THE 93:20 NEWSLETTER:- ISSUE 17

Author

Howard Hockin
December 13, 2024

Hello, and welcome to Issue 17 of the 93:20 Newsletter. City are still in crisis, and January cannot come soon enough, even though it is clearly the worst month of the year. At least the daylight will slowly return, as I pine for spring. Never mind, the festive season is upon us, apparently, so I will not dwell on football too much. Not the stuff on the pitch, anyway. Nah, as it’s the season of goodwill, I thought I would spend the majority of the latest newsletter slagging off some people away from City.

Merry Christmas!

It does feel like there is little new to say about City anyway. It is panning out each match pretty much how we would expect it. The myriad of issues has been discussed to death by us all, but until we have our best defenders back, this cycle will continue. Those awaiting salvation as soon as Auld Lang Syne is sung in a few weeks may be sorely disappointed. I have found it baffling that so many think it will be business as usual with City dipping into the transfer market, when we have the decision of the tribunal stull unsure. If I was a player, I’d want to know for sure that City were going to be competitive the following season, and in the Champions League. The lure of the Premier League and Pep is huge, but it cannot mask the other issues. I guess all this depends on who City go for. Some would jump at the chance to come to City, and a clause or two would cover their backs. But the absolute elite would not take risks. The sooner we can all concentrate on the football, the better. Well, as long as the standards improve that is. The amount of noise around City making a signing will be telling once the transfer window opens. It will be telling as to just how active City aim to be next month, and their attractiveness to potential signings will be telling about just how well City think the hearing went.

A quick word on the Champions League table. City probably need one win to get into the play-offs, finishing in the top 8 probably a pipe dream the moment they collapsed v Feyenoord. In case you didn’t know, the draw is seeded and pre-determined, so 9th will play 24th , 10th will play 23rd and so on. So even if City sneak through, they may get a very tough game, against teams on paper more difficult than some of the teams currently in the top 8. As it stands, City would play Atletico Madrid, but with two games to go, a lot will naturally change.

Anway, enough City. I need a break. THAT game is on Sunday, so I need a distraction.

So let’s begin with football’s own pub bore. It seems Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho had a spat over recent days, over how much they have won, maybe – I didn’t have the energy or intrigue to fully check. Leaving aside the pitiful barb from Mourinho, considering his own chequered career, I thought it worth a few words to consider what this man has become – namely, the tiresome bore who many still seem to revere.

Now Jose Mourinho was once charismatic and brilliant, one of the greatest managers in the world. Of that there is no doubt. He beat the odds at Porto, and built a machine at Chelsea. He continued doing his thing, and the world kept spinning on its axis, but as always the world changed, football did too, and his methods became more and more problematic, and less effective, and he became more problematic as a consequence. Thing is, there’s only so long his schtick is novel and entertaining. With every passing year, his barbs became less entertaining, and less productive. His treatment of Eva Carneiro showed us the man behind the mask, treatment that should have seen him ostracised there and then. Not that was ever going to happen of course, that is not the type of world we live in. More time passed, and he became more and more of a caricature. United hired him out of desperation at City getting Pep. And now here we are, almost forgetting he exists until he pipes up every now and then, or gets himself sacked with another huge pay off. He manages a big team, but in a poor league – he might as well be the Celtic manager. It was not supposed to be like this, but he only has himself to blame, as it was not just his tactics that led to this point, but him as a person. The fact so many club owners keep taking the risk of hiring him shows football’s problem of looking backwards rather than forwards, and the need for a quick-fix, rather than considered, patient building.

Jose Mourinho is the guy that was annoyingly good-looking at school, and got all the girls. Hey, your own life didn’t pan out perfectly thereafter, you’re plodding along, and at least you don’t support Spurs, but thirty years later, you bump into him at Wythenshawe Civic. You barely recognise him. He’s got a meal deal in a Lidl bag. There is the bare remnant of a twinkle in his eyes, but he is a broken man. Life has clearly not treated him well, and he has made some bad decisions. Even wound up in Turkey for a couple of years. Fell in with the wrong crowd. I wonder where it all went wrong? You make pleasantries, and go on your way, noting that you must stay in touch, which you absolutely will not. And you spend the rest of the day with a spring in your step, because you’re bitter and twisted like that.

Anyway, that man is Mourinho.

A final word or hundred. Jose Mourinho is absolutely the sort of man who holds a grudge, and you can bet your bottom dollar he will forever smart over his time in Manchester, when despite the desperate pleadings of his lackey Duncan Castles about how Mourinho was ready to “tactically best” Pep Guardiola once more, Pep saw him off as he has seen off so many others. Thus, he was never going to miss a chance to respond to Pep. Unfortunately for him, few will care. For the record, Fenerbahçe SK are six points off Galatasaray in the Turkish league, and 15th in the Europa League. Better than Pep then!

MARGINAL REIGNS

Recent form has made it rather difficult to continue the weekly “laugh at United” segment in this newsletter and our various podcasts. But every week United do something on and off the pitch that makes it hard not to resist and bite our lips.

