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Manchester City and Manchester United: Friends, neighbours, rivals
They started their walk, loud and boisterous, from a city-centre pub where the landlord, a Manchester United fan, had been let into their secret.
They headed south, past the university, through the bright lights of Rusholme’s Curry Mile and into the unpretentious terraced streets of Moss Side. It was a march. All of them were United supporters and they were paying a late-night visit to Maine Road, the home of Manchester City.
For some of the route, there was even a conga.
The date was February 23, 2001, and they were celebrating the silver anniversary, 25 years and counting, since City’s most recent trophy win, the 1975-76 League Cup.
A party was being thrown by Red Issue, United’s unfailingly acerbic fanzine, and the organisers had booked a banqueting suite at Maine Road so they could toast the occasion on enemy territory. It was an orgy of schadenfreude, an extravaganza of epicaricacy, all at City’s expense.
Different times, indeed.
“The party was booked in City’s marvellously named Silver Suite,” says John-Paul O’Neill, the fanzine’s editor at the time. “Tickets were sold on the basis that the venue would be announced via an answerphone message on the evening in question. We had a DJ booked, and a comedian. And, of course, we’d bought a couple of footballs for a drunken, late-night 100-a-side game on the pitch. Alas, City pulled the plug.”
Did someone tip off the club? Or did the police get wind of it first? Either way, City cancelled on the eve of what they had been led to believe was a regular 30th birthday celebration.
But the party went ahead anyway. The venue was Henry’s, a bar in the city centre. Then, at midnight, hundreds set off on the march. As they headed along Oxford Road, there was a heavy police presence, including a helicopter.
The story even made it into the local paper, the Manchester Evening News, noting that several banners — all with a “25 Years” theme — had been positioned on motorway bridges and various other routes into the city.
The headline was “In Case they Forgot” and, in the next edition of Red Issue, the fanzine was already making plans for a 50th anniversary bash. “A provisional booking has already been made for the Golden Suite for February 2026.”
Except, of course, it hasn’t worked out that way.
There will be no such party in 2026 and if you are new to this rivalry, or under the age of 30, it must seem strange to hear about the days when City, in the words of their former player turned chairman Francis Lee, would have no space remaining in their boardroom “if cups were awarded for cock-ups”.
The modern-day City have become a trophy-winning machine: champions of England five times in the last six seasons now. They will emulate neighbours United’s so-far-unique 1998-99 treble if they beat them in the FA Cup final on Saturday and then defeat Inter Milan in the Champions League one the following weekend.
It is Kevin De Bruyne, not Jamie Pollock, in City’s midfield. Erling Haaland leads the line, rather than Lee Bradbury (or goalkeeper David James). It is Pep Guardiola, not Alan Ball, on the touchline. It all feels very different to the days when United were having all the fun and souvenir stalls outside Old Trafford sold T-shirts with the slogan: “1976 was a strange year for English football – City won a trophy.”
Elsewhere on The Athletic today…
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer told a story recently that, in its own way, said a lot about the changing fortunes of Manchester’s top two clubs.
It came during Solskjaer’s An Evening with… event at Manchester’s Mercure Piccadilly hotel when the former United striker and later manager talked about City’s modern-day superiority and, for the first time, accused the Glazer family, who have owned United since 2005, of having “neglected” their Old Trafford stadium.
The man who scored the last-gasp, treble-clinching winner for United in the 1999 Champions League final was asked to recall the time, a year before that sweet-scented night in Barcelona, when the club had decided to sell him to Tottenham Hotspur — against manager Alex Ferguson’s wishes.
“I still have the fax, signed by the two chairmen, Alan Sugar and Martin Edwards, agreeing to sell me for £5.5million,” Solskjaer told the audience.
“The gaffer (Ferguson) called me into his office. He said the clubs had agreed a deal but he didn’t want to sell me. ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘You just can’t tell Martin Edwards, or anyone, that I convinced you to stay’. I can say it now after my goal in 1999, of course…”
That was the moment Solskjaer was interrupted by someone calling out that if he had gone to Spurs, he would have “won fuck all”.
