"Man City in crisis? What crisis?"

Knowing the club you love is being run into the ground is misery, not watching them fail to translate limitless wealth into back-to-back titles

The reaction to City's defeat at Crystal Palace summed up modern football’s desire to assign misery and crisis where none exist.
City outplayed a resurgent Palace on Monday night, but lost, meaning they were out of a title race they were more-or-less out of anyway -although they’re still odds-on to make the hallowed Champions League places.
Yet judging by the reaction, you’d have been forgiven for thinking Selhurst Park was Stoke's Britannia Stadium in 1998, and that City had just been dumped into English football’s third tier.
TV pundits lamented the end of an era, websites ran pieces documenting the club’s “spiral into trouble”, a national talk-radio station did a phone-in on the theme 'It’s all going wrong at Man City, who’s to blame?' and newspaper match reports had a funereal tone, with one claiming “the travelling fans want the old City back.”
Which fans would they be?
The ones who started supporting them seven years ago when the money arrived and who only know City as serial trophy-winners?
Or the ones who remember the bad old decades, and who still have to pinch themselves when they recall the two league titles they’ve won in the past three years or hear their team described as one of the richest in the world?
Now, City may well sack their manager and sell half-a-dozen players this summer, but when you contrast the potential replacements with the ones they used to have to settle for, it only confirms what all their true fans know - they’re still holding the Willy Wonka golden ticket, and misery is a stranger they left at Maine Road.
The over-the-top reaction was put in perspective 50 miles north-west of Manchester earlier on Monday, where real pain was being felt by fans of a club which has been in free-fall for far too long.
Blackpool’s confirmed relegation to Division One didn’t receive much coverage - in part because it had been inevitable since before the first week of the season, after they played friendlies with only EIGHT registered players.
But that inevitability didn’t detract from the sense of desolation felt by fans who, five seasons ago, watched their team win plaudits for their style in the Premier League.
In that short time, they have seen investment stripped to the bone, accusing the club's owners the Oystons of taking tens of millions of parachute money and transfer fees out of the club.
These accusations have been met with mockery, threats to sue, and abusive text messages.
The latter behaviour forcing the FA to charge Karl Oyston with five breaches of their conduct rules as each text to a supporter “included a reference to disability.”
Small wonder that at Tuesday’s home game flares, smoke bombs, eggs and fireworkswere hurled in protest at the Oystons, along with the chant “We’re relegated because of your greed.”
After their fate was sealed, I texted a Blackpool fan to commiserate and he directed me to website message boards which were full of anger over the “designer destruction by greedy slimeballs”, about feeling “completely disenfranchised from the club I love,” and about “such a bright future thrown away by greed and avarice.”
The desolation was summed up by Kevin Boroduvicz, secretary of Blackpool Supporters’ Trust, who told Radio 5 Live: “Something much worse than relegation has happened to Blackpool Football Club: it’s lost its soul."
Your players can turn out to be greedy mercenaries and your manager can be sussed as being out of his depth, but there is no worse feeling for a fan than knowing the people who run the institution you love are running it into the ground.
That is misery and crisis.
An oil-rich club’s inability to translate its limitless wealth into guaranteeing back-to-back titles doesn’t even begin to go there.
As every Man City fan who was at Stoke 17 years ago will tell you.

good points blue. I have been to hell & back with city as most fans around my age will have. I know for certain as much as I loved watching city & some of the banter at lower league clubs I wouldn't swap where we are today for anything. it is our time in the limelight, so as much as the way we have played this season hurts, it is 1000  times better than what we were used to 18 years ago.

Until you're club's up shit creek and literally 24hrs away from the doors closed forever (bin there n done it), whinging fans will never understand how lucky they are to watch their team play football......however shite that may be.

I think that's the point. After winning our first trophy, then the PL and having what we thought was a 'poor' season 2 years ago, to bounce back and win the double the following year was incredible...but the way this season has panned out has been nothing short of disastrous. 

Problem is, it's not just FFP. We've over £100m to spend on supplementary players - by that, I mean players being brought in to add to our main core team...but we basically bought shite.

The Manager has been pig-headed and stuck to his stupid 4-4-2 formation when players have been out of form. Even when we've been beaten, he still persists with it.

Would I like to go back 18 years again? Absolutely not. But we started to build a team that would seriously challenge for the title, year in year out...and this season we've not stalled, we've gone backwards - and for me, that's not acceptable with the money we've spent and the players we still have in the squad.

shakencity wrote:Until you're club's up shit creek and literally 24hrs away from the doors closed forever (bin there n done it), whinging fans will never understand how lucky they are to watch their team play football......however shite that may be.

True - but we were pretty close to that when we had to sell SWP to stop us from going into administration within 4 weeks.

As fans, we forget how far we have come, however, to come so far and then regress so much in one season is alarming. It would be nothing short of a disaster if we didn't get CL next season, regardless of how far we have come.

we haven't gone from 12 point winners to 7th place in one season..
so we're not a crap as somebody else not far from here yet..

Moonchester wrote:we haven't gone from 12 point winners to 7th place in one season..
so we're not a crap as somebody else not far from here yet..

Exactly moon...as someone once said "never forget, there always someone out there worse off than yourself"

There's not many worse things than seeing kerbcrawler David Pleat running across the Maine Road turf.