RANT: Manchester City Are Sucking The Life Out Of Football
Manchester City have just won the treble* and no one seems to care. Why?
I’m generally quite an optimistic person, especially when it comes to football. Despite this being the least enjoyable season I’ve ever experienced and despite what you are about to read, I still can’t wait for next season. I want it to start tomorrow.
But something has been bothering me for some time. And now it is really starting to worry me.
Who, in full honesty, was genuinely excited for that Champions League final? The biggest game in club football, and I was far more excited to watch the Championship play off. I wish I was exaggerating.
And I don’t mean that in the sense that I wanted City to lose; I just wasn’t excited about the game of football. The winner was inevitable and I knew the game would be dull.
The root of boredom often lies in monotony. It’s why there has been a steep decline in the interest of the French Ligue One and the Bundesliga, and unfortunately, the Premier League is heading in the same direction. No one wants to watch the same advantaged team win the same competition time and time again. Even when a team looks like they might challenge City, everyone just waits in anticipation for their inevitable collapse.
And I see Liverpool fans upset that Man City won the league with 89 points this season, saying ‘why did we choose this season to be shit?’ and I can understand it, but please be aware, whatever we would have done, whatever Arsenal would have done, City would have done one better. If we got 100 points, they’d have got 101.
And it was the same on Saturday night. Even though Inter Milan executed what was a tactical masterclass from Inzaghi to near perfection, and worked unbelievably hard, it wasn’t enough, and City won the game without really having to step out of second gear. Essentially, Inter were huffing and puffing just to keep the score at 0-0. And that’s never going to win you a cup final.
Then inevitably, the fatigue caught up with them, and they conceded a goal as a result of extremely tired defending. It was a great finish from Rodri, but helped by the fact that the closing down was clearly slowed down by exhaustion.
Then City did ride their luck with a couple of chances, and technically lost on xG, but their footballers were and are just far superior to Inters, and that was evident throughout the night. Their victory was never in doubt.
And that’s all fine, if it’s achieved legitimately. But can you honestly say City have reached this stage legitimately? To having the most expensive squad, the most expensive XI, to paying their players and their agents extortionate sums of money, to only being allowed to actually play in the competition because the allegations of FFP breaching were ‘time barred’, to…what am I forgetting? Oh yeah, they also have 115 charges against them currently being investigated by the Premier League for breaches of financial rules.
Riyad Mahrez, Kyle Walker, and Phil Foden are world class players. Julian Alvarez probably will be soon. £42 million Kalvin Phillips and £60 million Aymeric Laporte joined all of these players on the bench. Only Foden played a significant role, which was only because De Bruyne went off with an injury.
Inter Milan brought on Arsenal (mediocre at the time) flop Henrikh Mkhitaryan.
It’s no wonder there was little excitement in the buildup to this final and even less following its inevitable outcome.
It’s so lifeless, so mundane, bordering on futile. Haaland may be a superstar but he is one of the most boring footballers I can ever remember watching. His movement is exceptional and his finishing is lethal, but that’s about it. He was totally anonymous in that final, as he was in the FA cup final.
You might turn around and say ‘who cares, he scores the goals’, and I couldn’t agree more- I doubt the City fans give a shit that Haaland is a boring bastard to watch. But it just adds to how dull this whole period of dominance is becoming.
Do kids play football in their gardens trying to recreate Haaland’s tap ins? If you were going to watch a Man City game, would you be genuinely excited to watch him play?
Yes, who cares, but that’s my argument in a nutshell. It’s so boring that people are going to stop caring, if they haven’t already.
Yes, Mohamed Salah had a similar season in 17/18, but he scored more non-penalty goals in the league in a team that struggled at times, and scored some incredible goals, so it was more impressive, and he was undeniably exciting to watch.
Manchester City suck the life out of their games. They are exceptional at keeping the ball and are simply so dominant that they are basically able to dictate everything that happens. They may play amazing football but watching their matches is, more often than not, about as exciting as watching a pensioner do their weekly shopping in Aldi.
Have you tried to sit down and watch a Man City game and to genuinely be engaged for most of the match? I often find myself getting distracted by something futile, like going on Wikipedia to check who the opposition goalie played for in 2010.
Even when Liverpool were the best side in the world (2018-2020), the matches were still entertaining, still close, still dramatic. The late comebacks against Villa and Leicester in their title winning season, the mortality of losing 3-0 against Barcelona only to overturn the tie in the second leg, the epic battles with City during that period; and they did lose games. They never won the domestic cups, and were of course knocked out of the Champions League by Atletico Madrid in what was also a hugely dramatic game.
What’s made this campaign so lifeless from an outsider watching Man City is that there’s been no drama. It’s been so easy for them.
During their FA Cup run in, they only conceded one goal in the whole tournament, which was in the final. It was a penalty that shouldn’t have even been a penalty and a completely meaningless goal, as everyone could see that City were going to win anyway.
They outplayed Madrid as much as it is humanly possible to outplay a team in a Champions League semifinal. Then when they played Arsenal, who were supposed to be City’s only rivals for the title, they did the exact same thing. Two crap games of football. It’s boring.
The Gunners also capitulated and made wrapping up the league a piece of cake for City. Guardiola’s side didn’t even have to win a game to win the title, it was gifted to them because Arsenal failed to show up against Nottingham Forest.
There was never a grain of doubt in my mind that Man City were winning that final against Inter. Everyone around me, all the football fans I know (of which it is fair to say I know a fair few) showed little to no enthusiasm about this game of football, and that’s if they even remembered it was happening (indeed, several people forgot it was even on, and I had to keep reminding myself on the day).
