That’s all reasonable, and it reflects what I’ve pieced together about it.
Probably best you didn’t explore my psychology. That’s a real black hole.
Anyway, the thing I find weird is that thinking that “this is our year” is such a bad thing. I’m admittedly a person with measured expectations. So I’m always just “we’ve got a shot”.
Maybe it is really simple and Liverpool fans are pretty much the Yankees fans of England, if Yankees fans thought Yankees were winning.
But we still didn’t really cover the weirdness that I am talking about regarding trophy pressure. It’s inconceivable to me that anyone for one second would think Klopp has some sort of job ultimatum. The club is so far beyond where it was when he took over.
I didn’t follow Liverpool religiously until after I fell in love with football. I didn’t even know about Hillsborough more than maybe a vague recollection of a news snippet. I just liked the way those late 2000 teams played initially. Everything grew from there. So I’ve never enjoyed a major trophy win as a supporter. And I’ve seen more bad than good.
But I still don’t think there’s any “pressure” from anywhere except external or total idiots.
From my totally limited perspective, I think Liverpool fans are about the best in the world at enjoying good football and “the journey” as we’ve called it intra. Maybe that’s out of necessity. But I still think it’s true.
I think the real reason that "this is our year" is such a bad thing is that Liverpool fans (stereotypically) have more of a pronounced tendency to make that claim more often than not. It's probably just a higher tendency for optimism, but in the tribal world of football fandom if you make too many claims that you are going to win things which don't come off, it paints a target on your chest and leads to people viewing it as unrealistic ambition instead. I mean, if it works for you then that's great, all power to you. But remember that this is football, where most of the time fans of other clubs are going to look for any reason to have a dig at you, and a large part of that is deliberately exaggerating things you know aren't exactly how you claim in order to score points. It's School Playground Politics writ large, let's be honest.
As for people claiming Klopp has some kind of ultimatum, I don't think many people seriously believe that. What people do believe is that Klopp needs to win something soon to justify the comments he has made and the goodwill he has built up, but that's another story.
That’s because we are the greatest of clubs with the greatest of players. And particularly for City, y’all got no one to point to who could compare. (I kid here but not without reason)
I don’t give a shit about validation. But I think it’s because City, while winning more lately, still isn’t a global club. It’s just not. They don’t come close to the support of Liverpool or United. And it will be a decade of straight winning trophies before they even could (so they won’t). So there’s a jealousy among a lot of city fans who are looking to press their team into a status that hasn’t yet been earned. Don’t blame the club for that. Blame the hipster city fan who screams City “demands” respect. When they’ve never a single time one the biggest of the big cups.
Liverpool and United will always have beef. They are the two biggest and most successful clubs with the most historic players in England. City is the best team these days. Chosen and lifted from lower league obscurity mostly due to their proximity to United and Liverpool. That’s market research and smart investing, no question. But it’s ceetaiy pissing all over GE romantic notions of football that a lot of folks still love.
I mean, if you want to get really real, that’s really real. Your boys are nouveau riche sovereign-funded bitches (the view of the world, not me). The other clubs at least pretend to play the game of matching revenue to expenditures.
ETA:
I don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with CFG attempting what they are. I also think they will not engender a particularly loyal brand of fan after the old timers bail. CFG owns a club in NYC. They play a game here in the metro area with their record
setting title team. The stadium plays YNWA before the game. You think that’s because City outsold Liverpool? Because I guarantee you it is not.
Does that say anything about how good the teams are? Fuck no.
But it tells you a shit load about how people perceive CFG.
ETA: I’m exhausted. Long day. It may tak me a minute to get my suit together. Happy hour hasn’t changed.
Eh, let's be honest, this is a complex topic that we're all making light of. Are City a global club? Well how does one define "global club"? Is there an agreed-upon threshold? I mean, in terms of people who claim they follow the club, I believe that by this point City have easily a good hundred million bandwagoner fans living in God-knows-where, Wherever-land who can name three players and have only a vague idea of what colour the team plays in, just like the other major clubs. Do City has as many "serious" fans as Liverpool or United? Probably not, but do they have more than, say, Spurs? Probably. It's hard to say. So what defines when one becomes "global"? The problem with undefinable labels like these is that they are often little more than easy ways to put other clubs down by saying they aren't as good as your own club.
I think for City fans, the issue is that we have grown up constantly being told "your club isn't as big as mine", while at the same time winning trophies. You only need to hear those arguments so long before you question the very nature of a club "being bigger", and inevitably you end up with the answer "why does a team have to be bigger to be successful?" And it's still a question I haven't got a proper answer to, except that - again - it seems to say that it feels like fans of the other traditional "big" clubs seem to have developed a complex where they think that the only teams that should be able to win things are those who are in their group. It's a large part of why FFPR exists too - try looking up some Martin Samuel articles about FFPR; he directly calls out UEFA and clubs like Liverpool and United as trying to engineer FFPR to prevent other teams that they don't like from even being allowed to be successful.
As for the money argument, all I'm going to say is that Liverpool/United/etc fans like to throw the money argument around but the truth is that if you know your football history well enough, every club at some point has had a sugardaddy, it's just that most clubs had theirs back before Sky pumped enough money into football that success created the money itself for success. In the 1980s, United only were able to afford to break the transfer record several times because a guy called Martin Edwards pumped millions upon millions of his own cash into United's coffers without asking for any back. Liverpool I'm sure had their own, but as I'm not a Liverpool historian I can't name them. Heck, City even had a sugardaddy owner in the 1890s. The difference between Mansour and the others are that Liverpool/United/Arsenal won the lottery by being successful at the right time when external money started flooding in, where the other clubs didn't.
As for City being "lifted from lower league obscurity", let's really not go there. That's a fairly lazy argument which I suspect even you don't believe (I certainly hope not...) and you usually only see when two sets of fans are spoiling for a bit of a verbal scrap and I don't know about you but I'm not really feeling it. I prefer to try to keep my interactions with fans of other clubs fairly stable and placid, these days.
