Manchester City’s return to Europe’s top table more than 15 years ago came with the promise of beauty and drama at every turn.
City set for 150th Champions League game with AEK Athens visit
43 years on from our only participation in the European Cup – a first-round defeat to Fenerbahce in 1968 – we qualified for the Champions League for the 2011/12 season.
Now, as we approach our 150th game in this historic competition when we take on AEK Athens on Tuesday, we can say the Champions League has more than delivered on its guarantee of joy, heartbreak and everything in between.
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Having qualified for the continent’s hallmark cup competition in every season since Roberto Mancini led us there in 2011, we are currently on the longest ongoing run of appearances in the Champions League of any English side.
The level of consistency required not to miss out in all that time speaks volumes to our domestic dominance particularly under Pep Guardiola but also with Mancini and Manuel Pellegrini.
We have, after all, won the Premier League more than every other club combined since that 2011/12 season began.
However, it’s not always been the same in Europe. With the finest of margins often deciding knockout ties between the most talented players on the planet, it felt for a long time as if City were destined never to lift the famous old trophy with the giant ear-shaped handles.
That all changed in 2023, when Rodri curled home against Inter in Istanbul and Ederson produced a last-minute diving save to set the seal on a historic Treble.
But what you deserve isn’t always what you get in the Champions League.
Bernardo Silva, who left City in the summer as our joint-most decorated player having been integral to all the successes under Guardiola, said this in his final interview with the club: “I think more of our teams could have done the same.
“The final that we lost against Chelsea [2020/21] was a clear example. In my opinion, we were the best team in Europe that season and we played a really bad final.
“The year that we lost to Real Madrid in the semi-final [2021/22], in the last minutes, I would say that we were the best team again in Europe that year for me.
“The year that we lost to Madrid on penalties [2023/24], I also think that we were the best team that season in terms of quality of the game and in terms of the way that we performed. So, I do think that we should have won a bit more in Europe.”
The Portuguese playmaker clearly felt like City were more than capable of being European champions several years in a row, as we did with the Premier League.
But that pain in previous years only served in the end to make that balmy night in Istanbul all the sweeter.
Players and coaches hugged on the pitch, broke down in tears and let all the emotion flow with the thousands of City fans inside the Ataturk Stadium.
The most famous clip after full-time is perhaps Guardiola wrapping his arms tightly around Kevin De Bruyne and simply saying: “We did it.”
Guardiola and De Bruyne had been on an odyssey together through Europe in search of that moment.
De Bruyne had even played in a semi-final with City before Guardiola arrived, leading Pellegrini’s side into the last four in 2015/16 before a tame exit to Real Madrid.
Even to get that far in 2015/16 felt otherworldly at the time, with City struggling to get to grips with the changes from domestic to continental football in our early years of Champions League participation.
In 2011/12, as Mancini let us to a title that laid the foundations of all that has followed, City didn’t make it out of the group stage.
Napoli and Bayern Munich both proved too strong – or too savvy.
It was a similar story the following year, only this time there wasn’t a single win to speak of from the six group games.
1-1 draws in all three home games with Real, Borussia Dortmund and Ajax and defeats in each game on the road continued what felt like something of an anti-climax for City fans who had been dreaming of seeing us up against these names.
Pellegrini’s arrival in 2013/14 saw us progress through the group stages – although there’s no doubt CSKA Moscow and Viktoria Plzen were weaker foe than those who’d gone before.
Still, the 3-2 win at Bayern Munich in the final group game proved perhaps our first ‘great’ European night.
Having gone two done at the Allianz Arena, we turned the game around and could easily have left with the 4-2 win required to see us top.
Instead, it was a Round of 16 appointment with Barcelona and a Lionel Messi at the peak of his powers. While Joe Hart put in a performance for the ages at the Camp Nou, it wasn’t enough and we exited as 4-1 losers on aggregate.
At half-time of the fifth group game of six in the following campaign, it seemed inevitable City would return to group stage dropouts.
