I want to tell you something about Manchester City that younger football fans probably do not fully appreciate because they have grown up watching them win everything.
In 1998 they were playing third tier football.
Not struggling in the Championship. Not having a difficult Premier League season. Third tier football. The same division as Macclesfield Town and Chester City, in front of crowds that were a fraction of what Maine Road could hold, while Manchester United were winning the treble half a mile down the road.
I was not old enough to properly understand it at the time but my dad used to talk about it. About how surreal it was to watch a club that had produced genuine legends of the game reduced to that level. About the empty terraces and the bleak Tuesday nights and the sense that nobody really knew how far City were going to fall before they hit the bottom.
The reason I am telling you this is because you cannot understand what Manchester City have become without understanding where they came from. The distance between 1998 and now is not just the greatest transformation in football history. It is so vast that if you tried to explain it to someone who did not already know the story, they would tell you it was not possible.
It was possible. It happened. And here is how.
How Bad It Actually Got
To appreciate the scale of what Manchester City have become, you have to sit with the reality of how low they fell. And the reality is genuinely shocking when you lay it out plainly.
In 1996 City were relegated from the Premier League. In 1998 they were relegated again, this time from the First Division, dropping into the third tier of English football for the first time in the club’s history. A club that had won the First Division title in 1968, that had produced players like Colin Bell and Mike Summerbee and Francis Lee, that had packed Maine Road with passionate crowds for decades, was playing Wigan Athletic and Wrexham and Blackpool in front of crowds that were a fraction of what the ground could hold.
The financial situation was precarious. The playing squad was threadbare. The management structure was chaotic. Chairman Francis Lee had resigned in 1998 amid the turmoil of consecutive relegations and the club was being run by people who were, by any objective measure, out of their depth.
The Manchester United connection made everything worse. While City were playing third tier football at Maine Road, United were winning Premier League titles and European Cups half a mile away at Old Trafford. The contrast was so stark and so painful that it became genuinely difficult to be a City fan during this period. The club was not just failing. It was failing in the shadow of its greatest rival at the moment that rival was achieving the greatest sustained success in its history.
It is impossible to understand what came later without understanding this. The low point was not just low. It was historically, humiliatingly, completely low.
The First Signs of Life
The climb back began slowly and without any particular sense that it would lead anywhere remarkable.
Joe Royle steadied the ship in the third tier and got City promoted in 1999. Kevin Keegan arrived in 2001 and brought with him the energy and the optimism that the club desperately needed. Under Keegan, City were entertaining, occasionally brilliant, and clearly heading in the right direction even if the destination was not yet obvious.
The move to the City of Manchester Stadium in 2003, built for the Commonwealth Games and subsequently handed to City by Manchester City Council, gave the club a modern, 48,000 capacity home that immediately changed the way the club felt about itself. Maine Road had been beloved but it was old, cramped and entirely inadequate for a club with genuine ambitions. The new stadium was a signal, even if nobody was quite sure yet what it was signalling.
Stuart Pearce, then Sven Goran Eriksson managed the club through the mid 2000s with reasonable but unspectacular results. City were a solid Premier League club, occasionally finishing in the top half, occasionally threatening something more, but without the resources or the structure to consistently compete with the division’s elite.
Then came Thaksin Shinawatra.
The First Foreign Owner and What It Signalled
The Thai businessman’s takeover of Manchester City in 2007 was, in retrospect, a rehearsal for what was coming. Shinawatra brought money, ambition and an entirely different philosophy about what a football club could be used for. He appointed Mark Hughes as manager and backed him in the transfer market in ways that City fans had not experienced before.
It was also, almost immediately, complicated. Shinawatra’s human rights record in Thailand made his ownership deeply controversial and the discomfort around his tenure never fully dissipated. Within a year of taking over he was under serious political pressure in Thailand and his hold on the club was weakening.
But the Shinawatra era did one thing that proved enormously consequential. It established Manchester City as an acquisition target for people with very serious money. It showed that the club, with its stadium, its location, its history and its fanbase, was an asset worth investing in at scale.
Someone was paying attention.
The Day Everything Changed
September 1st 2008. Transfer deadline day. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet, completed the takeover of Manchester City.
On the same day, City signed Robinho from Real Madrid for £32.5 million. The British transfer record, broken on the day of the takeover, announced to the world that something fundamental had changed.
The football world reacted with a mixture of excitement, scepticism and, in certain quarters, genuine alarm. Sir Alex Ferguson, whose United had spent a decade utterly dominating their city rivals, dismissed the new owners as noisy neighbours. The phrase captured perfectly the assumption in some parts of the game that this was a temporary disruption, a flash of oil money that would illuminate briefly before burning out.
