It’s time for Manchester City to win the Champions League
Manchester City may never have a better opportunity to win the Champions League than they do this season.
Manchester City have been here before. Not Tottenham’s new home — Tuesday’s match will be the first time they’ve visited Spurs’ new spaceship of a stadium since the doors were finally flung open to fans last week — but the quarterfinals of the Champions League. In fact, this will be the third time in the last four years City have reached the competition’s final eight.
And yet never before has the burden of expectation weighed so heavily on the Abu Dhabi-owned club. With the Champions League as wide open as it has been in over a decade, and three-time defending champions Real Madrid already out, City are, along with Barcelona, widely seen as the competition frontrunners.
It’s not just that, though. Between the purchase of players, the hiring and firing of managers and the construction of training ground and stadium upgrades, well over £1 billion, maybe even close to £2 billion, has been splurged by City over the past decade — all with the purpose of turning the club into a soccer superpower.
As three-time Premier League winners, they’re already some way along that path. However, as with every oil-funded soccer project of the modern age (see Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea and Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain) the Champions League is seen as the crown to coronate them. That is something that has so far evaded them.
Pep Guardiola was hired to change that. A former two-time winner of European soccer’s premier club competition, the Catalan is the preeminent coach of his generation. Along with Johan Cruyff and Arrigo Sacchi, Guardiola is likely to go down as one of the most significant coaches in the history of modern soccer.
City started preparing the ground for Guardiola years in advance of his actual arrival, even hiring many of his former Barcelona colleagues to executive positions. Never before has an elite club been so geared toward the appointment of a specific manager. Couple this with the resources of the Emirati and Guardiola has few excuses to fall back on should City fail in Europe.
While Guardiola has changed the culture around the Etihad Stadium, leading City to a record-breaking title win last season and keeping them on course for an historic quadruple this season, the Champions League quarterfinal against Spurs presents the Catalan with something of a career crossroads.
Move past Spurs, into the final four, and Guardiola will be another step closer to achieving the grand objective set for him upon his arrival at the Etihad Stadium. Stumble as his side did against Liverpool, another English opponent, at the same stage of the Champions League last season, however, and questions will be asked.
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That might seem unfair given how City would still, in this hypothetical scenario, be on course for a treble. But these are the circumstances Guardiola signed up for in the first place. Manchester City had already won the Premier League twice before when the former Barcelona and Bayern Munich boss arrived. That frontier had already been crossed. Europe is the final frontier.
Anyone who believed the Champions League could be bought has been silenced by the fortunes, or more accurately misfortunes, of the New Guard in recent years. Between them, City and PSG have spent more than any other two sides in the world over the past decade and yet neither has made it past the Champions League semifinals.
PSG have already fallen by the wayside this season, crashing out in the round of 16. Now, City must avoid a similar fate and prove that their failures over the years have at least helped them build toward something. In previous seasons, Guardiola’s side have fallen victim to teams with an air of irrepressible destiny about them — see Liverpool last season and Monaco the season before. Given all the measures taken, all the pieces that have fallen into place, destiny is surely, finally, on Manchester City’s side.