But Pep Guardiola’s City squad is not yet as emotionally wedded to the Champions League as Liverpool’s is. It does not have the weight of history in European soccer behind it. It has not yet accrued immunity to the sort of atmosphere, the high-stakes hostility, that this competition can generate, in certain places at least. How it coped under the lights and in the bear pit of Anfield, the theory ran, would decide how the tie would go, and the test would start on the corner of Arkles and Anfield Road.

Not that City was especially happy about that. The club expressed concern to the Merseyside Police, the local constabulary, about the risk of disobedience. But rather than cancel the “welcome,” the police decided to reroute it, in the hope of controlling it.

It did not work. Those projectiles did enough damage to the bus that City had to call for a replacement for the ride home. The original, Guardiola said, was “destroyed,” and in no condition to make the journey of about an hour back to Manchester. Jürgen Klopp, Liverpool’s manager, immediately apologized for the behavior of a handful of his team’s fans, and the club released a condemnatory statement, too. The police said they would comb through video footage to identify the perpetrators.

In that context, it would be wrong to romanticize those few minutes, to shrug off a few smashed windows as a price worth paying for a decent bit of noise at a soccer game.

Similarly, it would be inaccurate to portray it as a spontaneous, organic expression of an inherently superior fan culture. These welcomes are common in Europe — Real Madrid often sees much larger crowds greet its arrival to Champions League games — and, as ever, there were far more with cameras recording the event than partaking of it; this is 2018, after all, where everything that might be shared is in some way performative. It was the same on the bus: the players, inside, were on their phones, filming the people filming them outside.