Ferguson was wrong. Spectacularly, historically wrong.
The money did not stop. It accelerated. Roberto Mancini was appointed, then backed with transfer budgets that made the rest of the Premier League look on in a combination of awe and unease. Carlos Tevez, David Silva, Yaya Toure, Vincent Kompany. Player after player of genuine world class quality arriving at a club that had been in the third tier ten years earlier.
Building the Empire
The first title came in 2012. The manner of its arrival has become one of the most mythologised moments in Premier League history.
Sergio Aguero. Ninety three minutes and twenty seconds. Queens Park Rangers. A goal that won the title on goal difference, scored in the last seconds of the last game of the season after a collapse so dramatic that United had already been told they were champions.
I remember watching that goal and feeling something that transcended any club allegiance. Pure, unfiltered joy at the spectacle of it. Football doing what only football can do, producing a moment so perfectly constructed and so impossibly timed that it felt scripted. Aguero’s celebration, the crowd erupting, the commentator losing his mind completely, all of it compressed into thirty seconds that the Premier League will be showing in its promotional material for the next hundred years.
The 6-1 at Old Trafford that same season told you everything about the shift in the balance of power. United humiliated at home by their neighbours. The noisy neighbours, it turned out, had rather a lot to say.
Manuel Pellegrini delivered another title in 2014. The infrastructure grew alongside the results. The City Football Group expanded to own clubs across the world. The academy, the Etihad Campus, the commercial partnerships, all of it built with a clarity of vision and a depth of resource that no other club in English football could match.
And then came Pep Guardiola.
The Guardiola Era and the Records That Will Never Be Touched
When Guardiola arrived in 2016 the expectation was enormous and he exceeded it in ways that still feel slightly unreal when you lay out the numbers.
Eight Premier League titles in twelve seasons for the club. A hundred points in a single season, a record that nobody has come close to matching. Thirty two consecutive home league games without defeat. A Champions League finally won in 2023, completing the set for a club that had spent billions pursuing that specific trophy for fifteen years.
The football Guardiola produced at City during his peak years was the best club football I have ever watched. The positional play, the pressing, the technical quality demanded of every single player regardless of position, the tactical sophistication that made watching City at their best feel like watching a different sport to the one being played everywhere else. It was genuinely beautiful and I say that as someone with no affiliation to the club whatsoever.
He leaves this summer. After a final season that by his extraordinary standards felt like a decline but by anyone else’s would be considered a success, Guardiola has confirmed he will not be continuing as City manager. The greatest manager in the world departing the club he transformed into the most dominant force in English football history.
What comes next for City without him is one of the most fascinating questions in football. The structures he built, the playing philosophy he embedded, the standards he set across every department of the club are his legacy as much as the trophies. Whether City can sustain what he created without him is something we are about to find out.
The Shadow Over Everything
And yet.
Any honest account of Manchester City’s rise has to address the thing that hangs over all of it. The 115 charges of alleged financial fair play breaches brought against the club by the Premier League, covering a period stretching back to 2009.
The charges are serious and the potential consequences are severe. Points deductions, fines, relegation, stripping of titles, all have been discussed as possible outcomes if City are found guilty. The club deny the charges and the case is being heard by an independent commission whose timeline has stretched far longer than anyone anticipated.
I am not going to prejudge the outcome. The process exists for a reason and City are entitled to have their case heard fully and fairly before any conclusions are drawn. What I will say is that the charges cast a shadow over the era that cannot be entirely ignored when you are telling the story of how this club rose from the third tier to the summit of European football.
If City are found guilty, the question of what the titles and the records and the Champions League actually represent becomes complicated in ways that nobody associated with the club wants to think about. If they are cleared, the greatest rise in football history is exactly that and nothing else.
The final chapter of this story has not yet been written. Guardiola is leaving. The charges are unresolved. The next manager inherits a squad built for domination but faces questions about the club’s future that go beyond tactics and transfers.
The Most Remarkable Story in Football
Whatever the commission eventually decides, the journey from Maine Road on a grey Tuesday night in the third tier to the summit of European football remains the most remarkable transformation the sport has ever seen.
A club that was genuinely dying, that had fallen so far and so fast that its survival was not guaranteed, rebuilt itself into the most powerful football operation in the world within a single generation. The people who were there for the third tier years and are still there now have witnessed something that no supporter of any other club has ever experienced in quite the same way.
From the third tier to the Champions League. From noisy neighbours to the most dominant force in English football history. From Maine Road half empty on a Tuesday night to the Etihad packed to capacity for a title celebration.
It is the greatest story football has ever told. Even if the ending is still being written.
