Man City Is Rich and Broken

Manchester City's season ended on Monday. Out of the Champions League and now nine points behind Chelsea in the Premier League table, there isn't much left for the Citizens to play for this year. Picture a bored god-king slovenly slouched on his ethereal throne, mainlining a quart of Edy's, his robes a barely sufficient dam against his belly flesh. In soccer's upper echelon, the mighty hardly ever really fall. They just finish in fourth place.

Whether City's performance this season is worth complaining about depends on where you're standing. Newcastle and Stoke City fans surely play miniature violins whenever they see one of England's massive clubs struggling—which is to say still running through most opponents as if they were made of paper. It takes tasteless, obscene, extravagant, let's-hunt-human-beings-for-sport money to fail the way City have failed this year. Sympathizing with them is like feeling sorry for Larry Ellison when he spills a splash of champagne on his infinity thread count sheets. Their shortcomings and inconveniences are those of the super-rich. You can only be fucking up so hard when you come home each night to a mansion that belongs in a Cam'ron verse.

But Manchester City are fucking up, and they're hearing about it. Manuel Pellegrini has been fired time and again over the past couple of months and he will be for real once the season ends. The squad, expensive and talented as they may be, are showing their age and can't hope to improve by much in the coming years, which at a club with death-crevasse deep pockets, signals this summer might be a bloody one. The reportedly unhappy Samir Nasri is going to be first out the door. Aleksandar Kolarov, James Milner, and Yaya Touré might follow him. The back four is due for an overhaul. The depth chart has both too many strikers and not enough; there doesn't seem to be a consensus choice for who should play ahead of Kun Agüero on the front line. No one would be shocked if they threw a cargo helicopter of cash at that problem.

All of this is loud, thrumming, perhaps baseless speculation—except for Pellegrini getting dismissed, that's definitely happening—but it's what finest quality, hand-stitched luxury clubs suffer through whenever they're not living up to the hype. The expectations that follow these clubs around are both absurd and closer to achievable than they seem at first glance. It's not like Madridistas started thinking their club could win La Liga every year for no reason. They damn near do. The same goes for Bayern and Manchester United. European soccer is a plutocracy. You're one of the wealthiest clubs in the world, or you're largely shit out of luck. And when one of those wealthy clubs find themselves shit out of luck, displeasure abounds and heads roll.

The difference between City and the rest of Europe's titans—save PSG and, to a lesser extent, Chelsea, who are in similar 128-foot yachts—is that the clubs' fans are not altogether used to having such a large bank account, or so much to expect. City were middling and often quite bad before they entered the smoky backroom of European elites around 2010, two years after Sheikh Mansour's Abu Dhabi United Group bought the club and began to assemble a mercenary force of internationals. They're not an established power; they're nouveau riche. Madrid won their 10th European cup last season; City haven't made it past the Champions League Round of 16 yet.

What this Fire Everybody! Buy Everybody! frenzy that surrounds them demonstrates, in a sad way, is that they've arrived. Continental triumph has eluded City, but if they keep spending at the rate they do, it will come. In the meantime, they've won a pair of Premier League titles and finished second once since they started running on oil money. That trend will continue as long as Mansour maintains the sort of dopey-evil competitive streak unique to billionaires. Financial Fair Play looms, but looming is not the same thing as actual perturbation. If City want to remake their squad in a couple months, they'll bend the very notion of budgeting to their will.

There is an emptiness to this practice. The game is rigged in City's favor, and if they don't capitalize on that fact, they're awash in crisis. Until the next round of transfers, that is. The cycle mirrors that of an addict: wanting, getting, wanting, getting, wanting, not getting, and suddenly a severe pain shoots through them. This happens every year, in Manchester, or in Madrid, or in Munich. Then cash is splashed and success springs anew. It would be stupid to ask if City fans are happy. They've won two titles; of course they are. The more pressing question is if they can ever be happy again with splendid soccer that isn't quite splendid enough to top the league table. At what point does sustained expectation make it impossible to enjoy anything less than excellence?