In Manchester, Things Are Not Quite as They Should Be 🩵❤️

By Rory Smith

In Kevin De Bruyne’s case, the streets quite literally won’t forget. Over the last couple of weeks, a wistful, nostalgic air has settled on the Premier League. It is not in the nature of football to stop, of course. The great telenovela rolls relentlessly on, the conclusion of one season transformed instantly into the raw material for next year’s plot lines. 

And yet, with much of the league’s most meaningful business long since concluded, there has been a distinct fin de siecle vibe to this season’s final throes, an unavoidable sense that things are coming to an end. Everton bade a bittersweet farewell to Goodison Park. Jamie Vardy, with one last act of carnage, signed off after a decade at Leicester City.

And, on Tuesday, De Bruyne graced the field at the Etihad Stadium one last time. It is hard to know quite how to describe the Belgian, which honorific best captures the outsized role he has played since he arrived at Manchester City in 2016. He is, certainly, one of the finest players in the club’s history. He is probably the best player of the current Premier League era. He may be the best midfielder in the competition’s history. He is definitely one of the most decorated.

City, too, evidently found it difficult to know exactly how to honor him. So the club took the safest possible route, and just did…everything. A statue has been commissioned. There is already a mosaic at City’s training facility. (City’s dedication to celebratory tiling is a welcome development for those of us who appreciate the ancient art forms. Presumably, in the spirit of competition, Manchester United will one day dedicate a whole fresco to Bruno Fernandes, and Arsenal install some sort of colossal temple frieze for Bukayo Saka.)

Most novel of all, though, is the fact that De Bruyne now has his own road. This is very much en vogue at the moment: when Xabi Alonso left Bayer Leverkusen a couple of weeks ago, the club announced that it would apply for permission to rename a street near its stadium Xabi-Alonso-Allee, a suitable tribute to the manager who led the club to its maiden German championship.

City, clearly, liked the idea. As a club, though, it is not entirely surprising that it did not want to expend a lot of time and energy meeting local planning regulations. City — let’s be diplomatic about this — incline toward finding a workaround. And so Kevin De Bruyne Crescent, rather than an actual highway, a street on which someone might one day live, is actually a private road inside the club’s expansive training facility. Still, it’s the thought that counts.

Or it would be if it did not all feel like City are protesting just a little too much. That is not to doubt the sincerity of the tributes, of course; the club, clearly, value just how much De Bruyne has contributed to its unprecedented success over the last seven years or so. But in the context, it is tempting to wonder whether even De Bruyne feels all the pomp and ceremony rings somehow hollow.

He has, after all, made it abundantly clear that he was surprised to learn that the club did not intend to renew his contract; has made it apparent that the decision caused him some pain, that he felt as though — given how long he has been at the Etihad, given the role that he has played — it would have been reasonable to think things might have been handled differently.

He has retreated, a touch, from his assertion a few weeks ago that he would not rule out playing for another Premier League team, but that he even considered it briefly is significant. Perhaps he said that in one of the earlier stages of grief; that he has said, more recently, that he intends to move abroad might indicate that he has at last reached the “acceptance” part. That he said it at all, though, suggests he has been hurt.

There is, admittedly, an echo here of another City legend’s somewhat botched farewell — Sergio Aguero was not entirely happy with the way the coda to his career at the Etihad was handled, though his dissatisfaction seemed to be directed more at Pep Guardiola than the institution as a whole — but it is broadly uncharacteristic of a club that has done all it can to preserve its recent history in amber.

Whether the source of City’s wealth is healthy for football is inherently subjective, and whether its astonishing success has been entirely legitimate is currently the subject of extremely expensive legal wrangling. That its rise has been marked by an unusual coherence in its thinking, though, is beyond debate. City has always had a clear idea in its head, a vision for its future, a sort of unified purpose. 

In one sense, of course, the decision not to renew De Bruyne’s contract is an example of that: City is not a club that indulges in sentiment; it is a shark, forever moving forwards. The broader circumstances, though, might indicate a different interpretation.

