Hopefully!
I think a lot of the shit we’ve faced has had a negative affect on many fans.
Yeah we faced some bad times in the ’80s and ’90s but it wasn’t always wave after wave of shit. Promotion seasons are pretty much as enjoyable as top tier title wins, we had seasons where we finished 5th 8th 9th, and there are always good wins and runs of form even in relegation season to keep you going.
But in the last decade, the constant waves of abuse and lies from rival fans and the media; the constant threat of The Cartel making rules up to stop us, and the constant threat of us failing those rules because they move the goalposts or hack us and ban us on selected sentences from clipped emails as “evidence”; some of the ridiculous decisions we’ve faced on the pitch over the years, and the constant feeling that VAR can do us over more than ever...
has brow beaten many fans more than the ’80s and ’90s did. And why wouldn’t it, it’s been every single fucking day for over a decade!
Yes, the fantastic football, the fantastic wins and winning trophies is all...fantastic! You hear that in our best atmospheres when it really matters we make as much noise as any fans around, and our end of season parties are something special!
But even then, the day we won the the Prem (or was it the FA Cup) last season. Roan came out moaning about human rights abuses in the UAE and connecting it to City and City fans.
I see Roan didn’t do the same thing the other week when Liverpool won the league, linking them and their fan base to their main sponsor, Standard Chartered, being done for investing in terrorist groups and money laundering did he?!
And we still have more cases to come: it’s the Premier League’s case with us next... but we’ve ticked off wins against the FA, FIFA and UEFA! so maybe now we can start to galvanise as a fanbase and show the team and the club how much this win meant to us by being more upbeat in the ground from week-to-week, not just for the big games!
We’ve got 8 clear rivals now. No disputing it, they all signed the letter. We know who they are and we can make their visit to the Etihad as uncomfortable for their team and fans as possible every time they visit from now on.
Let the hate come out in our atmospheres!
I will also add: the club could do something to really give us an even bigger feel good factor n’all.
I’ve seen dozens of people from my group of mates, family or just people who’ve sat near me in the ground; all fall away from our support over the years because of the prices of tickets, being moved (with no guarantee they’d be given seats next to mates, or at all, elsewhere) to accommodate corporates or the Family Stand. And I know some others who moved away from their mates to sit in SSL3 leaving groups of mates split-up around the ground.
News of ticket price freezes for the next five years (United have frozen prices for the last 11 years) would do an awful lot to the mood of our fan base!
News of a new stand that will be used as a proper home end for vocal fans, that won’t get moved or diluted for Cup games, for the first time since 1994, would be a huge boost for our fan base! I even know lads who’ve stopped going who’d come back if that happened!