I've been meaning to write about this at greater length, which I maybe will do at some point in the future, but here's the quick version.
My first match was 26 years ago in a couple of weeks - the 12th December 1994, when I was 8 years old. I'd been a City fan for a couple of years, though I became one in slightly unusual circumstances. Unlike most kids, I was never given a team to support by my dad or another family member. My dad grew up in a country where football wasn't especially popular, and he never developed an attachment to any English team when he moved to the UK in his late 20s. I enjoyed playing football on the street as a little kid, but I was completely clueless as to what the professional sport was like. In fact I remember once my older cousin giving me a football card (those old school ones, maybe they came in cigarette packets or something?) and being really confused because it said the player played for Liverpool and England, and I didn't understand because what if they played against each other? Anyway, one day in infant school, when I was about 6, some of the other boys were talking about football and who we all supported. Cliches aside, despite the fact this was in Manchester nearly everyone was a United fan. I remember some of the United fans talking about how City are rubbish, no one likes City, etc, and I remember thinking to myself that this wasn't fair, so I decided on a point of principle to support City there and then. So from then on if anyone asked me who I supported I said I was a City fan, without knowing who played for them or really anything about them.
When I started junior school there was a kid in my class who was a big City fan (I used to still see him a lot when I was still living in Manchester actually, he goes on Whizz's bus from Didsbury) and he was like, 'who's your favourite player?' I didn't have a clue so I just copied his, which was Gary Flitcroft. Over the next year or so I started to nag my dad to take us to a game, which he eventually agreed to do. It was City - Arsenal at Maine Road, and we sat in the corner between the North Stand and the Main Stand. I don't remember a lot about the game, just a few scattered details. The kids 'minding' dad's car; Dibble's name getting booed when they read out the teamsheet; Arsenal's right winger (I assume it was Ray Parlour) having a lot of the ball; City looking pretty crap and the crowd being lethargic. It's a cliche that seems to feature in every story of going to a night match as a kid but I was struck by how massive the ground was, how bright the lights and how green the pitch. I also remember the fact that people were shouting and singing stuff on the street outside the ground - I was amazed that football was apparently this thing that meant the normal rules and habits of behaviour didn't apply. After the game, by chance we bumped into someone my dad had been to university with, thousands of miles away in their home country, who had also moved to Manchester and was also a City fan.
We lost 2-1 and apparently I cried, and asked my dad when we could go again.