Why there's no reason to get salty about Man City's treble: An open letter from a Manchester United fan

Is this their moment? Beckham, into Sheringham... AND SOLSKJAER HAS WON IT! History is made, Manchester United are the Champions of Europe again & nobody will ever win a European Cup final more dramatically than this. Champions of Europe, Champions of England, winners of the FA Cup, everything their hearts desire. - Clive Tyldesley

Whenever I feel low, which I felt recently as a Manchester United fan seeing Manchester City’s complete dominance of football, I rewatch the highlights of the 1999 Champions League final when Manchester United scored two goals in injury time to complete the mother of all comebacks.

The entire season was remarkable enough to be a Greek drama: Solskjaer’s late comeback goal in the fourth round of the FA Cup to knock out Liverpool; Ryan Giggs’ knife-through-hot-butter run cutting through Arsenal’s defence after Roy Keane had been sent off and Peter Schmeichel had saved a Dennis Bergkamp’s stoppage-time penalty in the FA Cup semi-final replay; Cole and Yorke’s telepathic partnership during a goal against Barcelona in the Champions League; Roy Keane “pounding every blade of grass” to engineer a comeback win against Juventus in the Champions League semi-final and finally the most dramatic way anyone could ever win the Champions League.

United were like Rocky, coming back from nowhere whenever things looked down and out. In the final, they had to play without two of the greatest midfielders to ever grace the game: Paul Scholes and Roy Keane, but they still managed to power through.

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I apologise for digressing. This isn’t about Manchester United’s past glories but the fact that the Treble is the rarest of rare occurrences, like a politician with morals or a journalist who understands numbers.

It has only been achieved nine times since the European Cup began in 1956. Bayern Munich is the only team to do it twice, while Pep Guardiola is the only manager to have won it with two different teams: Barcelona (2008-09) and Manchester City (2022-23). Interestingly, he beat Manchester United in both cases to get there: in the Champions League final in 2008-09 and the FA Cup final in 2022-23.

And it has caused much chagrin among football fans of various vintages and allegiances. Twitter’s favourite football troll account summed up the mood: “Man City finally winning the Champions League is such a fairytale story. Amazing what can be achieved with over £2 billion spent in transfers, a manager with an offshore account, a suspended 2-year ban from European competitions and 115 charges of financial irregularity.”

The reaction has been echoed across a spectrum of football watchers – from online fan forums to esteemed The Guardian columnists – that City had somehow bought their way to a Treble as if every other European club has been operating on the dole.

City winning the Treble isn’t as simple as going to the store and ordering the top players in the world. Despite their dominance in the league, they continued to underperform in Europe, not unlike Sir Alex Ferguson’s United, which only managed to win Europe’s premier trophy twice in a 29-year reign.

In fact, City’s inability to grab the Big Ears has been a running joke in football. Will Guardiola overthink another semi-final – perhaps playing his wingbacks as false nines – and lose again? Is Yaya Toure’s juju curse still effective? Will Haaland accidentally trample one of their diminutive ball-playing midfielders?

The Holy Treble finally happened 24 years after Manchester United’s, and it wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. There was a time when it seemed Arsenal would run away with the league. Overcoming Manchester United in the FA Cup final – a dogged outfit under Ten Hag – wasn’t effortless either.

Keeping one’s cool before dismantling Real Madrid – who often play on proverbial steroids in Europe – wasn’t child's play as well.

Life isn’t a Rudyard Kipling poem, and while it might look facile in retrospect, it’s very easy for things to unravel. Even the Champions League final was a terse and tense affair, and Inter put up a real fight but managed to make it three in three losses for the famed Catenaccio-loving Italians who couldn’t keep their door bolted in European finals (Sevilla beat Roma in the Europa League and West Ham overcame Fiorentina in the Europa Conference League).

The final could’ve ended very differently if Man City keeper Ederson didn’t pull off a few sublime saves and if Romelu Lukaku was capable of off-the-ball movement and thinking concurrently. All of this brings me to the most important thing about sports.

In the optimistic sports drama Ted Lasso, the ever-Panglossian Dani Rojas would often quip: “Football is life.” Well, football is life, which means that it also follows the basic tenet of life: we aren’t all equal.

Yes, Manchester City probably dodged FFP and has 115 charges against them. Yes, they have unlimited funds, so they can sign anyone they want including Halaand, whose physique seems to suggest that Mjolnir would break if it struck him. But City’s success didn’t come overnight, and the City Football Group spent many years laying the foundation that today seems like the inevitable road to success.

People have forgotten, but the “noisy neighbours” didn’t immediately catapult themselves to the top of the league. They finished 9th, 10th, 5th, and 3rd (a round of results that included being denied a place in Europe by Tottenham of all teams), and it wasn’t until 2012 that they dramatically won their first league as they scored twice in injury time to pip Manchester United by goal difference.

