With train strikes throwing my plans to get south for Brentford’s first ever Premier League derby against Fulham at Craven Cottage this weekend up into the lap of the transport gods; I have decided to instead dedicate this weeks blog to the conquerors of English domestic football over the past 5 seasons.
I don’t really need to say the name for you to know what team I’m talking about, even those who hate football have heard of Manchester City and the success they have had under the stewardship of Pep Guardiola.
Whilst vast swathes of their success can be attributed to the undeniable genius of Guardiola, the gargantuan amounts of money poured into the club by their owners and the undoubted skill of the world-class players that innumerable wealth allows them to hoover up. There is one crucial element in the success that is often overlooked but one that anyone who has ever competed in competition of any sort will be well aware of, the feeling that you enter a competition going up against a favourite that has hardly ever been beaten and as such you stand no chance of beating them.
This is the feeling that teams in the Premier league have when stepping onto the pitch to face-down the Sky-blue juggernauts. With 4 titles in the last 5 seasons behind them any team facing them in domestic competitions go into that confrontation feeling that they are interlopers in ‘ City’s Competition ‘. As such they start the match already beaten in their minds and therefore they stand a vanishingly miniscule chance of walking away from the match will any points at all, even with the vociferous support of thousands of partisan home fans.
Many professional athletes will talk about the importance of the psychological side of sport and this is exactly where City win most of their games. The Etihad is set up to psyche out the opposing players before they even get a toe on the grass.
During a public tour of the stadium last season the tour guide was open, to the point of gloating, about all the steps City had decided to take in their pursuit of a psychological edge over their visitors. Including the large circular design of their dressing room, that was draped in colour and motivational quotes and sat in stark contrast to the tiny, rectangular and grey nature of the away dressing room.
All teams take steps to bolster any advantage they can at home, but very few do it as effectively as City do. With the obvious exception of Millwall whose fans make the away fans visit to the den as soul-shatteringly terrifying as possible, this keeps their chants to a minimum and allows the intimidating atmosphere of the home stands to force the visiting players back into their shells so the home team can rip them apart. The south Londoner’s home form can be the difference between mid-table and relegation, as their form away from the Lion’s Den falls off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote after a run-in with the Road Runner.
However, City face no such issues on their travels and the reason for this is down to the doubt their success plants in the minds of fans of other teams in the league. Just 2 matches into the season and already Liverpool fans that I work with, whose team sits just 4 points behind City, are telling me that “we need to win every single game left this season to stand a chance of winning the league title now, because City don’t lose matches”.
Walking into an oppositions team home ground with those thoughts in the fan’s heads is a huge positive for City when they visit these grounds. Doubts in the home stands feeds down into the atmosphere on the pitch and once City use their unimpeachably world-class skill on the ball to take the lead the psychological victory they have already gained in the stands leaves their opposition with no way to reassemble a foothold in the match.
This is a huge part of the reason why you see the resistance of many teams collapse like the Oroville dam slipway did in 2017 the second City score a goal, no matter the scoreline situation they have facing them. Invariably even a 2 or 3-0 lead will not stop the tidal-wave of City goals once the wall of resistance is breached once, allowing City to rescue points from situation where no other team would stand the slightest chance of mounting a comeback.
City’s decade of success since the takeover has done to their opposing fans the exact opposite of what Jurgen Klopp has done to Liverpool fans. Klopp turned them from doubters into believers, but City’s success has turned their opposition fans from believers into doubters whenever they see the light-blue shirts lined up against them. When the fixtures for the upcoming season are released fans around the country look for their matches against City and discount it as a guaranteed loss.
This psychological edge is one of the main factors behind their continued dominance of the Premier league. All it will take to break this aura of invincibility though is for another team to beat them to back to back Premier League titles. After all, “If you can make god bleed then people will cease to believe in him” (Ivan Vanko, Iron Man 2) so now all their opponents need to stand a chance of winning domestic trophies once more is for someone to make City bleed.
Unfortunately for City’s fans they are one of the noted haemophiliacs of European competitions, as their consistent failure to capture the Champions League title so gloriously illustrated. Juventus and PSG provide City with stiff competition for the best domestic teams to choke on the European stage and one of the many reasons is their lack of the aura of invincibility that they have all cultivated at home. Instead they are saddled with the “spursy” aura in European competition, the idea that no matter how good their situation appears to be they will still find a way to mess it up.
When it gets down to the critical moments in domestic matches City’s fans and their opposition’s fans expect them to win, whilst on the continent the majority of the fans present expect them to lose. This reversal of the psychology in the stands gives City limited hope of overturning first-leg deficits in European knockout football, no matter where the second-leg is played. Even when they have the lead in such matches their opponents always smell blood in the water and believe they can overturn whatever advantage the Mancunians hold.
Critical moments in any match are where results are won and success is built and the psychological factor of those moments is one of the main reasons why Manchester City will continue to dominate English domestic football for many seasons to come. It is also why I will not be betting even a single penny on them winning the Champions League before the end of the decade, despite their eye-catching capture of the undisputedly incredible Erling Haaland and the supply he will be getting from the footballing genius of Kevin de Bruyne.
Those are my thoughts on a crucial factor in Manchester City’s success in the last decade. I will be back soon with a match blog, when I have the opportunity to get to one.
The Football tourist 