessary to join the elite group of clubs, then limiting the amount owners can invest can surely only be seen as protectionist.” @PrestwichBlue

Clearly, something has to be done. But for the good that FFP brings, it could lead to a closed shop for other clubs. Alternatives have been suggested, such as a salary cap and a luxury tax. Common in American sports, this would be a tax imposed for going over a pre-determined level of spending, that money would then be redistributed amongst the rest of the clubs in the league and would discourage the richer clubs from spending too much. Revenue sharing has also been suggested, which ironically was what the big clubs were opposed to in the early ‘90s, leading to the Premier League being founded.

In Europe, a return to the old style of the European Cup could also aid competitive balance. Rather than a seeded group stage where the top clubs inevitably qualify for the latter stages, a direct, unseeded knockout competition gives the lesser sides a better chance of winning the competition. This would undeniably be met with huge backlash from the existing superpowers, but studies have shown that these methods would all be fairer and do a better job of promoting competitive balance than the existing FFP regulations.

In recent articles posted in German newspaper Der Spiegel via Football Leaks, City have been accused of cheating the existing Financial Fair Play rules. Emails obtained showed, for example, that a £15 million sponsorship deal with a State controlled investment fund in Abu Dhabi was actually only going to see the club receive £3 million; the remaining £12 million would come from the pocket of Sheikh Mansour himself. Assuming this was common practice (which the leaked emails appear to show), City were effectively able to continue to bankroll the team using Mansour’s own fortune, under the guise that it was coming from sponsorship deals.

The allegations against City go on and on. Creative but incredibly murky deals to sidestep the rules. UEFA are currently investigating the allegations and ultimately could ban the club from European competitions. Whether the rules are fair is up for debate, but if the reports are true then surely the only conclusion can be that they have cheated and gained an unfair advantage over the rest of the playing field.

For the supporters, it has been something else to rally around the club for rather than something to condemn. They label UEFA as corrupt and protectionist, and the investigation into financial wrongdoing as a conspiracy against them.

A Fight for Identity

This battle has again caused many City fans to see themselves and their club as anti-establishment. Still an alternative to the big names, but this time for being too powerful rather than not powerful enough. It’s a take that is hard to reconcile; it doesn’t get much more establishment than being run by a state’s PR wing. But it is clear, that to the supporters at least, City are still the same club as ever. They don’t see themselves any differently now to how they saw themselves in the Third Division. There doesn’t appear to be any identity crisis that you might expect from a fanbase that has seen their club change so much over the last decade.

City still retain the goodwill of many football fans, those brought up with Liverpool and United being top dogs generally will always choose City to win titles over them. But the reason for that might not be what the supporters would hope. People don’t see City as anti-establishment for sticking it to UEFA, or a cool alternative. They see them as a smaller club who they haven’t had to put up with winning everything for decades at a time.

Should City’s grip on English football remain tight over the coming years, they will have to come to terms with the criticism that they get. In some ways it has already begun. While it’s clear that most football fans don’t seem bothered about the source of City’s funding, they do seem much more bothered by the apparent empty seats at the Etihad. City, a club priding itself on the loyalty of its supporters, now under the microscope for failing to sell out Champions League semi-finals or trips to Wembley in the cups.

Fans have come out on the attack in response, pointing out (rightly) that it is unfair to expect them to be able to fork out hundreds of pounds at a time when they face three games a week. For all the riches of the club, Manchester remains the poorest area of Britain. However, that isn’t the point that rivals are making. Anfield isn’t full of the exact same people every week. Neither are Old Trafford, the Emirates or Stamford Bridge. And this noble stance doesn’t stop City fans calling their title rivals bin-dippers or singing songs about poverty in Merseyside.

The point is that City aren’t yet as big as the others. The global support isn’t there. They don’t have masses of tourists coming to take photos or sample something famous to boost the numbers. That isn’t, necessarily, a bad thing either. But it will change. A generation of kids are admiring the football that City play in the same way that a generation of kids were brought up admiring the football of Guardiola’s Barcelona. They will become one of the giants if they continue their dominance; one of the “establishment”, even, and with that will bring changes to the dynamics of their fanbase.

