Manchester City vs Inter Milan was a ‘corporate spectacle’, says Joe Butterfield

As a City fan, I’m certainly not naive as to where we are as a club right now.

The club stands here today as Premier League champions for the fourth time in a row – only recently dethroned as Champions of Europe. We’ve got some of the highest revenues in the sport with Pep Guardiola, the greatest manage to ever do it, at the helm and bonafide superstars like Erling Haaland leading the line.

Much to the chagrin of the 100,000 strong “I was at York away” lot, we are no longer little old City anymore.

This has obviously come with some of the greatest memories of our collective lives. Aguero’s 93:20 goal felt like a once in a lifetime achievement until Ilkay Gundogan did his best job of almost recreating it a decade later (ironically in a kit which was a tribute to that goal). Winning the Champions League, that feeling as Rodri slammed it into the back of the net. Going to the Bernabeu and slapping Madrid about. Knocking United off their perch, condemning an entire generation of their fanbase to only ever knowing life as the noisy neighbours of Manchester. It’s been a wild ride.

However it felt like Wednesday’s Champions League opener against Inter was very much a culmination of the corporate club City have now become. The club lined up, in a home game no less, sporting a fourth kit (yes, we have four kits now) which exists purely to massage the ego of one half of the Gallagher brothers, with the ultimate irony being that it was released within a week or two of Oasis reforming yet, despite this, the Definitely Maybe memorial kit has zero input from, mention of or reference to Liam. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was a Noel Gallagher solo album.

When Oasis were massive back in the 90s and early 00s, the fact that such a massive band, a real cultural cornerstone of the nation, had two frontmen who were fans of little old City as they suffered through some of the most torrid times in their history, was genuinely great. It was a very organic thing, with Liam and Noel sporting City kits on photoshoots and doing backstage interviews at award shows where they’d reference the club. Now? It’s less so.

It’s not helped by the fact that the club obviously picked their Gallagher brother when the split happened and it’s the one I don’t like – the guy who hangs out at oligarch social events in Kensington with Boris Johnson and various political donors, a scene which couldn’t be much further from the brothers who once embodied “diamonds in the rough”. Now, Noel seems to only grace the club with his presence when it’s either a London away day or a trophy deciding game, whether that’s a final or a last game of the season. He always weasels his way into the dressing room afterwards as well, sometimes “spontaneously” pulling a guitar out of his arse to sing Wonderwall with the dressing room, a song which his brother famously sings.

However, if we set aside my general dislike of Noel, the kit is just a bit shit isn’t it? I’ve been wracking my brain to try and find something nice to say about it since it was released and the only thing I can come up with is that I quite like the shade of blue they used for the trim and the shorts. It’s still not a City blue at all and it can obviously never offset the fact that the rest of the kit looks like it’s gone discoloured around the edges of the white space, like a tea towel that you can’t be arsed cleaning so you just keep using it until it reaches that point where you can’t ignore it anymore.

This is before we even get started on the comic sans level font that is being used, not only for this kit but for all kits outside of Premier League games. I know it’s Noel’s actual handwriting and it’s not his fault that his handwriting looks like comic sans, but why on earth has the club let the kit font for every non-Premier League competition be decided by one half of Oasis’s handwriting?

Look, none of this is really the point. I don’t like the kit but you might, and that’s fine. Well, it’s not really fine. But whatever, you do you.

The point is that this no longer feels like a genuine collaboration between a couple of world famous City fans and their struggling little club anymore because, well, it’s not. City are a goliath now and Oasis (Noel) have got a 30th anniversary of Definitely Maybe to promote. The club know that a collectible kit like this will have a massive audience amongst kit collectors, City fans and Oasis fans. It’s a carefully constructed corporate partnership which will A) help Noel pay for his very expensive divorce and B) allow City to capitalise on the idea of “the old City”, despite them currently being a million miles away from that.

“But, Joe,” I hear the readership cry out collectively, “stop being so miserable, it’s just a one off collaboration between your favourite club and a band you like a bit, it’s not that deep, why are you so bothered?”

Well, my beloved reader, this is where I come to part deux of my gripe with the Inter match and what it represents.

Anybody who’s read a good chunk of anything I’ve written will know that one of my biggest bug bears about the club/football in general is ticket pricing, and boy did this fixture provide some ammunition for this one.

Eagle-eyed non-City fans will have noticed that there were some empty seats at the Etihad on Wednesday night. Nothing crazy, but the ground wasn’t packed out like it has been for knockout competitions. That’ll have something to do with the fact that pricing for this game was roughly around the same level as it was for the Champions League Quarter Final against Real Madrid last season.

Plenty of City fans online said they’d refuse to pay this amount and it looks like a lot of them kept their word, only the first game of eight in the new Champions League format isn’t quite the tourist draw that the club thinks it is and so not all the empties were filled up.

Lots of Champions League group games are usually filled up by fans who only attend the odd cup game here and there. People who want to take their kids to the occasional City game but can’t afford a season ticket and are quite happy to watch us batter some fourth seed team 5-0 at home. Typically over the last decade or so, these games have been inexpensive, exciting for the kids and a nice mid-week evening out to watch some football.

