I've written about this before somewhere else on the forum but 06/07 was the closest me and my mum ever came to not renewing our season tickets. Until we came out of the stadium after that 0-1 derby defeat, saw a sea of sky blue shirts from above, and realised we couldn't leave it behind - as soon as we got back in the car we agreed to renew.
It's arguably become one of those seasons where history has been slightly unkind to it despite the end result being mostly okay, but I think the reputation it has is deserved. It's not that things were going downhill, and it's not that we hadn't experienced worse as a fanbase in recent memory, it's that things weren't going anywhere at all.
I do think 06/07 constituted a bit of an identity crisis for a lot of City fans. We left Maine Road with the promise that a new stadium would bring European football and decent cup runs, and we seemed to be on the right track. UEFA Cup football in 2003, finishing 8th in 2005. Things were just about on the up during the Keegan and (early) Pearce days.
But then we sold Wright-Phillips and Andy Cole got injured and the football went very, very negative once it was clear Samaras and Corradi were incapable of replicating what Vassell and Cole had produced thus far. I think a lot of City fans realised that there was a huge glass ceiling blocking us from making any progress and that this was
it.
We were destined to finished 8th-16th for all eternity and maybe get to a cup quarter-final before dismally bowing out to a slightly better side (West Ham, Blackburn), selling on any players who weren't bobbins. And that was it. Better things weren't possible. At times like that, you start to question what the point of going to football every Saturday really is.
I do think the point that broke everyone that season was the cup defeat at Ewood Park. 7,000 City fans chanting "You're not fit to wear the shirt" while a young woman threw Barton's own shirt back at him after he'd given it to her. A massive collective realisation that this was it, forever, unless something drastic happened to change things.
We were solid at the back for a bottom half team and our stodgy, stifling football meant we got valuable points on the road at Newcastle and Middlesbrough. And I don't think we were ever under serious threat of going down. But I think we'd just become so jaded. We turned up for
five months and didn't get to cheer a single goal, haha.
06/07 still stands as our lowest average attendance since we moved to Eastlands. It's the only regular season to have dropped under 40,000. The only other seasons with a lower attendance average are 19/20, which was affected by the pandemic, and 20/21, which was played behind closed doors until the final day. I think we were just tired.
Looking back, it's easy to get nostalgic about 06/07 because of how affectionately awful it was (hence the article on it that's been published by City today). But I mainly think it's easy because we've since been given two huge injections of cash and haven't looked back. I wonder how we'd feel if things had gone differently. We could
be Charlton right now.
Because as far as I'm aware -
@Prestwich_Blue could correct me - we were in dire, dire straits financially during the summer of 2007 and were close to calling in the administrators. There's every chance that, if Shinawatra had never turned up, 06/07 would be the season we looked back on as the moment where it all started to go very wrong.