How City turned Manchester blue
TEN years ago this weekend, Manchester United were finding the noisy neighbours hard on their heels in every conceivable way.
The first charity Santa Run staged by Manchester City happened to occur at precisely the same time as United’s more established event. United could boast a solitary sky-blue Santa among the hundreds wearing red at their run. City could boast the first-team manager, Roberto Mancini, participating in theirs.
Sir Alex Ferguson ridiculed a fan who had “Manchester City — Champions League winners 2011” tattooed on his shoulder — another example of the club getting carried away with itself, he said — correctly as things turned out.
Two huge games will decide the fate of three big games in Group H of the Uefa Champions League.
But his feigned indifference was unconvincing, given that City’s “Welcome to Manchester” poster for Carlos Tevez was clearly still riling him. It reflected a “small club with a small mentality”, he declared. “All they can talk about is Manchester United.”
In essence, the rivalry which the Abu Dhabis’ arrival across the city prompted had reached its peak that winter, though what Ferguson did not appreciate was that City considered his own seething response to the Tevez gimmick the greatest gift of all.
“It was a marketing thing and we didn’t think anything of it,” says an executive from the Mark Hughes and Mancini eras. “Then he reacted. That was a great result. It showed that we’d got under his skin.”
It also signalled the start of the power shift from red to blue that has been happening for the last decade, with the clubs ready to clash again on Saturday in a Manchester derby with United actually a point ahead — but in yet more turbulence following their midweek Champions League exit.
Tevez’s move across Manchester in 2009 was the first demonstration of City’s capacity to entice United players through their new financial muscle, though it was Wayne Rooney’s flirtation with them that was still reverberating around Old Trafford in the winter of 2010.
City had been waiting in the background when Rooney issued a Press release, hours before a Champions League home tie with Bursaspor in the October, declaring that United lacked ambition. Ferguson delivered perhaps his most memorable post-match Press conference speech later that night — a baffling, rambling, captivating appeal to the player, issued through the writers. “Sometimes you look in a field and you see a cow and you think it’s a better cow than you’ve got in your own field,” he said. “And it never really works out that way. It's probably the same cow, or not even as good as your own cow”
He seemed to be telling Rooney that the grass isn’t always greener, though it was an improved financial offer which persuaded the captain to sign for another five years — as well as the gang of 30 hooded fans who arrived at his Prestbury home, warning of the consequences if he joined City.
It was knowledge of Yaya Toure’s £220 000-a-week salary which seemingly mesmerised Rooney at the time. “United sold themselves on their history, being No 1 and being the place any player would want to go,” says the executive. “But the money certainly talked.”
City also felt confident back then that they could outflank United on youth recruitment. 'There was a “come to us, we’re Manchester United” vibe,’ says another source from those times. “But we felt their academy had lost a bit of its magic and got a bit long in the tooth. Parents were receptive to us.”
It was not a smooth ride for either team. Though one of the football staff who worked with Mancini vividly remembers Tevez’s intensity in training — “he didn’t say much, but would just turn up and be relentless at the training ground” — the Argentine was in the throes of the first of his disputes with Mancini by Christmas 2010.
City were also attempting to integrate the recently arrived Mario Balotelli. “You would not call them a settled organisation,” Ferguson said of City a few years later. “There was always an issue, with someone setting off fireworks or falling out with the manager.”
Some feel it was Hughes, a manager brutally removed by the new owners, who set the tone for a process of reeling in United.
“He’d done his time there,” says the executive who worked with him. “He knew the adage about, ‘How do you get to be No 1? Prepare like you’re No 2’. If you’re the underdog, there can be something relentless about you. Staying at the top, where United were back then, is the hardest part.”
The money was the main appeal, but City were also obsessively good at selling the club, Manchester and the message. David Silva and Yaya Toure, both 2010 recruits, and Sergio Aguero, 2011, would reflect years later that, as City had promised, they did make history.
To mention Rooney’s name in a Ferguson Press conference carried a risk back then. Someone tentatively asked whether he felt City had been genuinely interested in signing the then 25-year-old. “That’s for them. Don’t ask me. Christ!” he replied.
But then, in April 2011, the derby dynamic shifted irrevocably. City beat United 1-0 in an FA Cup semifinal, sending them to a final against Stoke City which they won. The Stretford End ticker banner signalling the old enemy's 35 years without a trophy came down at last.
The progress to City’s current state of superiority was not a linear one. They did win a first Premier League title in 2012 and Ferguson related in his autobiography that even his wife, Lady Cathy, declared from the sanctuary of their Wilmslow home that it had been the worst day of her life. ' I'm not going out. There are too many City fans out there.'
But United, who had sacrificed a substantial lead that season, claimed the title back the following year, jetpropelled to glory by Robin van Persie, who chose United over City.
Of course, what no one bargained for was Ferguson and his chief executive David Gill leaving that same summer.
Much of the football knowledge was gone and Gill’s successor Ed Woodward was casting around for the secrets to success, akin to hunting an aircraft’s black box flight recorder, he reflected.
City, frustrated by the way that their wealth and lack of recent glory led to clubs demanding an exorbitant “Manchester City price” for players, had meanwhile put in place a scientific player acquisition model, later adopted by Liverpool — who hired two of City’s best scouting managers to run it.
Signings were generally mapped out months in advance. A homogenous style of play was introduced and Pep Guardiola brought stability and purpose, while United are on their fourth manager in six years.
Though United sit a point above their rivals ahead of today’s meeting at Old Trafford, the table flatters them.
When United took the title back from City in 2013, Ferguson felt the noisy neighbours had simply lacked the backbone to stay at the top and “settled down into a sense of relief ” instead. But he seemed to know that the 2010-11 campaign, and that decisive Wembley semi-final, was significant.
“We all reach points in life and say, ‘This is a different life now,’ whether it is a job or winning the lottery,” was his enigmatic assessment of City’s breakthrough. “There was a couple who won the lottery — €110 million. Do you not think that was a turning point in their life? We all have points in our lives when it happens.”