“I know,” Solskjaer replied. “Maybe the Carabao (League) Cup. Back in the day, it was called the Worthington Cup. Or as we called it, the Worth Nothing Cup.”
Arrogant, eh? But United never hid that streak of arrogance. There was even a banner at Old Trafford to make sure everyone knew it. “Not arrogant,” it read, “just better.”
But the audience that night knew what Solskjaer meant: United had different priorities when Ferguson’s teams were winning Premier League titles and European Cups, “Football, bloody hell…” and all that. To United, the League Cup, English football’s third trophy after the league and the FA Cup, was little more than an afterthought.
Then again, so were neighbours City for many years, judging by the number of times Ferguson was asked, before the Abu Dhabi era began in 2008, to rank United’s rivals and named them, in order, as Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Leeds.
There was rarely a mention for the tenants of what Ferguson called “the Temple of Doom”, aka the City of Manchester Stadium (now the Etihad), and usually only when Paul Hince, then the Manchester Evening News’ chief sports writer, turned up at one of his press conferences.
Hince was an old-school Mancunian and a City fan who used to write about “Sir Taggart”, because of Ferguson’s resemblance to the flint-faced Scottish detective of that name played by Mark McManus on British TV in the 1980s and ’90s. He could get away with it because Ferguson quite liked him and, most importantly, rarely saw City as a threat.
“For a long time, the way he (Ferguson) would get at City was by constantly saying our games (against United) didn’t count as a derby match,” says Gary James, the Manchester football historian, author and City fan. “He’d say, ‘Our real derby is Liverpool’, which completely ignored the entire history of Manchester football.
“I remember years ago reading an article in (UK football magazine) When Saturday Comes with a Notts County fan saying, ‘The worst thing for us is that our biggest rival, Nottingham Forest, don’t even regard us as a rival’. And that was how Ferguson wanted City to feel — inferior in every way. That was the rivalry then: ‘We don’t value you — you’re not a worthy opponent’.”
The interesting part is trying to work out when exactly the balance of power started to shift in City’s favour.
Was it the 2010-11 FA Cup semi-final, when City beat United in the clubs’ first-ever encounter at Wembley? Was it the 6-1 at Old Trafford six months later when, in James’ words, it felt like “the crumbling of an empire”?
Was it Carlos Tevez switching from United to City in the summer of 2009? Or the swish of Sergio Aguero’s right boot to win the 2011-12 title with a final-day, stoppage-time goal that now has a hospitality lounge, The 93.20 Suite (in honour of the minutes and seconds played when ball met net), at the Etihad Stadium?
Or does it go back to that late-summer day in 2008, three years after US tycoon Malcolm Glazer took ownership of United, when Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi transformed City into the most financially-endowed club on the planet?
Something certainly changed, because, around a year later, just a few minutes after Michael Owen had scored United’s 96th-minute winner in an epic 4-3 derby, there was a telling scene inside the tunnel at Old Trafford.
Away from the television cameras, Ferguson was venting all his fury, up close, in the face of the City executive he thought was responsible for the “Welcome to Manchester” poster that had gone up in the city centre, attracting worldwide publicity, after Tevez swapped United red for City blue that summer.
Ferguson had been misinformed — but that was not the point. His rage told its own story. So did the television interviews when he talked about City being the “noisy neighbours”. It was official: they had finally got under his skin.
“When he called City the ‘noisy neighbours’, it was telling us two things,” says James. “He was trying to say, ‘They’ve got a lot of talk, but they don’t ever do owt (anything)’. But the way it was interpreted by most City fans, and the club itself, was, ‘We’re winding him up, we’re getting to him, we’re in his head’.
“Then City started to find success and win trophies. Tevez, of course, was the catalyst to that success. And Ferguson’s comments galvanised City.”
