I want to preface this by saying I do not give a fuck about Shitty other than the illegal money laundering and then their buying an acquittal with CAS. I truly do not care if they or PSG spend shitloads, and also truly couldn't care less about purist nobs in Germany whingeing on about Leipzig.
Moaning about Man City, PSG and Leipzig is mostly just jealousy
https://theathletic.com/1991254/2020/08/15/man-city-leipzig-psg-money-buy-champions-league/
You might have seen it. That familiar shade of red, held up in Rome and Istanbul and Madrid and on all sorts of other European assignments. Liverpool fans have always known how others see their club. The banner shows a picture of their European Cups. Five to begin with, and now six. “No wonder you hate us,” it reads.
In another time, it was Manchester United with so much haughty self-worth they had a picture in their programme showing a skip, directly outside Old Trafford, overflowing with empty cans of silver polish.
Sir Alex Ferguson used to say there was always someone waiting to jump off London Bridge when his team won a football match. And there were times, as they swept up the silverware, when it inspired something bordering on genuine hatred. “There’s a tremendous amount of jealousy towards this club,” was Ferguson’s take. “I don’t understand why.”
It was pretty simple, really. Every team that routinely wins trophies tends to encounter animosity in some form. It is part of football, it is unshakeable and, as Manchester City have found out, the teams at the top are generally obliged to live with it. A haul of 11 major trophies in the last decade tends to make it worthwhile. Or 14 if we include Community Shields, as Pep Guardiola says we should, with the possibility that the biggest and most important trophy of all could follow in the next week.
City winning the Champions League? It feels a little strange even typing those words as someone who can remember covering the club in the old third division, with Macclesfield Town as their local derby, and then the move from Maine Road when nobody even thought about putting a trophy cabinet in the new stadium.
It all makes sense, of course, to picture them as European champions when you think about the money they have spent to reach this point. I will come round to the idea. It’s like watching Joey and Rachel hooking up on Friends… they all seem very happy. It just takes a bit of getting used to, that’s all.
But it’s a real possibility and we can probably guess the way the narrative will turn if they make it past Lyon tonight to join a list of semi-finalists that, more than ever before, reflects the state of modern football.
Paris Saint-Germain, for starters. Some people will look at the team from Parc des Princes and see their shiny kit and Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and their other glamorous names, and consider them a worthy winner of European football’s premier club competition.
Others will see something profoundly depressing in it.
They will see a club, like City, that have been bankrolled on Middle Eastern money for a political purpose. The perception of both clubs is that, if they have a problem, they will throw enough money at it until it goes away. The only real difference is PSG’s wealth comes from Qatar rather than Abu Dhabi, as it does with City, but fundamentally it all comes back to the same thing. The rich ultimately beat the poor, the super-rich beat the rich.
It is old money versus new money. But it also goes deeper than that. PSG versus City in the final, anyone? Roll up, roll up, for what will be billed as the sportswashing event of the year. What a football match it would be. What a line-up of category-A footballers. Just don’t expect all the headlines to be about the actual football.
The volume might be turned even higher if RB Leipzig are impudent enough to put their ribbons on the trophy. Bayern Munich, the most successful team in Germany, had been in existence 74 years before they did it for the first time. United took 90 years. Liverpool needed 85, Barcelona 93 and Real Madrid 54. Yet Leipzig are threatening to do it only a few months after their 11th birthday. And, again, it is tempting to think some of their many critics must be straying dangerously close to the point of spontaneous combustion.
In another sport, or another part of life, it would be described only as a fairytale, a brilliantly uplifting story of what can happen when talented people get together with a shared ambition. “That’s not progress,” one interviewer pointed out to Leipzig coach Julian Nagelsmann after his team had beaten Atletico Madrid in Thursday’s quarter-final. “It’s a rocket launch.”
In football, however, a lot of people don’t like it when the nouveau riche — a term that is rarely used flatteringly — take a position of power. The establishment, in particular.
When Leipzig were “born” as the German branch of Red Bull’s burgeoning sports empire on 19 May, 2009, completing their buyout of fifth-tier SSV Markranstadt, it was eight days before Guardiola won his first European Cup as Barcelona’s manager. It has all happened absurdly quickly. And the backdrop to Leipzig’s story is that, wherever they have been in Germany, there has been hostility.
Now we are told Leipzig are such football pariahs the German football magazine 11 Freunde intends to ignore their semi-final against PSG. “RB Leipzig isn’t a football club, but an imitation,” the magazine says. “It’s a marketing project, established solely for strengthening the Red Bull brand. It never intended on just playing football.”
In football, it appears to be a sin to be successful when you don’t have any “real” history. But is that really fair?
It gets thrown at City, too, and that’s when you know the argument is getting really silly.
No history? City won their first FA Cup 61 years before Liverpool. City’s first League Cup came 17 years ahead of Arsenal. Their first European trophy, the 1970 Cup Winners’ Cup, arrived before any of Liverpool’s. They broke the attendance record for the first time in 1924 and there are 116 years between the first and last of their major honours. Blackburn Rovers are the only club, on 118 years, with a longer span of success.
I could go on. Did you know King George V picked Hyde Road, City’s first ground, when he became the first monarch to attend a football match? That’s history, isn’t it? Or you could go even further back into the news archives to 1902, for example, when City were raising money to help a club called Newton Heath. Because if you know your history, you will know what became of Newton Heath (clue: they changed their name and moved into some place called Old Trafford).