It is not just that Txiki Begiristain, the longstanding sporting director, is leaving, or that the club spent $200 million or so in January, largely on players who can politely be described as “projects,” or that Pep Guardiola omitted two homegrown talents — Rico Lewis and James McAtee — from his squad for the FA Cup final last week, in favor of Claudio Echeverri, a 19-year-old Argentine who has never previously played for the club. It is not even just that Jack Grealish appears to have been scrubbed from existence. 

It is that, in the aftermath of that limp, insipid defeat to Crystal Palace, Bernardo Silva rather darkly spoke of how, “in the bad moments, you learn new things: who you can go to war with, first of all. It’s in the bad moments that you see who the real ones are.” It is that Guardiola threatened, presumably with some degree of sarcasm, to “quit” if the club did not trim his squad so that he does not have to leave half a dozen players “in the freezer” every week. 

City has, for years, been run with remarkable — possibly even unique — efficiency. It has made everything look sleek and smooth, on the field, off the field. The impression, now, is different; for the first time in a long time, there is an undeniable feeling of roughness, of jaggedness, of tension and torsion around the club. 

Releasing one of the best players in your history at the end of their contract could, in certain lights, be ruthless and determined and clear-headed. Catching them by surprise, alienating them, souring the relationship: that feels like a sign, more than anything, that things are not quite as they should be.

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Lads, It’s Tottenham

No matter how sour things turn at Manchester City, everyone involved can take solace from knowing they are much worse across town. It is difficult to know which is the more humiliating for Manchester United: ending the season in 16th place in the Premier League, the club’s lowest finish since relegation in 1974, or losing a major final to Tottenham Actual Hotspur. (The actual answer: doing both at the same time, and losing to Spurs while playing like that.)

United, now, represent a fascinating test case for modern football. It is now 13 years since the club won its last Premier League title, in Alex Ferguson’s final year in charge, as is well known. Less highlighted is the fact that United has not played in a Champions League semifinal for 14 years. In fact, the club has only made the quarter finals once since 2011.

The question this begs, then, is whether United remain a big club. Not in the sense of wealth; it is, and always will be, a very wealthy club. And not, really, in terms of popularity. United has millions of fans all around the world (although not as many as the club tends to claim), something that will be passed down through the generations, regardless of results. And certainly not in terms of media coverage; the sheer volume of former United players working on television and pronouncing on social media means the club gets far more attention (unhelpfully, in many ways) than it might otherwise expect. 

But for players, the sort of players who might get United out of the funk it has now endured for a decade and a half, does the name Manchester United mean what it used to mean? An entire generation has grown up thinking of United as a team that oscillates between Europe’s two major competitions, a club that only occasionally challenges for a title, that finds new and hilarious ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. There is a generation, in other words, who might look at Manchester United and think: lads, it’s Tottenham.

Kevin Will Miss…

As an advertising strategy, it’s hard to beat the one deployed by Tast, the upscale Manchester tapas place owned — in part — by the Catalan powerbrokers that have been central to City’s success.

A couple of times a year, Guardiola, Begiristain, and various associates will have some sort of summit meeting at the restaurant. They will go in bad times, to try to understand where things have been going wrong, and in good, to celebrate eventual victory. Either way, it will be breathlessly reported by a media apparently fascinated by the fact that people in football sometimes go out for meals.

Tast is located in what I think of as being Manchester’s tapas quarter: three cobbled streets in the city centre that are home to a clutch of Spanish restaurants. Tast is the most expensive. Bandera and El Gato Negro are the most stylish. El Rincon de Rafa is the oldest, the O.G. of the genre. The best, though, is nowhere near: San Juan is in Chorlton, Manchester’s equivalent to Brooklyn (in that it used to be very, very cool, and is now very, very expensive), but it is very much worth the trip. (There’s a great pub, the Horse and Jockey, nearby, too).

Enjoy the final weekend of the Premier League. Here’s to a mutual guard of honor, just 90 minutes of clapping, at Anfield.

Rory

How will you remember KDB’s final season in Manchester? When will United turn it around, if they ever do? What are your three favorite tapas? Send Rory, and the full MiB team, your questions or thoughts at [email protected].