To younger fans, it must seem rather peculiar to hear about the times when City’s crowd would sing “Twenty-five years, and we’re still here” as a show of loyalty. Eventually, it became 26 years. Then 27 years, 28 years, 29 years… on and on until, finally, they ended their 35-year wait for a trophy by lifting the FA Cup in 2011.
A new breed of City fans might not realise there used to be a ‘Ticker’ banner on permanent display inside Old Trafford, keeping record of how many years had passed, with transferable numbers, since City’s most recent piece of silverware.
The younger generation might not remember Joe Royle, one of Guardiola’s predecessors as their manager, talking about a strange and debilitating condition known as “Cityitis” and the team being an easy target for every comedian on the circuit.
Exhibit A: the episode of BBC comedy news quiz Have I Got News for You when jazz singer George Melly seemed taken aback to hear about a Mancunian Turner Prize winner making art from elephant droppings. “There isn’t much elephant shit to be found in Manchester,” he explained. Regular panellist Paul Merton butted in: “Haven’t you seen Man City lately?”
And yet, there was something about City in those days that neutrals found endearing and attractive. Their hard-luck stories inspired sympathy and admiration in equal measure.
“City picked up widespread general support because they weren’t United,” says Mark Hodkinson, a writer, publisher and author who has seen, close up, how the two clubs were once separated. “Everyone could imagine what it would be like living among fans of such a dominant club. City were able to forge a more sporting, wholesome image. And, of course, clubs are much easier to like when they lose every week; pity and love are first cousins.”
In 1998-99, United’s treble season, Hodkinson was given access behind the scenes to cover City in what would now be called League One, the third tier of the English game. The end product, Blue Moon: Down Among the Dead Men, is among the finest books ever written about the club. It should also be mandatory reading for any fan who never knew the times when the only thing City really had in common with United was the first letter of their postcode.
“In all my time among the players, backroom staff, directors and fans, United were barely mentioned,” Hodkinson says. “I think they had the good sense to realise it would have been ridiculous to hold that same level of enmity when they were so far down the league.”
City were auditioning at the time, in the author’s words, to become “the sport’s unofficial Slapstick XI”.
Their derby that season came against now-defunct Macclesfield Town among the puddles of potholes of Moss Rose, which this season has been a Northern Premier League (eighth-tier) ground. Under Royle’s management, they lost league games to York City, Lincoln City and, twice, Wycombe Wanderers.
The nadir was a 2-1 defeat to Mansfield Town, of what is now League Two, in the EFL Trophy (a cup competition for teams in the third and fourth divisions) in front of 3,007 fans at 35,000 capacity Maine Road. Especially as, the following night, United hosted Bayern Munich in a group game that turned out to be a Champions League final dress rehearsal.
Hodkinson recalls there was not much humour around. City managed to win promotion that season, albeit via the play-offs, and on penalties, having been 2-0 down after 86 minutes of the final, but there was all sorts of Mancunian melancholy preceding it. Royle, he says, looked “whacked out” after games. At one point, a supporter wrote to the manager to wish him good luck and included a gift. It was a drinks coaster bearing the words: Panic Button.
“I struggled to grasp why City fans were so anxious and frustrated that season,” says Hodkinson. “I remember Kevin Cummins, the photographer and devoted City fan, telling me they shouldn’t issue match programmes for games against the likes of Colchester United or Macclesfield or, if they did, they should be edged in black to mark this funereal period in the club’s history.
“Tom Ritchie, editor of the fanzine City ‘Til I Cry!, had stopped going to matches because he was so overwhelmed by it all. I attended a few supporters’ club meetings and they were often shouting and arguing among themselves.
“As time has passed, I’ve realised why it was all so toxic: when we take on passionate, partisan support of a football club, we have an innate assumption of our club’s ‘rightful place’ – basically a league standing that we regard as acceptable, given the vagaries of form and fate. When a club veers wildly below this, it sets loose all kinds of negative emotions, from stress to hostility, and it becomes internalised and then expressed on matchdays, or when we are with fellow fans.