They spent many years setting up the foundation that would allow them to bring Pep Guardiola on board, and even after Guardiola came in, Champions League success remained elusive.

Ever since Mammon lovers figured out that there was big money in football, some clubs have always had more spending power than others. Yes, Manchester City got the luck of the draw when a nation-state picked the club to be their flagship brand in the City Football Group, but this is not the first time fortune favoured a club.

Manchester United was very fortuitous that the inception of the Premier League and the rise of the Class of 1992 coincided with the exponential explosion of cable television across the world so millions could tune in to watch the likes of David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, Roy Keane, and Co dominate football.

It opened up revenue streams for United that was hitherto unavailable. It means that United’s appeal went far beyond the “copper boys, dockers, millers” who would turn up in the middle of the country’s largest industrial estate to watch the team. If the cable revolution had happened a decade or two ago, then it would’ve Liverpool reaping the benefits of being the dominant force in the Premier League in the age of information.

Speaking of which, the same goes for the Premier League, which allowed clubs at the top to come together and manage to control most of the resources in English football, enough so that they could put on the greatest show on earth week in and week out, attracting the best talent from the world. When the Premier League started in 1992, it only had 13 foreign players. In the 2022-23 season, there are 442 registered foreign players, far more than English ones (256).

The taunt of “buying success” has been reserved for any club that has come up to challenge the status quo of English football. It used to be aimed at Jack Walker, the late owner of Blackburn, who bought players like Alan Shearer (and almost signed Zinedine Zidane) to help the Rovers win the Premier League in 1996.

It was reserved for Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea, which he bought after watching a pulsating end-to-end 4-3 match involving Manchester United and Real Madrid. Abramovich’s Chelsea acquisition unlocked the new Attitude Era of the Premier League with the introduction of Jose Mourinho, who sauntered in and announced he was “The Special One”.

In fact, the very success of the Premier League, the tribalism for a club on a tiny island that once colonised India, is a triumph of capitalism beyond any other. Bertrand Russell argued that a power struggle meant that the world was divided between “leaders” and followers,” but even he would’ve been shocked at the giant amassment of followers that clubs from his tiny island managed across the globe.

English football, like all football, once belonged to a tiny group born into a certain location whose loyalties were decided by geographic boundaries. However, the triumph of capitalism meant that a club’s appeal would transcend those mundane coordinates.

Capitalism forced English football to get rid of its hooliganism (even though we do end up with bums who can’t help but stick things up their bums). It allows poor players to instantly lift their families out of poverty because sports, unlike any other profession, is based solely on merit.

No nepotistic privilege here. Not even Ronaldinho’s or Zinedine Zidane’s or David Beckham’s sons can just waltz into a team by dint of their surnames. It’s the true great leveller, which is why we have more non-white people in sports than any other profession that pays respectfully. And it allows its denizens to bring actual change. Imagine a footballer, who didn’t have enough to eat as a kid, not only refusing to shut up and dribble but actually forcing the government to change its policy.

And finally, we have Man City’s biggest crime, what esteemed sports columnists like to call “sportswashing”, which is just a fancy term to lament the white man’s loss of hegemony.

Consider the hue and cry that we observed during the Qatar World Cup, where fans appeared to lose their mind after not getting beer in stadiums. There were a million articles about human rights abuses by the regime but how many articles did we read when America held the World Cup in 1994? Or France in 1998? Did anyone say J’accuse to nations who have gone out of their way to make life hell for millions across the globe? Why are the actions of the Qatar regime apropos human rights somehow more morally repugnant than the actions of the white countries?

Football, like life, reflects nature. Remember that nature works as a food chain. Herbivores eat flora and, in turn, are eaten by carnivores. Bacteria live by invading other cells. The young of a lot of species live on the larvae of others. Parasites survive on others. Humans survive like nature. Fraternity, Equality, and Justice are just byproducts of a well-meaning but delusional mind. Capitalism has, more than anything, proven Martin Luther King Jr right: "The moral curve of history bends towards justice."

The white man enjoyed the top slot for the last millennium, but now, the arc of history is slowly moving away. The Premier League is the epitome of inequality, built by a nation whose genocidal empire reaped the benefits of colonialism, plundering indigenous cultures across the globe. So, why shouldn’t it be ripped apart by a nation-state with even more money?

The triumph of an oil-based nation state in creating a brand-new footballing legacy in Manchester is perhaps a reminder to the white man that hegemony is no longer their preserve. That’s why, in all honesty, even as a suffering Manchester United fan, I don’t believe that there’s anything wrong with Manchester City winning the Treble.

Equality feels like oppression when it happens to the privileged. Football’s current status quo is just learning, albeit very slowly, what that actually means. All said and done, Dani Rojas was right. Football is life. Exactly like it.

The views expressed are the author’s own.

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