Next week, an all-glamour Champions League tie will land in Manchester with all the trappings you would expect.
City and Pep Guardiola will attempt to seal a place in the knockout stages with a game to spare when they face Paris Saint-Germain on their latest quest for elusive European glory.
There will be superstars everywhere. Kylian Mbappe, Neymar and Lionel Messi facing up to Kevin De Bruyne, Phil Foden, Bernardo Silva and the rest.
Oh, and there’ll be booing of the Champions League anthem, of course.
This now-established Eastlands tradition has baffled many, including Guardiola himself, but why does it happen and is it time to knock it on the head?
To many casual observers, the booing is framed as a response to City’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) wranglings with UEFA, but there’s actually much more to it.
Pulling up the drawbridge
City’s history in the Champions League and FFP do share a common timeline.
The 2011/12 season, when the Blues played in Europe’s premier competition for the first time, was also the year when UEFA introduced its regulatory framework aimed at encouraging sustainable spending among top-flight teams
Given spending would be tied to turnover, to many City supporters this felt like an attempt to preserve the established European elite from insurgent forces such as their own club.
Beyond the impact of the regulations themselves - City accepted a £49 million fine, along with caps on spending and their Champions League squad size in May 2014 - it established a tone of hostility on both sides.
Whereas maiden Champions League runs for the likes of Tottenham and Leicester City either side of City’s debut felt celebratory for the most part, no one seemed too keen on welcoming Roberto Mancini’s ambitious side with open arms.
Outspoken Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis labelled City "money wasters" as his side progressed at the Premier League club’s expense from a group also featuring Bayern Munich and Villarreal in 2011, among several taunts.
The newcomers certainly did not feel like welcome participants for these "special" European nights they’d heard so much about.
Paltry fines and a closed-doors farce
While UEFA, under the now-disgraced Michel Platini, were keen to trumpet how they would run a financially tight ship, their attempts to deal with the abhorrent stain of racism left much to be desired.
Unfortunately, City had a front-row seat for this.
A third-place finish in their group behind Bayern and Napoli meant Mancini's men dropping down into the Europa League in 2012.
They beat Porto 6-1 on aggregate after a first leg at Estadio do Dragao where Mario Balotelli and Yaya Toure were racially abused by home supporters.
Porto were fined €20,000 - €10,000, less than the €30,000 fine City received for returning "up to 60 seconds later than they should have done" after half-time in the subsequent quarter-final defeat to Sporting Lisbon.
Two years later it looked like UEFA actually had taken meaningful action against CSKA Moscow. A string of incidents, including racist abuse directed towards Toure in 2013, resulted in the Russian side being made to play their 2014 Champions League group game against City behind closed doors.
Except, it didn’t really pan out that way. CSKA were roared to a 2-2 draw from 2-0 down by a small but significant crowd of 650, comprised of corporate and club guests.
"Why the hell do we not have any fans here? What have our fans done wrong? There's no fairness in it," said a visibly angry City captain Vincent Kompany afterwards.
But you’d think those City fans who paid for travel and hotels in advance only to be barred from the game in Moscow through no fault of their own would be reimbursed by UEFA, right? Guess again.
‘Disruption of the competition anthem’
After that fiasco, in the campaign where City were serving their FFP sanction, the booing started and was pretty vitriolic up to and including a last-16 exit against Barcelona.
The following season, UEFA escalated matters in typically farcical fashion when they charged City after a 2-1 group-stage win over Sevilla at the Etihad Stadium.
The offence was a breach of competition regulation 16.2, namely "the disruption of national or competition anthems".
That’s right, in UEFA’s eyes, their trumped-up, faux-classical pomp-fest is akin to an actual national anthem.
Common sense prevailed and City faced no action on that occasion but it meant fans - some of whom brilliantly produced banners simply reading “BOO” to the return fixture in Seville - took an even dimmer view of the governing body.
Since then there has been a UEFA investigation into the club’s operations on the back of Der Spiegel's publication of the Football Leaks revelations, a consequent Champions League ban in 2020 and City’s successful appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
It feels to safe to say that, where UEFA are concerned for City fans, we have passed a point of no return.
To boo or not to boo?
If not for the coronavirus pandemic, City would have faced European aristocrats Real Madrid at a packed and seething Etihad Stadium in March 2020, a month on from the ban being handed down.
That game eventually took place in August last year, with the ban quashed and no fans present.
Anthem booing would surely have scaled new heights had the original date been viable. By contrast, with fans now back in the ground, it feels like little more than a token gesture - the same as booing a United player on the opposition team sheet.
Take City’s most recent home Champions League game against Club Brugge. The booing whipped up for the first few bars but had died out by halfway through the ditty.
Supporter grievances with UEFA are understandable, but you can tell the booing has been going on for six years. It now sounds like more of a curmudgeonly grumble than a call to arms from the downtrodden.
That’s fine, I like a grumble as much as the next person, but it’s hardly something to stoke the fires ahead of a big game in a tournament the manager and players frequently profess to love.
Guardiola might claim City are not on the same level as Europe’s grand old names, while we recently had to endure the latest belched out opinions of Uli Hoeness and Javier Tebas, but let’s not pretend this club is not what it is nowadays.
Whether or not FFP was an attempt to stop it from happening, City are part of the elite now - no better or worse than the rest in the greater scheme of things after their involvement in the Super League debacle.
To the wider footballing world, in this context, the booing just sounds petulant. It’s ultimately not for outsiders, of course, but it won’t rally the players in the way it might have done for Kompany and his contemporaries.
The Poznan was back at Old Trafford the other week, maybe it’s time to turn our backs on UEFA’s massive shaking centre-circle flag and bounce? Or sing all the way through it, drowning out the anthem with "City! The best team in the land and all the world!".
City supporters’ gripes with UEFA are numerous and valid, but it’s time to turn the page and raise the roof, not chunter for our champions.
Do you think City fans should still boo the Champions League anthem? Follow City Is Ours editor Dom Farrell on Twitter to join in the conversation and let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
