Why do Man City fans have inflatable bananas? Explaining retro fan craze in defiance of Premier League guilty verdict originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
So much of the build-up to the October 11 Premier League showdown between Liverpool and Manchester City was dominated by discussions about the atmosphere.
The Anfield crowd was anticipated to bring an extreme state of vitriolic hostility and fury to the occasion, as City stepped out for the first time since the Premier League found them guilty of all charges related to serious financial breaches of competition rules between 2009/10 and 2017/18.
Just after the period that was examined by an independent commission and resulted in a shockingly damning verdict – where City were found to have concocted "sham" sponsorship agreements with companies from Abu Dhabi and put forward witnesses believed to have lied – Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool went blow-for-blow with Pep Guardiola's City in thrilling title races in 2018/19 and 2021/22. Twice Liverpool racked up in excess of 90 points; twice they lost the league by a point.
Andoni Iraola and Enzo Maresca led the two sides, and few of the main characters from those incredible battles remained. Enmity on the Kop, understandably, did.
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"Absolutely, [the City players] can face the pressure," a relaxed Enzo Maresca said at his pre-match press conference. "We have players who have experience of similar situations. Enzo Fernandez played in Argentina. In Argentina, almost every game is like you go to Anfield."
The response from City's travelling supporters, viewed by millions of television viewers across the world as they raucously celebrated a 3-0 win, invited puzzlement. Tucked away in the left-hand corner of the Anfield Road End, the Mancunian contingent brandished dozens upon dozens of large inflatable bananas.
It was the same story at City's first Premier League home game after the verdict — a 3-2 win over Ipswich Town — as thousands of inflatable bananas dotted a capacity 60,000 attendance at the Etihad Stadium.
Phil Foden arrived for his post-match interview with an inflatable banana 🍌 https://t.co/15brfnndUb
— Match of the Day (@BBCMOTD) October 17, 2026
Why do Man City fans have inflatable bananas?
The origin story of Manchester City's near 40-year association with inflatable bananas goes back to the 1987/88 season, the club's first back in Division Two after being relegated from Division One the previous year. Like a lot of the best stories, it features some palpably rubbish wordplay.
"It started because of [former City forward] Imre Varadi," said Dante Friend of 1894, the City fan group who have distributed upwards of 1,000 inflatable bananas among supporters traveling to Anfield.
"It was just one guy at the game who referred to him as "Imre Banana". A guy called Frank Newton took an inflatable banana to the next game, and then everyone started doing it."
There were all sorts of other inflatables, from paddling pools to fried eggs and Frankenstein's monster, but it was the bananas that endured. Sometimes in this job, you find yourself writing the strangest sentences imaginable.
Varadi enjoyed a nomadic career in English football, representing City, Everton, Sheffield Wednesday and Leeds among many others. He scored 31 times in 81 appearances for City across all competitions, a very solid return at a time when the club was not at its best on the field. His wider legacy has nothing to do with any of those goals, and it's one he continues to embrace.
"The bananas are taking over Anfield," Varadi posted on X (account handle: @imre_banana) on the morning of the Liverpool match. "City fans are ready to party at Liverpool."
🍌🍌 The bananas are taking over Anfield! ⚽ Great to see our inflatable bananas getting a mention on Sky Sports this morning and making the back page of the Daily Star! 📰 City fans are ready to party at Liverpool! 💙🍌 #MCFC
— Imre Varadi (@imre_banana) October 11, 2026
Manchester also knew how to throw a party during the mid-to-late 1980s, as the acid house music scene that in turn spawned the 'Madchester' craze thrived. The famous Hacienda nightclub was the high church of the movement – a temple of optimism and love via chemical refreshment, that stood at odds with the often desolate state of hooligan-addled English football as Margaret Thatcher's conservative government oversaw a period of post-industrial decline in many of the country's biggest cities.
"The reason some people were doing it as a joke was because they were going out clubbing on a Friday night to places like the Hacienda and the Brickhouse and were absolutely off their heads on ecstasy, then falling into the match the next afternoon," Friend recalled.
"They weren't interested in fighting. Most of the fans were having a laugh. We were s—, we were in Division Two. I think, every now and then, when it's fan-led and not club-led, [bringing back the bananas] can be really good. It'll be a laugh."
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And that's the spirit being tapped into as Manchester City, to many, embark on a new chapter as pariahs of English football. The spirit of a club founded in 1894 that won its first trophy in 1904 and has seen all sorts of majestically brilliant, perplexingly bad and mind-numbingly average iterations throughout this long history.
Their trajectory was changed beyond all recognition by Sheikh Mansour's 2008 takeover. Pending an appeal, the wrongdoing of the Abu Dhabi royal's trusted executives will change that path once again. But nothing is permanent. Manchester City were here before their current ownership, and it would be a travesty for generation upon generation of fans if they weren't after them.
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When City struggled in the 1980s and again, even more severely in the 1990s, inflatable bananas were there to celebrate every promotion back to the big time. They've featured in every pitch invasion after every Premier League success at the Etihad Stadium. Whatever those titles mean now, they promoted grown adults to wave ridiculous, oversized novelty fruit above their heads. Because sport is brilliant like that.
The reborn banana craze is a show of defiance from City fans, who before the days of billion-dollar spending counted gallows humour and sarcasm as their most potent weapons. They're not scared to go back there if they have to. Don't threaten them with a good time.
"The message is obviously defiance," Friend added. "We don't give a f— who the owners are, we are the club. The fans are the club."