Now, however, it appears that City are all about making each of these games “an event” rather than just a night at the football. We’ve seen the makings of that over the last year or two with the pre-match light shows, which I don’t personally hate though I understand why they grate on many, however a bit of fancy lighting before a game that’s cost you £25 isn’t exactly a game changer.

Sitting down and watching the Halle Orchestra play the Champions League anthem, an anthem which is notoriously booed by the Etihad Stadium every time it rings out around the ground, before a game that you’ve paid £60+ to go and watch, is a totally different kettle of fish, however.

Come, pay £100 for you and your child to watch Champions of England, Manchester City, take on Champions of Italy, Inter, where City will play in their Oasis commemorative kit, with a special performance from the Halle Orchestra where they’ll play the anthem you don’t like, in the first game of eight in a brand new competition format where we have no idea how meaningful or meaningless the result will be. What’s not to love!?

It just feels like the absolute apex of the kind of fixture that UEFA, FIFA, The Glazers, Daniel Levy, John Henry and sadly, Manchester City are absolutely begging for. These owners and federations don’t want Manchester City in a group stage with Feyenoord, Shakhtar Donetsk and FC Copenhagen; they want the European Super League.

Sure, we’ve currently got something that resembles a bit of both so far, with some hot and steamy Pot One on Pot One action to appease the higher ups who are begging for more high-profile match ups in the Champions League, however I’d wager that within a decade or two (if the current format holds) the pot four teams will slowly make way. Your Slovan Bratislavas and your Sparta Pragues will be no more and we’ll find ourselves with the dreaded “historical merit” entry qualification, where the likes of United and Liverpool will be given ironclad spots regardless of recent performance.

But this is bigger picture stuff. Back in Manchester, we’re filling the Tunnel Club for the Champions of Italy, charging the regular, local fans (who already have an extra group stage fixture now to contend with after the expansion of the competition) more than double the amount for the privilege of watching compared to last season’s highest seeded group stage opponent.

As I mentioned all of the joys and positives City’s recent success brings, this success comes with some negatives, of course. Nothing is perfect. Despite having an owner who could sell the club 10 times over and barely see the billions earned impact his family fortune, we see the ticket prices like we’ve seen this week. Disabled fans are charged extra for needing parking spots close to the ground due to literal disabilities, until fans force the club to U-turn. More and more sections of the ground make way for corporate hospitality year after year. Rich tourists (and by tourists I mean genuine tourists who are not City fans) and businessmen on tax-deductable client schmoozing sessions flock for an afternoon in The Tunnel Club.

Co-op Live looms over the Etihad, ensuring that what was once a clear view of the stadium from the bottom of Alan Turing Way has now been obstructed by some kind of dystopian, Bladerunner-esque, Megacity One black box that is apparently designed to house humans every now and then. That’ll all become part of the matchday experience soon enough, as hordes of day-trippers who don’t mind forking out a tenner for a pint of Asahi will flock into this windowless box that happens to be right next to the Etihad and be greeted by Natalie Pike and Danny Jackson, who will interview players from the 90s in the pre-match build up to City v Southampton that most of the people in there will have never heard of.

City will soon no longer have a home kit, instead every single match day will be a different collector’s item kit. The Blossoms will have their own kit soon to mark the third anniversary of their most recent album. Your favourite City Podcast will have their kit, which is fine until you realise that the one you don’t like will have one as well. The “Why Always Me” kit will sell by the truckload and the vicious cycle of commemorative, collectible shite will spin on and on.

Of course, I’m still a City fan. We all are. This is the kind of deep-rooted, psychological stranglehold this massive corporate machine has on all of us. If Samsung or Sony or Nike took direct steps to make my life as somebody who buys their products less convenient, I’d have no problems turning my back on them and buying products from elsewhere. Yet the vast, vast majority of City fans can’t just start going to watch somebody else.

Going to the Etihad every week is about much more than the football for most, and it’s that very fact which City prey upon. I can understand people not giving up their season tickets despite annual rises – no matter what we think about it, the per-game increase is minimal enough to be justifiable to anybody who wants to rationalise it in their own heads every year. However, when it comes to games like this, do you really want to watch us play one of eight group stage games in the Champions League in our Oasis anniversary kit badly enough to pay £62.50 to do so?

Only when people stop forking out for these games en-masse will the cycle even begin to show signs of slowing down. It’ll probably never end, that’s a pipedream. Prices will rise year on year and there’s nothing we can do about it. But if enough fans don’t turn up to an obscenely priced group stage Champions League game, there’s a chance they’ll think twice next time.

No matter what the likes of Manchester City legend, Peter Schmeichel, might say about a lack of atmosphere as he sits in his padded seat, courtesy of his free entry media pass, real, paying, matchgoing fans are paying the price for this new expansion of greed, both from UEFA and City.

Do I have much hope? No. Not really.

Do I think that we’ll find ourselves having this discussion again next season? Definitely. Maybe.