The modern-day Manchester City have changed a lot since the day – and if there is a better story about any club I am yet to see it – back in 1989 when they had to beat Bournemouth at Maine Road to guarantee promotion and, leading 3-0 at half-time, Mel Machin decided to start the party early by bringing in a comedian to take his team talk. Eddie Large – shiny silver suit, sleeves rolled up – addressed every player using a different celebrity impression. Deputy Dawg ordered Paul Lake to keep tight in defence. Cliff Richard told Trevor Morley to shoot on sight, Harold Wilson asked Ian Brightwell to keep it simple and Benny from Crossroads told Andy Dibble to stay awake. Final score: 3-3.

These days, there isn’t the same kind of humour in the shiny new corridors. There is a great story, however, from Roberto Mancini’s time, amid the firecrackers and noise of a night at Aris Thessaloniki’s Kleanthis Vikelidis Stadium, when the Greek team’s match programme had taken a spoof Where’s Wally? picture off the internet, thinking it was a genuine photograph of the squad Abu Dhabi’s money had put together. There were 60 players going back seven rows, including Wayne Rooney, Kaká, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Lionel Messi, all resplendent in City’s blue and squashed in like the album cover for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Aris were so embarrassed they pulped every copy that had not been sold.

Yaya Touré was on the fourth row of that picture (alongside Didier Drogba, Mesut Özil and Gianluigi Buffon, one of six goalkeepers) and, whatever happens next, he has worn those colours with distinction. It is a pity, perhaps, that largely because of his agent he might ultimately be remembered because of another piece of tragicomedy. Wednesday is Touré’s birthday and goodness knows how City will handle the occasion bearing in mind the uproar when all they did last year – the rotten swines – was present their player with an expensive-looking cake and serenade him via Twitter.

A year on, could it really be that a grown man with all the rich footballer’s accessories could throw such a strop because he didn’t get the bumps or he wanted a personal rendition of “Happy Birthday” from the sheikh? The story is more complicated than that and don’t overlook the fact it was the agent, the consistently atrocious Dimitri Seluk, who drove the headlines (“when it was Roberto Carlos’s birthday, the president of Anzhi gave him a Bugatti” being one gem), with a lingering sense of doubt elsewhere about whether his client was ever as cross as purported.

Touré’s mistake is that he should have used the occasion to sign one final cheque and abandon his agent as the worst kind of rent-a-quote. He didn’t and that’s a great shame because there is not much else in Touré’s career to suggest he is one of the sport’s prima donnas. Seluk, meanwhile, continues to snipe and stir in a way that suggests Touré does not appreciate the damage being caused to his own reputation. Every time his Mr Fixit speaks it reminds me of the old Henry James quote: “He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.”

Seluk now says it is “90% certain” Touré will sign for another club at the end of the season and maybe he hopes that is true, bearing in mind this is his one major client and it would mean another tills-ringing day at the office. Something behind the scenes does not feel right and Seluk has been badgering away for so long now there seems to be a fairly widespread belief that Sunday’s game against QPR will probably be Touré’s penultimate appearance in Manchester.

My own feeling is that it doesn’t add up and, in defence of Touré, that it is bewildering to see the way he has been consistently made a scapegoat for City’s shortcomings this season, bearing in mind the number of other players who seem to have escaped without a fraction of the same comment.

I could highlight Samir Nasri, who boldly proclaimed in February that Chelsea were “nothing special” then ushered himself to the edges and will probably always be remembered at City as an elegant frustration. Or Edin Dzeko, whose decline has been considerable and can possibly be traced back to the point he was awarded a new contract last August (City fans might not appreciate the source, but Sir Alex Ferguson always said there was a danger of players switching off when they were given the security of another pay rise).

There is no point pretending Touré has emulated the exhilarating play that placed him on the player-of-the-year shortlists last season and probably made him second only to Luis Suárez as the Premier League’s outstanding performer. His minutes-per-goal ratio has gone from one every 146 to one every 274. His shooting accuracy is 39% when before it was 54%. His passing accuracy is down – 88.8% against 90.1% – and, most notably, he has scored fewer goals: eight in 26 appearances compared with 20 in 35 games.

