The entire reaction of the league, the regulator, the other teams, "big club" fans, and the media to City in (especially) the last 10 years stems from fear.
That's a strong and very loaded term to use, I know, and it's overused by a lot of people on social media but I'm trying to use it in a more nuanced way at least. Every action that they take and every reaction that they convey can only be explained by framing them as fear responses.
There's many types of it. Some are afraid of "Arabs taking over" because they hate Islam or think they're all terrorists who want to dominate their country but not as many as I think is suggested on here at times. Some are walking around anxious in their every day life because of the world or politics or climate change or wokeness or fascism or whatever is their specific point of fear, and they want things to be the same as when they were younger and these difficult topics weren't pushed in their face to address and think about. That manifests itself in nostalgia - it isn't conservatism, it is anxious nostalgia and a reaction to the Information Age where things are no longer "hidden" by a complicit media. They want to go back, for things to be simple again and that genie is truly out. City represent a change in football who upset "the order" of things and football is serious enough to emote at but not serious enough to feel as overwhelming an issue as the big problems in the world.
Some people are afraid of the dominance that we've shown and this really is a huge part of it. We aren't just winning leagues, we have moved the bar so high that we have driven the other competitors to extremes. A Liverpool fan who is a good friend of mine explained one day that competing against City for the Klopp years was absolutely exhausting. You'd have a good early result at the 12.45 kick off and then City kick off at 3 and go 1-0 down and you feel fucking sick. Not sick with delight, sick with oncoming dread. You know what will happen. You know that if you attempt to raise your hopes then they will beat you down and win that game, sometimes 5-1 but others 2-1 with a late goal yet it will only end up one way. And over several years that takes a mental toll when you perform at your absolute zenith with world class players breaking club and country records every week and are desperate to be excited and happy but City still win with their "horseshoe and slow" football. It's not that City win necessarily, it's also the way that they win. They grind people to death on the pitch, they move the ball left and right and runners have to be covered and you get more tired and more tired until eventually the goal comes. They don't see individual brilliance, they see an all conquering machine that is relentless and will never slow, never be beaten, never show mercy. When I call this a fear, they're not just in fear of a game to game basis but because it hasn't stopped and they are scared that it will never stop.
Some people are afraid for the same reasons that most people are afraid of things - pure ignorance. They are told that we're attempting to ruin the game that they love, that we're buying referees and cheating the rules and they never heard any different from someone willing to patiently explain why this is wrong so they'll believe it. You have to remember that we're passionate about Man City so we know what "time barred" means and who Michael Oliver was paid by (and what for) because for lack of a better term, we're City nerds. Nobody knows as much about City as we do and expecting them to is sort of asking too much. I don't know a ton of information about Barnsley for example and if I read on Twitter that their owner was a wanker with these huge threads attached then I'd probably just believe it, especially if I didn't really think too much about it. But Barnsley fans know everything about Barnsley and could give point by point rebuking of the same post. They're scared because they're misinformed and don't know they're misinformed and we're presented by others as a monster to be slain by all "right thinking people".
There's some out there, and these are BY FAR the minority in reality but the ones who most pretend to be for convenience sake, who are concerned that City's relationship with the UAE is bad for football. They are afraid of what that means for the future of the entire game, the Super League, the health of the pyramid and grassroots. They're worried about the people on the ground in the UAE and think the media might ignore any human rights abuses because City are good at football. These are by far the most well meaning but also the stupidest set. Nobody cared who Nick McGeehan was until he linked in Man City to the same story he had been writing for a decade. Sportswashing is the stupidest concept and immediately tells me I'm arguing with somebody who has never thought about the issue and are parroting if they bring it up. It's an immediate "this isn't worth my time" comment in a chat.
Fear can manifest in many different ways; sometimes as anxious, sometimes as jealousy or inadequacy, sometimes as hatred or aggression or violence. And that's what this all boils down to - it is the basis of 99% of ALL media output now rather than just sports and we are to the sports media as Islamic terrorism is to the news media. City fans seem to think that this will go after the 115 case but that is a misunderstanding of what is happening and why. This will go away after we stop dominating football and they see that their fear was actually unfounded, in the same way that racist sentiment lessened after BLM were less in the news or months after a bombing happens. It's the nature of the beast and in their eyes, we are the beast