However, Sergio Aguero completed a hat-trick against Bayern to earn a 3-2 win before unforgettable Samir Nasri and Pablo Zabaleta strikes in Rome a fortnight later miraculously took us through.
There we again met Champions-elect Barcelona and again, our participation was done.
By contrast, much of 2015/16 was plain sailing. Wins over Juventus, Borussia Monchengladbach, Sevilla and Dynamo Kyiv sealed a quarter-final date with fellow fresh contenders Paris Saint-Germain.
After a 2-2 draw in Paris, De Bruyne’s first iconic Etihad memory came with a 76th minute curler beyond Kevin Trapp to take us to the semi-finals.
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There we’d play Real Madrid – a fixture that at this point had all the lustre and glamour you’d hope for from this competition.
Only one goal was scored over the two legs – a Fernando own goal. And there was no doubt some regret on City’s side that we didn’t quite grasp the nettle on the biggest stage there is.
And so, in comes Pep Guardiola. The Catalan won this competition twice with Barcelona, playing a style of football revered the world over.
And the fact he didn’t win it in each of his four seasons there was perhaps the clearest indication of what Bernardo mentioned earlier – sometimes the best team in Europe doesn’t lift this trophy.
Qualifying ties against Steaua Bucharest, which don’t count towards this figure of 150 Champions League/European Cup ties, were a gentle introduction to Pep’s City.
What wasn’t gentle were the first two away games of the group stage, with a 3-3 crash, bang, wallop of a game at Celtic followed by a 4-0 defeat at Guardiola’s boyhood club.
City beat the Catalans at the Etihad two weeks later to ensure we were in the driving seat for second place.
Then came the first of a succession of knockout ties during Guardiola’s reign that will live forever in the memory of those there to witness them.
City beat Monaco 5-3 at the Etihad thanks to goals from Raheem Sterling, Sergio Aguero (2), John Stones and Leroy Sane, with Radamel Falcao bagging a brace a teenage Kylian Mbappe also getting in on the act.
While we had been clinical, most Blues left the Etihad wondering how a win had been possible. Even more so, many were purring over the talents of Monaco’s No.10, Bernardo Silva.
Three weeks later, City lost on the now defunct away goals rule when Monaco beat us 3-1 at the Stade Louis II and Guardiola’s highly entertaining first Champions League campaign at City was over.
As it was in the league, 2016/17 was mostly about Guardiola getting his feet under the desk in England and refreshing his squad with young, energetic talent.
We reaped the rewards of that in 2017/18 as we set a Premier League record of 100 points.
A near perfect group stage in the Champions League also came about, with City winning five of the six games.
A 4-0 thrashing of Basel in the away leg of the Round of 16 rendered the return fixture meaningless.
However, a meeting with Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool at perhaps their most ‘heavy metal’ in the quarter-finals proved too much.
We lost 3-0 at Anfield following a whirlwind of an opening 30 minutes and could never recover the tie from there.
It was in 2018/19 that City truly felt ready to combine everything achieved domestically with success on the continent.
The Blues breezed through to the quarter-finals, with victories including a 6-0 defeat of Shakhtar Donetsk and 7-0 demolition of Schalke.
There we met Mauricio Pochettino’s Tottenham Hotspur in only the second game at their state-of-the-art stadium. Aguero had an early penalty saved before Heung-min Son got their only goal of the game.
What followed at the Etihad was sheer chaos. Sterling levelled the aggregate score four minutes in before a lightning quick double from Son seemed to put it out of reach.
Not so. Bernardo levelled on the night within seconds of the restart after Son’s second before Sterling got another midway through the first half.
Aguero made it 4-2 on the hour mark before Fernando Llorente appeared to handle the ball in from a corner to put Spurs back in charge on away goals.
Hope was fading fast – only for Sterling to score in the 93rd minute, seal his hat-trick and City’s place in the quarter-finals. Nope.
Aguero, who teed up Sterling, was adjudged by the freshly introduced VAR to have been in an offside position when the ball deflected off Bernardo and into his path.
Guardiola was on his knees. The Etihad crestfallen. An unimaginable confusion reigned supreme over the 53,000 present and that was that.