I am not going to mock too much, there is a derby at the weekend after all, and both teams are staggering towards it punch-drunk, but this week’s dismissal of Dan Ashworth is pertinent to both how United have been, and are, run, and modern football as a whole. Because finally, the fans have had enough. Enough of being ripped off, enough of being treated as a commodity. Owners don’t really care if they have had enough, and that includes City’s owners and especially Brexit Jim, who is keen to mention at every opportunity how he was brought up on a council estate as he fleeces fans with increasingly tenuous excuses, like his £66 tickets for kids initiatives. You see Jim, it really doesn’t wash to make swathes of the staff redundant, demoralize the entire remaining club staff, cut support to disabled supporters, cancel Christmas do’s, reduce bonuses to hard-working staff and cut every corner when you have spent tens of millions of pounds putting a new manager on a new contract, spending another hundred million pounds on players he wanted, then sacking him with a huge payoff, whilst chasing a sporting director for longer than you employed him, having paid £3m to get him in the first place, before he left with another pay off, whilst claiming that United can’t be competitive unless staff stop getting taxis to work. These people live on a different planet, one where they think running a football club is like running a petrochemical company. But Ratcliffe got a period of grace to do all this because he “got the club”, had United DNA, and is of course a white Anglo-Saxon, so we can ignore the fact he is one of the planet’s greatest polluters. Those Qatari sheikhs aren’t looking like such a bad idea after all, are they? Because they at least understand how to run a business, and made quite clear that within three days of taking over, they would have wiped debt, taken United off the stock exchange and signed off plans for a new stadium, whilst hiring staff rather than sacking them. If as a United fan you have moral objections to such an owner, that is fine, that is your right. Just don’t paint Ratcliffe as some saint in comparison. The signs were there for Ratcliffe before he took over, from his previous career, but most chose to look the other way, and proclaim the new saviour of Manchester United plc. What’s more, Jim Ratcliffe is the perfect case study for how the lifeblood of the game, its fans, have been treated in the English game for far too long. And United, City, Fulham fans and more have had enough. Though if United were doing well, I can assure you those green and gold scarves would be gathering dust in a far-flung wardrobe. Still, chin up United fans, you just need some of those economic levers that Barcelona are so good at locating. It really shouldn't need saying, and yet here we are, again - fans should never be the ones to pay for owners' mistakes and bad management. 

Either Jim Ratcliffe thought United fans were compliant, stupid, or both. In fact, it is him that displayed unparalleled levels of stupidity thinking he could win a PR war with these decisions. If the last year has taught us anything, it's that we must stop assuming billionaires are intelligent. Or at least should not assume that they will succeed at anything they turn their hand to. Sacked off the women's team, sacked off Alex Ferguson (ok, I'll give him that one). The man is a walking PR disaster – his next step should definitely be a career in politics.

As a City fan, you’ve got to respect the Glazers, as they have played a blinder here. They have allowed someone else to come in as minority owner and take on all responsibility for the running of the club, as they continue to collect their dividends, having taken one nice big slice to tide them over. Absolute genius.

Back at City briefly, ticket details for the Salford City cup match have arrived. And my ticket will be £10. Well done City, it is possible to engage your brain occasionally. No doubt the empty seats of recent games has set off the odd lightbulb above the head of the odd executive or three. Welcome back to the real world chaps. It’s weird that City almost always get the FA Cup pricing spot on, which tends to lead to full houses and great atmospheres, yet seem incapable of transferring this common sense to other competitions, perhaps because they see the real money-making to be made away from the FA Cup.

City’s Annual Report has come out today, with record revenues, record player sales and bumper profits! And it’s all thanks to that £30 on my season ticket. I assume next season prices will be frozen, considering how cash-rich City are, and their reluctance to spend any money, especially on full-backs, whatever they are.

Right?

Elsewhere, a quick word on Spurs being Spurs. Spurs have pretty much always been Spurs, a sense of entitlement that has not been earned. There was once a list of teams that had been to Wembley since Manchester City had, that contained half the teams in the country, Chesterfield sticking out above all overs. Now you could do a similar list of teams that have won something since Spurs last did. They are set up to succeed, they just never do. What’s more, reverting to type this season has posed an additional dilemma for our beloved press, because Ange Postecoglou failing poses one hell of a poser for many of the footballing fraternity. Hey, I’ve nothing against the media saying nice things about nice people. The world needs more nice people right now, and I like the guy (annoyingly, Slot seems decent too). But naturally it leads to a skewing of impartial, fair reporting, though I gave up on that prospect many years ago. And for a man who thinks defending is woke, it is harder to stick the knife in that it is for Pep, who is coming off the back of four successive titles. Make it make sense. The 4-1 loss at home to Chelsea with nine men last season was the perfect example. I’m sorry to slip into whataboutery mode, but imagine if Pep had played such a suicidal high line after two red cards. I’ve even been critical of him not adapting his principles in recent weeks myself, and that’s generally with eleven men on the pitch, but if he had done what Ange did, I’d have no hair left. Postecoglou’s tactics that day were embarrassingly naïve and foolish, yet somehow he came out smelling of roses. The more they fail, the more compromised the coverage will become. One to watch. A draw at Rangers is no disaster, as it’s a tough place to go to, but a half-decent Spurs side would have come away with a win against an average side. The pressure is truly on.

What We Have Been Up To This Week

Opposition Fan:- Kevin Day

It was last week to be honest, but in case you missed it, then you have to check out this podcast, available for all on Soundcloud.

The 93:20 Review:- Groundhog

Howard and Ahsan look back at the draw at the Palace, repeated themes, captain unfantastic, the state of play, and dealing with the big games on the horizon.

The Hub:- Episode 20

Alex, AKA Euro Expert, joins Bailey to discuss the problems Manchester City have dealt with this season, where the blame lies and what their potential transfer targets will be in January and the summer.

The 93:20 Review:- Old Men

Ste, Lloyd and Stefan look back on another demoralizing defeat, and no punches are pulled. What now?

The Weekend Show

As always, a packed show, as Ste, George and Howard pore over another difficult week, and look forward (kind of), to this weekend’s Manchester derby, a game City really cannot afford to lose.

Plus the usual reviews, previews, transfer talk and more next week - AND - a long-awaited Market Podcast, which will be MASSIVE.

If you are not a subscriber to our player shows, then enjoy some free samples of what we are about. Every show we do will have a 15 minutes sample on Soundcloud, along with a full, free weekly Friday show, jam- packed with content. Give it a try!