I’m not one to usually post on forums, in fact this is actually the first time, but with everything that has transpired over the past few days coupled with the flagrant arrogance of football ‘fans’ i’ve felt compelled to respond.
I won’t go down the road of emphasising the misery it brought me at school, although relevant it’s hardly exclusive, but what I will focus on are the sheer levels of hypocrisy that are emerging, hypocrisy that we all knew existed but couldn’t truly demonstrate because one club was state owned (originally) and another was bankrolled by a horrendous group of incestuous yank capitalists.
During the past decade Manchester City have produced the best football ever witnessed, scored the most goals and essentially made a mockery of an English pyramid headed by two teams in Red, both dominant in respective decades due to the majority of investment and all the perks that it brings - better players, trophies, more fans - similar to ourselves although we still can’t sell out our stadium allegedly (heard some ball bag on the radio the other night claim we only get 30,000) but we’ve never been truly allowed to appreciate it.
Certainly amongst ourselves we have rejoiced: QPR, Villa, Leicester, Liverpool, United etc but there’s never been a moment where we’ve not had to suffer the ignominy of a loutish fat tosser down the boozer who so flippantly decries our achievements as being tinged with falsities, arab money, financial tampering, inflated sponsors (words he can’t even spell let alone understand) or; when faced with some facts that he struggles to dispute, barks treble or twenty times in our face like a petulant child, remnants of last night’s dinner still smeared around their mouth, before slinking off with their fellow minions, fortified by the fact that we’re yet to win the champions league.
Dealing with people like this is allegedly part and parcel of the sport, working class ribbing and ‘friendly banter’ to be expected amongst rival fans… except that it’s not, it’s tiresome, absorbing and ultimately annoying to the extent that it has literally sucks the fun out of it all, a bitterness echoing loudly in the streets, on social media, on whatsapp, in the boozers and at work, fully grown men and women focusing their jealously through petty barbs, goading people into responding to try and deflect their own pettiness and insecurities.
I’ve maintained for a long time that there are no truly decent rags and I’d like to think that over the past few days that any lingering doubts people have had to the contrary have been extinguished. Having to listen to people try to explain something to me that they know even less about than I do is tiring enough but when you’re also faced with a bombardment of populist media shills and ex-players, let alone the very organisation that your football has done so much enhance the brand of, then I could be forgiven for giving up and just accepting the inevitable.
But then the final piece of the jigsaw fell into place and all the ‘coincidences’, the collusion and corruption finally jumped right out and smacked me in the face… Qatari investment. All the false sentiments and morality, the things we’d known for so long that were simple mechanisms to try to mask their spite finally shone through. I mean, we should have known it was coming when the media tried to condition the public into believing that it was because of City and Newcastle that clubs like Liverpool and United had no choice but to seek state investment, as though they were forced into it.
Make no mistake the timing of Monday’s announcement, the delay to the Independent Regulator, the two week window it potentially gives the Qatari’s to meet the Glazer’s deadline, displace the Governments dependence on one State’s finances by shifting it another - may sound a tad too conspiratorial but can anyone truly pretend they don’t agree?
If the above goes through, which it most probably will, all the murmurs of human rights violations will disappear, vanish as though they never existed and the truth will present itself because all this has ever been about is no longer being the best… like the most popular child at school suddenly losing his grip on his peers, the only way to try to regain that is through manipulation and lies.
Personally I believe we’ll prove our innocence but on the back of this it’ll instil a whole new level of tribalism and toxicity and so we must never forget the way we’ve been treated. Never pretend that this was okay and never lose sight of the fact that we were there when we were shit! MCFC. x