After years of sensing Champions League success was beyond us, it felt doubly cruel to experience that in a season Guardiola and his players were ready.
We dusted ourselves down at cruised to the top of the group stage in 2019/20 before perhaps our defining performance up until that point in the Champions League came at the Bernabeu, with Gabriel Jesus and De Bruyne scoring for a 2-1 win.
The outbreak of COVID-19 meant we had to wait almost six months for the return leg, with no fans present but City got through it and into the specially arranged camp in Lisbon that would host the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final in quick succession.
We’d leave after the first set of matches though.
When De Bruyne equalised after Maxwel Cornet’s surprise opener for opponents Lyon, City dominated the ball and created all the chances.
However, Moussa Dembele put the French side ahead before Sterling skied a chance from a few yards out that seemed to typify City’s luck in this competition.
Dembele added a third late on and City ended the night sat disconsolate on the Jose Alvalade Stadium turf.
And now Guardiola’s City had the bit between their teeth.
We won all but one of the 12 games that took us to the 2021 final in Porto.
Ironically, the only game we hadn’t won was in the same stadium the final would be held – the Estadio do Dragao.
And it was familiar heartbreak in the showpiece, with Chelsea’s Kai Havertz rounding Ederson and slotting home just before half-time in front a drastically reduced capacity of approximately 14,000.
Remembering City’s Champions League story is not about ranking heartbreaks, but 2021/22 would potentially sit above the previous year’s final if it did.
City were once again flying high at the top of the Premier League in close competition with Liverpool as the two sides set standards rarely seen before.
And it seemed for all the world that they would meet in the final when Riyad Mahrez put us ahead on the night at Real Madrid with less than 20 minutes to go.
After pipping another modern classic 4-3 at the Etihad a week earlier, we were now firmly in the ascendancy.
Instead, Brazilian winger Rodrygo popped up with goals in the 90th and 91st minute to take it to extra time, where Karim Benzema’s penalty won it.
To this day, City fans in the Spanish capital or watching from around the world can’t put a finger on what happened in those crazy seconds.
All of that hurt and frustration was unleashed on the rest of Europe in 2022/23, with City going unbeaten in the group stage and thrashing Leipzig 7-0 at home as recent signing Erling Haaland became only the third man to score five goals in a Champions League game.
A 4-1 aggregate win over Bayern Munich in the quarters gave way to another meeting with Real in the last four.
An emotional De Bruyne, pushing his body to the limit in pursuit of glory, lashed home our goal in Madrid before perhaps the greatest performance in our 132-year history followed at the Etihad.
Bernardo Silva scored twice in the first half before Manuel Akanji and Julian Alvarez wrapped up a 4-0 defeat of the self-termed Kings of Europe to take us to the final.
Guardiola’s inspired idea to ask John Stones to perform a hybrid role between defence and midfield proved to be one of the defining tactical tweaks of the modern era.
We were less impressive in the final, but it didn’t matter. Rodri wrote himself into our history forever with his cushioned finish and an almighty party could begin.
The emotion wasn’t reserved for those on the pitch of course, with fans who had seen City try and try again and find increasingly bizarre ways to miss out on the elusive maiden Champions League revelling in every moment.
Not even gridlock throughout the Turkish metropolis could dampen spirits, with the players heading for a night in Ibiza before reporting back to Manchester for a rain-soaked parade to end all parades.
With that success tucked away, it may not have stung everyone in the stands in the same way the following spring when a dominant City were knocked out of the competition at the last eight stage by a Real Madrid side that fought for penalties from early on.
That would be the first of three years in a row in which the Spanish giants would knock us out, with the 2024/25 defeat coming in the newly formed play-offs before a Round of 16 meeting last term.
And so, here we are. With Enzo Maresca leading us into a fresh frontier, seeking to add to that one 2023 success knowing that the club have surely experienced all the quirks and quips that this great competition can throw at us.
As we hit 150 games in the Champions League proper, we look forward to building on the legacy already laid out.