But let’s cut the guy some slack. In the past year Touré has played in the World Cup and, mid-season, half a dozen games in the heat and humidity of the African Cup of Nations, when we just have to see how one tournament, never mind two, has caught up with Robin van Persie and Steven Gerrard this year (or how John Terry has played after not being involved in Brazil).

Touré has also been through the kind of personal grief that could affect any sportsman’s performance, bearing in mind his brother, Ibrahim, died from cancer during the World Cup, at the age of 28. All that considered, is it really fair to have expected nothing but minimum eight-out-of-10 performances every single week?

A similar thing happened to Messi last season when he apparently had a bad year (in Messi’s case, that meaning a World Cup final and Fifa’s Golden Ball award, plus 41 goals and 14 assists from 46 games with Barcelona). That was the year Messi discovered he was under investigation for alleged tax evasion. Tito Vilanova, one of his mentors at Barça, had died the previous April and a close friend, the journalist Jorge “Topo” Lopez, was killed in a car crash just before Argentina played Holland for a place in the World Cup final. Sometimes in football we are all guilty of seeing the dip in form without acknowledging the possible causes.

The point is that Touré is still a highly capable player and it would certainly represent a surprise here if the deposed champions were to move out the four-time African player of the year and risk him excelling for another club after the benefits of a summer off.

For one thing, City are nobody’s pushover these days and will not allow a player’s agent to dictate to them, no matter how tempting it must be to make Seluk someone else’s problem. Logistically, there are very few clubs apart from Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea and Manchester United who could match Touré’s reputed wages of £220,000 a week and, politically, it would surely be a risky move for the two executives who were supposed to take City to the next level. Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain must be under considerable pressure from Abu Dhabi given their undistinguished record since taking transfer recruitment off Brian Marwood. Moving out one of the club’s more influential players is not the obvious answer.

It would be a bold move as well for a new manager (though, if City are true to their word, Manuel Pellegrini is going nowhere). Far better for whoever is in charge to reconfigure the team’s midfield so opposition teams did not set up to capitalise on Touré’s habit of straying forward – a long-term issue that appears to be one of Pellegrini’s blind spots. Paul Pogba would be an outstanding acquisition even if Mino Raiola, the agent he shares with Mario Balotelli and Ibrahimovic, is another who sometimes gives the impression he should be fitted with his own muzzle. In the meantime, Touré turns 32 on Wednesday. One dreads to think what will happen if City somehow forget.

Koeman would merit manager’s award even if Mourinho cares

José Mourinho’s conspiracy theories about the football authorities, referees and television pundits have formed a tiresome subplot to Chelsea’s title success, but the people who choose the Premier League manager of the month awards have played right into his hands by somehow going through the whole season without him receiving a single one. The same happened when Chelsea won the league in 2006 and we can all imagine the curl of his lip if he does not get the main prize at the League Managers Association dinner on 26 May.

“I don’t care,” he said this season. “There is something that is not right because, in four years in the Premier League, I’ve won the manager of the month three times. So, for sure, they don’t like me. But I don’t care.” Of course you don’t, José.

He would be a valid winner but there is still something extraordinary about the story of Southampton’s season and the fact that they have spent a large proportion of it in the Champions League qualifying places.

Ronald Koeman inherited a team stripped of their best players and that period brought so much insecurity to their supporters that it is a remarkable job he has done, even if since mid‑February they have not been able to sustain a place in the top four. No matter today’s results, just compare Koeman’s first year in English football with that of his old rival Louis van Gaal at Manchester United and the way an extravagantly assembled team have plodded through seven-eighths of the season.

An honorary mention, too, for Garry Monk, who doesn’t seem to get an awful lot of praise bearing in mind Swansea have already accumulated six more points than their previous record in this league. They are on course to finish in the top eight for the first time and Monk’s distinguished work deserves more recognition, not least when he is 36 and the youngest manager in the top division.

The kids love Mario, but it isn’t Balotelli

In the age of the half-and-half scarf, the selfie stick and the creeping phenomenon of goal-music, we probably shouldn’t be too surprised by the modern gimmicks at our football grounds. All the same, it was slightly disconcerting last Sunday when a colleague in Chelsea’s press box pointed out that at the back of the stand there were video game consoles, with a line of children hammering on the buttons rather than watching the football. They have been there for quite a while, apparently. Chelsea seem to have kept it quiet so far and a part of me is reluctant to spread the word. I do hope this doesn’t catch on elsewhere.