Giles Smith: Are City lucky they missed out on Oasis as owners? Definitely maybe

Giles Smith

Giles Smith: Are City lucky they missed out on Oasis as owners? Definitely maybe

Some might say you would never have had Guardiola, but don’t look back in anger... be here now


Fascinating, that interview the BBC pulled out the other day with Noel Gallagher, back in 1996, saying that he hoped Manchester City would get relegated to the Third Division so that he could buy them.

We all know what happened, of course. City did get relegated to the third tier, but they ended up in the ownership, not of Oasis’s lead guitarist, but of Thai businessman, Thaksin Shinawatra, who then sold the club to Sheikh Mansour, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and chair of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, under whose reign they have won eight Premier League titles, three FA Cups, six League Cups and the Champions League.


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Oh, and as Pep Guardiola proudly insists, last year’s Community Shield.

Oasis, meanwhile, went on to release the Be Here Now album, the UK’s fastest-selling long-player of all time, spent the next couple of ­decades becoming a bafflingly durable fixture in the British music scene even though they seemed to be mostly punching each other and splitting up, and will next weekend begin a five-night run at Wembley Stadium on the band’s sold-out reunion tour. So I guess it worked out OK for everybody in the end.

Still, bit of a sliding doors moment, no? And always fun to imagine “What if?” How different might it have been for City, and indeed history, had Gallagher’s wish come true back there in the glory days of Britpop, and had Manchester’s former “other club” spent these past years under Oasis?

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Of course, the eventual masterstroke pulled by the current City ownership was to appoint Guardiola, a genuinely transformational manager intent on bringing to the club a whole new way of playing football. Do we imagine the Gallagher ­brothers would have gone the same way? Or would we have seen a more ­backward-looking, retro City, had Oasis been involved?

After all, as music critics will tell you, Oasis drew their inspiration from their forerunners, The Beatles. To which other music critics say, “That’s true, if the Beatles had only written the fade-out of Hey Jude and half a verse of I am the Walrus.” There’s an awful lot in The Beatles’ music that doesn’t appear anywhere in Oasis. Like, nearly all of it.’

Perhaps style-wise, then, an Oasis-owned City would have been like the Dutch “Total Football” team of 1974, but seen narrowly through a Wim Rijsbergen lens, or as if Arsenal’s Invincibles were entirely made of Sol Campbell. Enthralling to consider how this might have evolved.

Then there’s Blur to think about. The rivalry was intense, back in those Britpop years – to a degree, indeed, that one perhaps feels slightly sheepish about now, as if we had got caught up in a collective loss of proportion, a bit like after Princess Diana died. Still, with Oasis in charge at City, would Damon Albarn have felt provoked to put in a bid for Chelsea, getting in ahead of Roman Abramovich and thereby altering the course of the past quarter of a century at Stamford Bridge? Or would Blur have resisted and stayed in their lane, content to be the better musicians, with the better songs?

It’s all great to speculate about, isn’t it? As is the question of whether ownership would have allowed Gallagher to become a more visible presence at City’s finals, trophy-lifts and other major occasions. Although, actually, that’s probably impossible.

But what about the club’s ­culture? Would it now be defined to any degree by what the music writer David Stubbs recently described as Oasis’s propensity for “smug ­waddling”?

Other defining characteristics of Oasis pricelessly noted by Stubbs: “the funklessness”, “the femalelessness” and “the dressing like reservist trawlermen”. Lots to think about there.

Overall, then, how would it have panned out? Would City currently be squeezing some unpromising, ­gruel-thin ingredients into something remarkably popular and lasting? Would they too have been playing Wembley this year? Or would City now be getting accused of playing football for people who don’t really like football? So many interesting lines of thought to pursue! But, as I say, no real need to. It all worked out just fine on both sides.


Photograph by Brian Basic/Getty Images


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