Manchester City Are Many Things But They Are Not Boring. To Even Suggest This Is Just Plain Silly
There are plenty of serious criticisms that can be aimed at the Etihad and the team's dominance may be tedious to opponents but their fans love it and they're watching superb football
They should be popping champagne corks at the Etihad. Not because Manchester City are cruising towards an unprecedented fourth league title in a row. No, you know you’ve really made it when the articles begin to appear claiming you are boring.
Yes, that Manchester City. The team of Kevin De Bruyne; of Phil Foden; of Bernardo Silva, Rodri, Erling Haaland… A side averaging almost 2.5 goals per game in the Premier League, who swatted away Wolverhampton Wanderers 5-1 at the weekend. B’dumb, b’dumb.*
It is often the fate of great sides to be called boring. The Liverpool of Kevin Keegan, Steve Heighway, John Toshack and Emlyn Hughes were sneered at as the ‘Red Machine,’ a label inherited by Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush and Graeme Souness. Even Lionel Messi’s Barcelona came in for flak: tiki-taka was dull, the edgy-opinion boys claimed.
Now, it’s easy to have issues with City. Their dominance is unlike anything English football has experienced before. The journey from also-rans to superpower in less than a decade was propelled by Abu Dhabi money and the club's conduct was questionable enough to have generated 115 charges alleging breaches of Premier League financial rules. There is the same sinking feeling watching them dismantle Wolves that evokes those ugly days of the 1990s when Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United steamrollered the opposition. Oh, the tedium.
But forget all this. There is a more pertinent, existential question here. Is football meant to be entertaining? And who is it supposed to entertain?
City fans, quite rightly, love what they’re seeing. Last-gasp winners may be the greatest experience in football, but what most supporters want on a week-to-week basis is to see their team put the game away early and get the victory in the bag.
From a personal perspective, I remember going to Villa Park in 1978 and seeing Liverpool go three goals up after 21 minutes. After that, they shut down the game. The crowd could have left at that point. Aston Villa fans made barely any noise for the remaining 69 minutes aside from a constant low, discontented grumble. It was most amusing – and far more fun that the previous season when Villa spanked Liverpool 5-1.
That was not my idea of a good night out at all. Only a neutral cares for jeopardy.
As for the title race, again, does anyone really care apart from TV companies, journalists and the fans of the teams involved? Well, yes. Evertonians, for example, were invested only to the point where they wanted to see Liverpool bombed out of contention. Individuals have their biases against certain clubs and players but were Brighton fans sighing in despair on that Sunday last month when Liverpool and Arsenal lost to Crystal Palace and Villa respectively? No Brentford supporter, surely, wailed that Super Sundays were going to be a lot less super in the final month in the season? The hype for the title race is, largely, a pile of shite.
As is the notion that City are boring. They are a fantastic team and stand up in terms of brilliance to any side in English football history. When you watch them professionally – with the emotional investment that makes football worthwhile removed from the equation – they are breathtakingly good. For me, their excellence was underlined during the pandemic.
In the empty stadiums, you could hear what was going on during the game. The thing that was most striking about City was that their players hit the ball much harder than the opposition when passing. The ‘thwack’ of boot on ball was significantly louder when City were in possession. That meant they were moving the ball faster around the pitch and the level of control demanded when receiving possession had to be greater.
A final truth: football * boring for long periods of time. What makes the game great is not the actual game, it’s all the stuff around it: going with your mates, feeling a sense of kinship, the us-v-them atmosphere.
Yeah, I’m fed up with City, too. But they’re not boring. Don’t bore me by trying to tell me they are.
* From The Buzzcocks classic Boredom. Go listen to it immediately. You won’t regret it
Try telling my 6 year old that Haaland scoring 4 goals is boring. Causing me a headache as I scramble for spare tickets so I can take him. But I also suspect it is less about Haaland and more about going to football with me and being part of the group we sit with.
You are right that what keeps us coming back to football isn’t what is happening on the pitch, but the people that you sit with week in week out.