“Dedicated supporters look to football to bolster or even define their sense of well-being. If the infatuation is spurned or mistreated, they suffer their club as much as support it. Back then, City were the ultimate definition of this condition.”
Hodkinson admired the durability of all those disillusioned City fans who kept going back for more punishment, season after season, in the years when United and their flow of trophies were just a speck in the distance.
“But I could sense the age-old rivalry was simmering, waiting to be revived,” he says. “This was inevitable, because for many years being a City fan was often defined by its anti-United stance, almost as much as it was pro-City.”
On reflection, maybe we should have listened more closely to Garry Cook when he announced his master plan in August 2008, three weeks before the Abu Dhabi takeover.
At the time, City were owned by Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister of Thailand — who went on the run from his own country after being convicted of multi-million-pound levels of corruption. Shinawatra, a man also described by Human Rights Watch as “a human-rights abuser of the worst kind”, had run out of money to fund the club.
City had finished the previous season by losing 8-1 away to Middlesbrough on a day United celebrated yet another title (they would also win the Champions League that season). Cook, however, had a vision that on reflection deserved better than the scorn it attracted.
That vision was to turn this proud yet accident-prone club into the major force of English football.
“And we will,” Cook said. “Can we be as big, or bigger, than Manchester United? Yes. Can we win the Premier League? Yes. Can we win the Champions League? It will take time, probably 10 years or more. But if I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t be here.”
And the response? Ridicule, for the most part. Cook was lampooned by newspaper columnists. Fans doubted him, too.
“Even some of the people inside the club weren’t sure,” says Mike Rigg, then City’s technical director.
“There was a big contingent of people we used to call the ‘If it’s not broke, don’t fix it’ brigade. These were people who had been at the club a long time. Garry was very much like, ‘No, guys. We’ve got to break it and rebuild it’. Some people didn’t like it, but he was building something from scratch.”
Cook had previously been a Nike executive, based at the sportswear giant’s headquarters in the US state of Oregon, with responsibility for looking after its world-famous Michael Jordan brand. He wanted to think big, because that was all he knew.
“A lot of people don’t remember that City were close to not paying their bills,” Rigg says. “It was Garry who removed Shinawatra and brought in Abu Dhabi. I remember coming out of one meeting with him. ‘We’re still talking about trying to get Fred the butcher to give us £500 as a match-ball sponsor,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to be thinking about bringing in £5million sponsorship deals and going global’. He wanted people to think differently.”
Cook was also responsible for Robinho’s arrival, from Real Madrid, as the first superstar of City’s new era.
“At the start, it was really difficult to sign players because we couldn’t offer Champions League football,” says Rigg. “I remember flying around the world and getting my laptop out to show them prototypes of what the new training ground would look like. The narrative was often, ‘Listen, this is not about maintaining history, like Manchester United, it’s about creating history’.”
Not that everyone was convinced when City’s new regime talked publicly about trying to sign Cristiano Ronaldo from United and, in a moment of pure tragicomedy, stuck in a £70million offer to Barcelona for Lionel Messi because – true story – “it’s getting messy” was misheard as “get Messi” on a conference call.
Maybe you recall Ferguson laughing off City’s ambitions to win the league with his now-infamous response of “not in my lifetime” (Tevez subsequently held up a cardboard sign reading, “RIP Fergie”, after City’s first Premier League title in 2012).
Perhaps you remember Robinho seemed a bit confused, too. The truth is that when he boarded his plane in Madrid to fly to England, he was expecting to join Chelsea. The Brazilian had never heard of City, which wasn’t as strange back then as it would sound now.
Overseas players often used to refer to simply “Manchester”, when speaking about United, as if they did not realise there was more than one club in the city.
Maybe you also recall Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield, the United-supporting bassist from The Stone Roses, declaring the only way the band would hold a reunion would be “when Man City wins the cup and a UFO is gonna hover over Wembley and beam down Elvis riding a unicorn”.