With success comes criticism, and they are having a lot of success. They will need to reconcile the way they see themselves and how they want to be seen with how people will begin to see them. Loyal support to the Third Division and back vs empty seats and plastic flags laid on by the club. Anti-establishment but run by a state’s PR wing. Anti-prawn sandwich brigade but will ultimately have to welcome them in to the club as their success continues. If their identity has always been to be the opposite of Manchester United, they will need to get used to that not exactly being the case anymore. Indeed, for a new generation it will be Manchester United who appear to be the underdogs.

In Manchester, United haven’t always dominated the landscape. But they dominated it at a vital time. The late ‘80s, ‘90s and early 2000s, when the city grew out of its post-industrial slumber and revolutionised itself. As the music of Manchester made the mainstream, United began winning titles again. The Gallagher brothers aside, United seemed to get something of a monopoly on this Manchester culture, the Stone Roses, the parties, the cool, exciting new fashion seemed to associate itself with the red half, who concurrently were revolutionising English football with Alex Ferguson and his youthful side, while Man City languished and began a descent to the Third Division. United are forever the “mancs”, associated intrinsically with their hometown.

David Conn argues that, even though it is City who see themselves as the alternative to the establishment, United have even claimed Manchester’s spirit of rebellion and protest far greater than City ever have. The protests surrounding the Glazier family that made national news and the resulting founding of FC United of Manchester reflected those left-wing protest roots and drew solidarity from many in the footballing community. City have never protested Abu Dhabi or Thaksin Shinawatra before them.

All this seems to come together and put the club and its fanbase at a crossroads. Yet, the fans remain happy. Happier than ever, in fact. They have an incredible team, they have an incredible coach and they are back at the top where they had been waiting to be again ever since the ‘60s. They don’t feel like their success is tainted, and they are enjoying the moment after years of hurt.

I didn’t find any deserters, I didn’t find a breakaway club, I didn’t find Human Rights protestors, and I initially wondered why. But it’s extremely simple. They are football fans, not politicians. They are a football club, not an institution with fixed morals and values. But the day will come, if success carries on as it surely will, that they do become one of Britain’s footballing institutions. And City fans will need to think about what they will represent about themselves, their city and their sport.

Ultimately, however, they will feel that the way they have achieved success isn’t Man City’s problem. It’s football’s problem. It wasn’t Manchester City who allowed money in to the game, who changed the game beyond recognition far before Sheikh Mansour arrived in 2008. It wasn’t Manchester City who let agents become more powerful than the players or the clubs they represent. It wasn’t Manchester City who priced out working class fans and replaced them with the middle classes and hospitality suites. It wasn’t Manchester City who invented foreign owners or the principle of buying success. It had all been done before them; they are just the latest to profit from it and have taken it on to the next level. They aren’t going to listen to the moralising of supporters from clubs who’ve profited from it for 30 years, now that they are struggling to keep up.

It is the likes of the Premier League, the FA, FIFA and UEFA who have the responsibility to safeguard the future of the game. It is them who have allowed clubs to become bigger than the bodies that govern them. All of Europe’s biggest clubs who have gained funding from shady places, turned the game into a business, broken world record transfer fees, negotiated TV deals for themselves and refused to share revenue with lower clubs, threatened to break away and form Super Leagues; they are the ones who have given birth to this new beast. Everyone in football must take some responsibility, which is why their calls for City fans to have some sense of shame fall on deaf ears.

Culturally, these are interesting times. Manchester City fans who’ve experienced Maine Road, the “typical city” days, the camaraderie in the bad times, the pride in being different, being everyone’s second team, have a lot to come to terms with. But then, doesn’t everyone in modern football? The transformation of this club is a caricature of the way football has gone, and the battles City fans will now have to fight are just the same as everyone else’s, pumped up by a couple of factors.

They’ve been there in the bad times, which conversely, many would argue were the good. Terracing, affordability, culture, an even playing field and a game that didn’t feel dominated by money. And now they’re here in the good times, which conversely, many would argue are the bad. But they’re still the same people. Only the world has changed around them; politics has changed, the country has changed, everything has changed. Football has changed, and at the top of it are Manchester City. Trying not to change. Trying hard to be the same old, Typical City.