Manchester United lost the FA Cup final to their huge local rivals, failing to stop them from winning the treble, yet I don’t think it hurt the fans that much. In actual fact, they were amazed that it was only 2-1. Does anyone realise how fucked up that is?
They should have felt like they never wanted to watch football again, that this was the worst day of their lives. Yet I guarantee most fans will tell you that the 7-0 defeat to Liverpool hurt way more.
And I don’t blame Man United fans, because this feeling of apathy towards Man City has been brewing universally for years now, so it’s not exclusive to Man United. This season was the first time that I understood why football fans wanted City to beat us to the title for all those seasons. Sometimes you would rather no one win a title than it not be your team, and when City win something, it does almost feel like no one’s won it. That’s just how soulless that football club is.
There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance in ‘wanting’ the worst thing in football right now to succeed, but most of us are lying to ourselves if we aren’t able to admit that there’s a feeling of ‘well, it’s just City, who cares?’
I of course wanted Man City to beat Man United in the FA Cup. It’s flawed, I’ll admit that. But at least there is genuine honesty there.
Yet the toady, disingenuous brown-nosing pundits/presenters on BT sport turn a blind eye to this all.
All they discuss is what a great team this is and how great the achievements are, without a single hint towards the 115 charges, the spending power, the sportswashing- absolutely nothing. Let’s just pretend it doesn’t exist.
I have no problem with the pundits lauding Manchester City and praising Guardiola and the players. Of course, they deserve a huge amount of credit. I disagree with the lazy argument of ‘put anyone in Guardiola’s shoes and it’s the exact same outcome’. No. They would still win loads with a mediocre manager, but wouldn’t have attained this level of dominance without someone of Pep’s caliber.
We’ve seen clubs spend huge sums of money and screw it up. Pep is a fantastic manager, even if we haven’t seen him take on a tough job, there’s no denying that he is a maestro when it comes to tactics, and that while he can buy anyone he wants, he has done a great job of buying the right players and building a great side with those players.
He has shown ingenuity in how he has developed and moulded his players and experimented with different tactics and styles.
It’s hard to tell how much of a good job he does in terms of keeping all these superstars happy, and how much if it is just that they are happy to stick around for the money and for the titles, even if they’re only there for minimal contribution.
But while it’s okay to make those admissions, you also have to present both sides of the argument. And BT’s role as a neutral broadcaster should be to present range of nuanced perspectives, not what is just purely synthetic brown nosing. They’re happy to hammer Jurgen Klopp in a live interview when they think he’s out of order for complaining about fixture congestion, but Guardiola and his team’s 115 charges aren’t worthy of a single line of questioning?
Why was Joleon Lescott on the commentary team? If they hadn’t said who it was I would have assumed it was just some ordinary City fan who kept stealing Steve McManaman’s microphone (which would be fair enough, as we all wish we could).
It seems inevitable that a British broadcaster is going to be biased towards the British team in the final, but from a media content point of view, to see absolutely no effort to stay somewhat objective, I thought, was utter garbage, and the arse licking was ghastly. Why did they keep trying to pretend that City were struggling and that there was a sense of nervousness? It had to be one of the most comfortable Champions League final victories I have ever seen.
I don’t care if Inter managed to fashion chances, the fact is that they are nowhere near as good a team as Man City (at this current moment, no one is) and that’s why they didn’t take those chances. Even if they had equalised, City would have won it in extra time, by bringing on world class players up against a team that was absolutely goosed. That’s even if it reached extra time.
The situation with state owned clubs is a very important discussion to be had in football, and I don’t buy this mentality of simply ignoring it so we can ‘concentrate on the football’. This is ruining ‘the football’, so we need to talk about it. In a few years I think we could be seeing Newcastle vs Man City in the Champions League final, and you’re going to tell me that’s just because they’ve been coached better than the rest, that it’s purely because of footballing reasons?
If the shithouse time-wasting, the rolling around and pretending to be injured, the treatment of the fans in Paris, dickhead football agents and football players, the trolls, the fixture congestion, the PGMOL, Richarlison etc. aren’t enough to create an atmosphere of some form of footballing nihilism, then surely sportswashing, and fundamentally, the refusal to discuss it or even acknowledge it on the biggest sporting occasion, on the biggest broadcaster of that occasion, will be.
All credit to journalists like Miguel Delaney and Jonathan Liew who call it out for what it is, and take endless abuse for doing so, but BT Sport missed an opportunity to do so on the biggest stage of all. I’m not asking them to blast City and call them cheats, but to just neglect the questions surrounding the legitimacy of Man City’s success was unacceptable.
As I said at the start of this, I’m an optimist, and excited for next season, excited to see Klopp rebuild this side. It’s clear that the Liverpool players are furious about what has happened this season and are raring to fight back. But I still think City will win the treble or at least a double again, in the same mundane fashion, and are you, as a football fan, whether you support Liverpool, Man United, Arsenal, Barcelona, AEL, Hashtag United, excited to watch that?
My next article will delve into that more, and I’ll be looking ahead to what I expect to see from Liverpool next season. That’s it from now: next season, next season, next season. 22/23 was fucked from Paris, and I am so glad it’s finally over.
That was rant and a half but it was a rant that hit every nail on every head and in the case of of all the City sycophants, every dickhead, For the first time I can remember I had no interest in the final, Why would you want to watch a boring movie again that you seen before with a wholly predictable end . One of the totally justified arguments against the European Super League is that it takes the jeopardy out of football and without jeopardy there is no excitement . City have bought the jeopardy out of football and we are now left with watching the same boring movie year after year...