The Stone Roses did, of course, get back together. City didn’t win a cup, but several of them. No UFOs have been spotted above Wembley, but there is no doubt this has been the most prolonged ordeal for United fans since Liverpool dominated English football in the 1980s.
“It’s shit,” says Scott Patterson, an Old Trafford season-ticket holder and editor of the Republik Of Mancunia fans’ website.
“I wouldn’t agree City have taken over, given they have still got more than 10 titles to win, and a few Champions Leagues, before their success can be compared to ours. But there’s obviously no denying the football they play and the success they have enjoyed totally supersedes anything we have done in the last decade.”
Patterson was part of a generation that saw Ferguson’s United teams win 13 league championships in 21 seasons from 1992-93 to 2012-13. He says: “We did it by playing great football, promoting academy lads and keeping faith with the manager. We were doing what every football fan in the country wished their team could do. We were arrogant, and rightly so, because we were also better than everyone else.”
Maybe, though, the club became too arrogant, complacent even, unprepared for the scale of development at the other end of the Mancunian Way. “City’s owners have put £1billion into their club,” says Patterson. “United’s owners have taken £1billion out.”
Go to City now and the place is a blur of workmen in hard hats and fluorescent yellow tabards. Plans have been submitted to increase the stadium’s capacity to 60,000. A bridge leads you over to the village-sized training complex, which includes a 7,000-seat mini-Etihad where City’s women’s and academy teams play. A 23,500-capacity concert venue is going up — bigger than the O2 Arena in London and New York’s Madison Square Garden.
Patterson makes the point that some of City’s titles might be taken away “when they are found guilty of their financial cheating” (he doesn’t bother with an “/if” and omits to use the word “alleged”).
City deny the allegations, issued by the Premier League in the form of 115 charges, that they have cooked the books to get a financial advantage over every other club. But many United fans expect them to be found guilty and for league titles to be wiped from the records or receive an asterisk. “Not that I have any desire for them to be handed to us,” adds Patterson, “despite finishing second to them under (Jose) Mourinho and Ole without breaching financial rules.”
And Cook? Eleven years after leaving the club, he has no appetite for told-you-so triumphalism or taking aim at his former critics. It is enough for him that everything has worked out as he had planned. His predictions feel remarkably prescient bearing in mind this is the 10th successive year City have finished above United in the Premier League (aka, every one since United last won it in what was Ferguson’s retirement season), and is seeing their second Champions League final appearance in three seasons.
The plan, says Cook, was to adopt a “bold approach and inject some ambition” at a club where “hope had been diluted every year because of the success of our rivals”. It also involved bringing in Roberto Mancini, three-time Serie A winning coach of Inter Milan between 2005 and 2008, as the first City manager who genuinely worried Ferguson.
“I always believed the club had a lot of potential,” says Cook. “But we needed new owners, employees and fans and, more importantly, a new culture to create belief and commit to the plan. The easy part is saying it. Those who have played a part, and those who continue to deliver every day, should be proud.”
City have finished, on average, 16.7 points above United since Ferguson stepped down. They have also turned Wembley into the Etihad of the south. Saturday will see City’s 24th visit to the national stadium for finals, semi-finals or Community Shields (there was also another of the latter, played in Leicester) since Cook ushered in Sheikh Mansour’s takeover.
“He (Cook) got laughed at,” says Rigg. “He got nailed, he got caned. And just look where they are now. I’ve been in football 36 years and he’s the most forward-thinking visionary I’ve ever worked with.”
If you were at that 2011 FA Cup semi-final, you can probably understand why the police wanted the kick-off time for this season’s final to be moved forward from what had become a traditional late-afternoon start.
Wembley Way, in particular, resembled a battleground. So the game on Saturday will start at 3pm, rather than 5.15pm, because the police want to reduce the potential for alcohol-fuelled aggro. The strategy is clear: less time for boozing beforehand means less chance of punch-ups between the two sets of fans.
