Ken Early: Manchester City’s supremacy has made the rest of football seem small
Costs that are daunting for a mere football club are insignificant when you are backed by the resources of an authoritarian oil state
As the Manchester City players paraded the European Cup before their supporters, the Ataturk Stadium rocked to the sound of the Inspiral Carpets: “This is how it feels to be lonely. This is how it feels to be small. This is how it feels when your word means nothing at all.”
To the uninitiated, that sentiment might seem to jar with the moment, but the song is a Madchester classic and, more to the point, a favourite at Old Trafford in the days when Ferguson’s team were winning everything. “This is how it feels to be City,” they sang, “this is how it feels when your club wins nothing at all.”
United enjoyed a lot of malicious laughs at City’s expense during the glory years. So secure were they in their superiority that they hardly even considered the “years since City won a trophy” counter at Old Trafford might be tempting fate.
Well… nobody’s laughing now. City fans reclaimed the Inspiral Carpets song years ago to mock United for signing Phil Jones the same summer City got Sergio Aguero. The night they matched United’s greatest-ever trophy haul would not have been complete without gloating over their former oppressors.
If United never seem far from City’s thoughts at such moments, maybe it’s because their story since the Abu Dhabi takeover is most compelling as a revenge drama. Tables turn, fortunes are reversed… when you remember how United lorded it for so many years, there is justice to it. It feels more meaningful to conceive of City as liberating football from the ancient tyranny of the Cartel than to see them as, well, the footballing arm of an authoritarian oil state.
Still, now that City have won five of the last six Premier Leagues, only failed to win the Champions League in 2021 and 2022 because of freak events, and have just cruised rather serenely to a Treble, you wonder whether they might be approaching the point of revenge overkill.
Guardiola is not unusual in being irritated by criticism, but he doesn’t seem motivated by praise – whose praise would mean anything to him?
Imagine a reboot of Moby Dick in which Captain Ahab strikes a mysterious Faustian bargain that enables him to live into the age of industrial whaling. He fits the Pequod with a diesel engine, tracks down Moby Dick using sonar and kills him with an explosive harpoon.
Years later, Ahab goes about in a white whaleskin suit and shoes and has opened a pub called Dick’s Place where all the furniture is made out of whalebone. The story of how he bested the white whale is still his favourite subject of conversation. If anyone is tactless enough to suggest that there was perhaps something unheroic about the explosive harpoon, he tells them to cry more. If anyone seems to be getting too interested in the question of how he continues to be fit as a fiddle at 150 years old, he hires the 50 best lawyers in Nantucket to sue them for the next 10 year
It was interesting to hear Pep Guardiola repeat in several interviews after the match that the great thing about winning the Champions League was that they might finally get the credit they deserved for the five Premier Leagues they have won since he came to the club in 2016.
You wondered what Guardiola meant by “credit”. He is not unusual in being irritated by criticism, but he doesn’t seem motivated by praise – whose praise would mean anything to him? You suspect he does not respect many opinions in football besides his own. Why would he, when he sees deeper into the game than almost anyone else? Look at the performance of John Stones in the final, roaming from box to box, Clodoaldoing his way past challenges. Maybe Stones always had it in him to do this, but it took Guardiola to see it. Wherever he has gone, he gives players and teams an extra dimension.
Last month the club released a video of Guardiola addressing a pre-match huddle earlier this season. “Everything we have won we have won on the pitch – always!” The obvious subtext being, to hell with all the critics who say the secret of City’s success lies in the off-field advantages conferred by their Abu Dhabi ownership and the alleged financial chicanery that led to the Premier League charging them with 115 breaches of the spending rules.
On one level it’s obviously true that if City are winning the league season after season with 90+ points, it’s because their players are going out and playing the opposition off the park nine games out of 10. But it’s also true that City have more than the normal quota of good players. In Saturday’s final, City had two unused substitutes – Riyad Mahrez and Julian Alvarez – who each would have been the best player in Inter’s team.
Guardiola offered this encouragement to Inter: “Football goes on, life goes on, they will try again next year.” If this remark was not simply insincere, it displays a hopeless misunderstanding of the economy of football.Manchester City have a very good chance of making the Champions League final again next year. Inter have almost no chance. They have liabilities of almost a billion dollars, and the current Chinese owner is at risk of being bounced out of owning the club for failing to meet debt repayments. Thirteen players are out of contract this month, and some of the best among those who remain will have to be sold unless someone else turns up to buy the club in the meantime.
In other words, Inter are going through the sort of periodic financial crisis that engulfs so many clubs that try to compete at the top level but end up making mistakes. Recent years have seen even bigger clubs than Inter, such as Barcelona and Juventus, crash and burn as the consequences of accumulated mistakes catch up with them. This doesn’t happen to City. It’s not because they never make mistakes. It’s that they can drop €50 million on a flop like Kalvin Phillips or Benjamin Mendy and it simply doesn’t matter. Costs that are daunting for a mere football club are insignificant when you are backed by the resources of a state.
City’s supremacy has achieved what no previous dominant club has done: they’ve made the rest of football seem small. Clubs regarded as giants have been swatted aside like gnats.
The lustre of the Champions League itself is fading, as Florentino Perez predicted two years ago to undeserved derision. Who, ultimately, can compete with this, except perhaps a state prepared to put in even more money? If Guardiola gets irritated when people focus on this, it’s probably because the most annoying criticisms are the accurate ones.
