It has long made marketable sense for the media to fire the occasional slingshot in Manchester City’s direction. After all, if a broad demographic of football supporters were placed in a room and asked for their opinions on the Premier League’s ‘top six’ all would get a verbal kicking but on City’s turn the vernacular would notably sour.
No longer would it be about the team or the manager but the club itself and the manner in which it transformed itself overnight in September 2008 from a perfectly likable mid-table side with a proclivity to get relegated from time to time into a burgeoning superpower.
So for every ‘good-luck-to-them’ it’s easy to envisage five times that number gurning their faces into ire and spouting off the predictable guff concerning ‘oil money’ and ruining football. A fair few would even resent having to reference City as a big club at all such is the depths of their disdain while others would commit to a diatribe of biblical proportions that spewed out every cliché in the book.
A quick, pertinent side-step here. Last night in my local pub a fair-weather Liverpool supporter with only a passing interest in the game undertook what can only be described as an anti-City rant. It began with this little gem: “It’s all money with them. They lose that German winger for a few weeks and then go out and buy two players to take his place. It makes me sick”. He wasn’t exaggerating for affect. He thought it was true.
Now of course the reality is that my club and his club both bought precisely one player apiece in this January window, both centre-backs. City paid £57m for Laporte. Liveprool paid £75m for Van Dijk. But that is by the by because the most important aspect to take from such genuinely believed silliness is to question where it came from. Was it simply a product of a feverish imagination? More likely it was from seeds sown elsewhere.
Perfectly aware of City’s widespread unpopularity – coupled with the knowledge that a significant portion of their target audience were Manchester United, Liverpool, and Arsenal supporters who all viewed their new rival with unconcealed disgust – it made marketable sense for the media to go in hard. So they did.
This began with digs, sideswipes, the reporting of achievements in a flat, begrudging tone: little stuff that generally goes unnoticed unless you are a supporter of the club in question. Chelsea and Arsenal endure similar to this day. But the media being the media it didn’t stop there and as City’s rise took in trophies so the accompanying coverage got progressively more negative.
That’s when I began writing about it.
This was not a daily event of course. I didn’t wake up each morning, don some tinfoil fashioned into a hat and take to my spare bedroom to hammer out another thousand angry words on an ‘agenda’. There is no agenda. The very notion of an agenda is ludicrous.
But once every six months or so, when a line had been crossed and my instinctive shock and surprise was shared by other Blues I would pen something highlighting a wrongness. Two years ago I wrote about BT Sport’s coverage of Manchester City’s Champions League campaign that had two Manchester United legends Rio Ferdinand and Paul Scholes as the pundits. The first tweeted on the day of the game that he desperately hoped that City’s opponents would win. The other mumbled an incessant stream of put-downs concerning City’s support throughout the pre-game discussion.
I found this very odd, this approach. It contrasted sharply with the usual strategy when a British team were playing a foreign team in a European competition to inherently root for the former. So I wrote about it and consequently the club put in a formal complaint to the network and City fans didn’t have to endure two hated rival players sniding on them anymore.
I’ve also written about the disgraceful treatment dished out to Raheem Sterling, a media witch-hunt born from racism and the fact that a young lad dared to move from a ‘traditional’ big club to one damned for being nouveau riche.
On other occasions I’ve concentrated on singular newspaper articles such as The Sun’s bizarre shot taken last year that was headlined ‘569m reasons why City deserve a good kicking’. Then there was the same publication’s match review of a Community Shield defeat to arch neighbours United that began with, “This was a result to make football itself stand up and cheer and not just because the Bad Guys took on a punch on the nose from the Good Guys”
In media terms – as clearly illustrated above without the need for elucidation – City were the villains and United the heroes.
The response to my articles were always strikingly similar. Some would whole-heartedly agree and some would disagree and explain in a rational manner as to why. Then there were the United fans (they were always United fans) who found the very notion of media bias against Manchester City to be utterly hysterical. My Twitter timeline would be inundated with laughing emojis. Large United accounts would quote-tweet my articles opening up the floodgates for their United-following followers to bombard me with mockery. Last month a United supporting respected journalist wrote a piece directly concerning yours truly that referred to me as a ‘lunatic fringe’.
Having spent years deriding Blues for being ‘bitter’ Reds now delighted in pigeon-holing their rivals as ‘paranoid’; worse, conspiracy theorists. To them the very notion that tracts of the media would castigate a club over and above other clubs was nothing short of farcical.
Fast-forwarding to the present and oh my how the tide has turned and the roles have reversed. Because nobody is taking cheap shots at City anymore simply due to it being impossible to get them through. So incredible is the football and beautiful to boot there are even joke items on the radio asking their listeners to come up with suggestions for ways to hate on Guardiola’s team. It gives me great satisfaction to know that there are United and Liverpool supporting journalists out there who previously were afforded the luxury of trolling on a rival and getting paid for it who now have to write glowingly about them with clenched fingers.
As for United, they are no longer the heroes of English football. Indeed it is open season on them after two decades and more of gushing praise. The recent coverage of Alexis Sanchez’s switch to Old Trafford calculated a complete breakdown of his wages and bonuses and saw the final tally plastered as sensationalistic headlines. United would never previously have received such disrespect: that was reserved for City and as recently as last summer when Kyle Walker’s fee was published in a similarly skewed fashion.
Elsewhere Jose Mourinho’s divisive antagonism and yes paranoia has polluted his club’s press leading to the type of toxic coverage Chelsea used to receive in his Stamford Bridge days. His tendency to favour conservative and boring football hasn’t exactly helped either.
And the United supporters can’t handle this. They are not used to this. Their club is being snided on. The famous Man United. Consequently they are spectacularly losing their s***.
The hypocrisy is hilarious but there will be no further highlighting of that here. After all, hypocrisy makes football go around. Instead I’ll simply say this to any Reds who might happen to be reading – be careful of what you claim in the weeks and months ahead because I’ve got laughing emojis to hand too. And if you’d like to lend a tinfoil hat there’s one going spare here for free. I’m not going to need it for a while. It appears that you will.
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