Perception of City as a 'big' club

[Kazzydeyna]

There's a thread on the main board about big clubs and how one should go about measuring what constitutes a big club. Everyone, of course, has their own criteria and it often strikes me as rather futile pursuit to argue whether one club is bigger than another.

Nonetheless, I went to my first City first-team game at Christmas 1975, and I've always had a perception of which clubs could be called 'big' clubs in the context of English football. For instance, in the early eighties, just after Forest had won the league and then a couple of European Cups under Clough, I still wouldn't have thought of them as truly a big club, whereas I'd have definitely put, say, Everton - though in a relatively poor period by their standards - as a big club.

Nor did I have any doubt that we belonged in the company of the other big clubs. In terms of trophy count, our League Cup in '76 put us on nine in our history, just behind Everton (10), Spurs and United (11) and Liverpool (13).

In my first full season watching the club, 1976/7, City were the third best supported team in the country behind the Rags and Liverpool and we'd managed over the previous ten or twelve years to narrow substantially the gap in support that had grown up between the end of the War and the mid-sixties.

Maine Road as a stadium was considered to be up with the best in the league, and had more seats than any other. It was chosen for four FA Cup semi final matches that didn't feature United between 1973 and 1989, in comparison to one such game held at Old Trafford (though OT hosted two League Cup final replays compared to one at MR in the same period).

We had a team full of internationals, which was in Europe and capable of challenging in both the cups and for the league. We had the wherewithal to spend money in the transfer market to add to what we had.

I don't think, at the time, anyone would have disputed our claims to be one of the genuine big clubs in English football. To me, looking back, the moment that it changed was when we sold Trevor Francis in 1982. Our crowds dropped the next season by more than 20% (against an average decline of just under 10% in the old First Division as a whole). We were relegated a year later.

We all know about the travails the club had in the 1980s and 1990s when we were skint and, for the most part, struggling. We never really recovered properly until the takeover in 2008. We lost a lot of prestige pretty quickly in the eighties - when all the talk in the English game was of the so-called 'Big Five' wanting to push through changes to the way TV cash was redistributed, it didn't seem to occur to anyone that we could make that cartel a 'Super Six'. I remember there being talk at one stage of a ten-team breakaway, and we weren't even in it.

I'm not saying that would have been good or right - just that it illustrates how our profile dropped fairly quickly. And that was largely how things stayed until very recently. Not only do you see it in the attitude of many younger fans of other teams, but it's prevalent among a lot of other younger Blues as well. You see on here plenty of posts that seem to assume we've always been a middle-of-the-road club at best.

Sure, back in the late seventies you wouldn't have called us the biggest. Liverpool were the perennially most successful, while United had the most glamour and biggest crowds. But we were high-profile, challenging for trophies, well supported, had a team full of stars and one of the best grounds in the land. And all those things had been true from the start of the 20th century right up until the early eighties, too. Then we lost pretty well all of it - even the stadium was allowed to decay.

Anyway, I'll draw this long-winded ramble to a close now. The point I wanted to stress is that many people since the takeover seem to think that the idea of City as a big club is an anomaly. In fact, that's been true for the large bulk of our history from 1900 onwards. It's 1982-2008 that's the anomaly! :)

Excellent post. Please show it to the "football didn't exist before the premier league " crowd.