The same was said about Chelsea when Roman Abramovich took control of the club. Chelsea were another plastic new-age club, apparently, even though they lifted their first European trophy in 1971 and had English football’s highest average attendance in 10 different seasons from 1908 to 1955.
There was the famous line from David Dein, then Arsenal’s vice-chairman, that Abramovich “has parked his Russian tank in our front garden and is firing £50 notes at us”. Chelsea, Ferguson said, seemed “hell-bent on ruining football”, to go with his later accusation that City were guilty of “kamikaze spending” and ruining the transfer market for everybody else.
Yet that is hypocritical in the extreme. No other club in England has broken the British transfer record more frequently than United. Ten times, in total. Half of them while a sign for “Ahcumfigovin” (I come from Govan) was hanging on the manager’s wall. Two more while Ferguson was a director.
For a bit of context, Chelsea and City have broken the record a combined four times.
There are so many double standards in football sometimes. Often from the strangest sources, too. Did you see that Wolverhampton Wanderers were one of the Premier League clubs — aka the Gang of Nine — who had written to CAS to ask them to stop City playing in the Champions League while the appeal against their two-year ban was ongoing? That’s Wolves, who have just been punished by UEFA for breaching financial fair-play regulations.
Or how about Jurgen Klopp expressing his displeasure about City winning that appeal and being found — to the obvious disappointment of many people within the sport — not to have cheated the system, after all? Klopp described it as “not a good day for football”. Was it a good day for football when Liverpool paid City an out-of-court £1 million settlement because of the alleged hacking scandal, involving three senior members of Anfield’s recruitment department, that involved City’s scouting system being unlawfully accessed on hundreds of occasions from June 2012 to February 2013?
Unfortunately for City, there are not many people who are willing to stick up for them these days. But I suppose I have a bit of a soft spot for the club, having covered them for 20-odd years.
I don’t often admit it, though, and that probably sums up City’s diminished popularity these days. I imagine it will inspire angry comments beneath this article. I know the reaction on Twitter. I know the frothing, incandescent rage City can inspire. And that’s just some of my companions in the press box.
It is still true, though. I know plenty of good people at the club. I have seen, close-up, the way City embrace their local community. I have watched the entire journey from the old League One. I have laughed at them, and with them. I can still remember the scene on Blue Moon Rising, the 2010 film about City, when they were rattling around a broom cupboard to find some of the things they had won over the years and eventually brought out a porcelain cow. I haven’t forgotten the days when City were so overwrought about United they would not let staff have red company cars.
Blue tomato sauce? That was true, too.
Sergio Aguero’s title-winning goal, with the final kick of the 2011-12 season, is the single most extraordinary sporting moment I have ever witnessed. Kevin De Bruyne is the most gifted passer I have seen in the Premier League. I also know it was a myth that City’s fans enjoyed their status as loveable losers in the lower leagues (there’s nothing enjoyable about losing, home and away, to Lincoln City).
At the same time, I have to accept it was easier to embrace the old City rather than the modern-day version.
Let me tell you a little story, for example, about a man by the name of Mike Corbett.
Corbett was a former bombardier who used to sit in the cabin at the entrance to City’s old training ground and provide the first welcome for visitors. He was old-school. He had tattoos on his hands, a rasping Glaswegian accent and the inside of his cabin was decorated with posters and newspaper cuttings of Ricky Hatton, the world champion boxer and City fan.
It was Mark Hughes, the manager at the time, who asked Corbett to take them down and understand that the new-look City had to conform with a certain kind of image. Corbett was at City for so long that when he was moved out he received a personal letter of gratitude from Cook. But he was still moved out. Today it is a small battalion of security guards on every corner, looking very officious with their walkie-talkies and blazers and dangling earpieces.
“Manchester City has long been perceived as a ‘friendly’ club,” Mark Hodkinson wrote in Blue Moon, published in 1999 and arguably the best book written about the club. “In stereotypical terms, United is your out-of-town hypermarket, faceless, homogenised and shamelessly avaricious, while City is your friendly corner shop, all ‘how are you?’ and ‘nice to see you, love’.”
It was probably inevitable some of that would be lost when the money came in and the club started to expand. City have had to take a crash course in what it took to be a big (or bigger) club and then a superpower. It hasn’t always been a smooth ride. The nice-to-see-you club has become, in the eyes of some, a sticking-up-their-middle-finger club.
And, yes, I’m very aware that if you join up all the dots, it will take us to Abu Dhabi and some pretty hideous things linked to the regime that bought City because they wanted a “proxy brand”, as former chief executive Garry Cook acknowledged in an interview with The Athletic.
Some of City’s critics are experts on the human-rights issues in Abu Dhabi and so knowledgeable on the subject that you have to listen and try to educate yourself. Others… well, let’s just say I’m dubious that so many fans of other clubs have a genuine interest in these politics. It is a handy way to score some points on Twitter. It is a good opportunity to belittle and criticise City’s achievements.
Far more likely, however, is that a lot of this antipathy from rival supporters is because City are richer and more successful than their own teams. Jealousy? Yes, I suspect that’s exactly what it is.