All of which can feel like a reflection of times if you go further back into the history of this fixture and the small library’s worth of books, written and researched by Gary James, such as The Emergence Of Footballing Cultures: Manchester 1840-1919.
The story of his own family, for starters. “My grandad was a big United fan,” says James. “He always wanted United to win the trophies. But if they couldn’t do it, he wanted City to win them, then another Lancashire team, then a northern one. To him and his generation, they would watch City (at home) one week and United the next.”
The same applied to thousands of people in the years before and after the 1958 Munich tragedy, when 23 people, including eight players and three club staff, lost their lives as a result of the plane carrying Matt Busby’s United team crashing off an icy runway.
As the football world mourned the dead and Busby lay in hospital recovering from his injuries, City offered to supply players to help ensure United could fulfil their fixtures and remain in the league.
Nobody should be surprised: when Old Trafford was badly damaged by bombing during the second world war, City offered them the use of Maine Road. They played there for eight years from 1941.
Forty years earlier, City donated money for Newton Heath, as United were known until 1902, to help keep that club alive when they ran into financial strife.
Or how about the story of United asking Albert Alexander, a City director, to lead their FA Cup-winning side’s homecoming parade in 1909, as he had done for City five years earlier? United wanted a City man to be involved because it was seen, in James’ words, as “a continuation of Manchester’s glory, not that of one specific club”.
In later years, Alexander’s son, Albert Jr, became City chairman. Busby, his friend, always made sure he had a seat in the directors’ box for every United home game.
The modern history is more complicated given the increased stakes, the presence of international owners with no real relationship to speak of, the allegations of sportswashing against Abu Dhabi and the inescapable fact that the two clubs do not particularly like one another.
“It has been difficult for City fans to redefine themselves as overlords after being underdogs for so long,” says Hodkinson. “There is also the political element. I know a good number who are uneasy with the club’s ownership and have walked away.
“I recall one City fan telling me that City were one of the big four Cs in his life alongside Catholicism, communism and the Co-op, where he shopped and banked. He saw City as ‘the people’s club’ and once they were bought by what he considered dubious foreign investors, they no longer felt like his club.
“Putting all that aside, I’m really happy for City fans. They deserve this success for sticking with the club. I was in a bar in Spain in 2019 when City beat Brighton to secure the title. At the end of the match, a few drinks in, I got quite emotional. I was thinking of all the good people I had got to know who suffered the absolute ignominy of that 1998-99 season.”
Against that kind of backdrop, anyone who appreciates what it takes to be a football fan — loyalty, stoicism and an understanding that following a club can be both exhilarating and excruciating — ought to understand why City’s modern-day success means more, on the whole, to the generations who remember much bleaker years. Younger fans have been spoiled in comparison.
It is true, though, that not everyone found it easy to adjust.
In 2011, the author, social historian and City fan Colin Shindler was interviewed by UK newspaper The Independent. “This City team has been cooked in a microwave,” he said. “Very tasty, but if you really want something sumptuous, you have to cook it for three hours in red wine, in the oven.”
Shindler’s memoirs, published in 1998, had the title Manchester United Ruined My Life. Some fellow supporters never forgave him for admitting it so openly.
And now, a quarter of a century later, United are trying to stop the team that Rio Ferdinand, one of the greatest defenders in their history, describes as “a juggernaut”.
That infamous Ticker banner from Old Trafford has been taken down — a private collector in Kuwait apparently bought it for £3,000 — and the motivation for everyone connected with United at Wembley this weekend will surely be as much about stopping City’s treble push as winning themselves.
In a divided football city, it turned out there was a cure for Cityitis, after all.
“It’s magical,” says James, whose earliest City memory was seeing Rodney Marsh’s debut versus Chelsea in 1972. “The next couple of weeks could be the most incredible the club have ever experienced.”
(Artwork: Sam Richardson; Photos: Getty Images)
