I got a new job recently. I'm currently living in St Petersburg, but will have to move to Moscow. Ideally I'd stay where I am, because I like it here in what has more or less become an adopted home city for me, but, basically, needs must. Anyway, it's not anything I haven't done before: in the summer of 1998, I also left St Petersburg for Moscow. Things back in 1998 were very different in the world of Manchester City, with the club at the lowest point in its history, and Russia was in the midst of a catastrophic banking and financial crisis. I couldn't help but see parallels, and was moved to write about them for the email newsletter MCIVTA. I thought I may as well reproduce that piece here.
AN UNCANNY RESEMBLANCE
In the last couple of weeks, as you may have seen on your news bulletins, life has become fairly interesting in Moscow, the city where I now live. Despite the economic crisis and political uncertainty, so far, at least, there's no sign of any public disorder. However, I've been instructed rather disturbingly by the firm I work for to book a ticket home so that if things turn nasty, I can leave. I have a friend who's due to arrive on Thursday to stay with me for a week, and normally I'd be rather worried about welcoming a visitor from England in these circumstances. However, this lad's been watching City for twenty years, so I have no qualms whatsoever about his arrival. You see, if the Russian Federation weren't a country at all but an English football club, it would be Manchester City.
I've known for a long time that my enthusiasm for City and my willingness to come and work in Russia were actually manifestations of the same character trait - a desire for experiences which transcend the ordinary, or, if you prefer, being a masochistic nutter. It's hard to describe Russia for people who've never lived here. I doubt I'll do better than I did in an earlier piece, when I wrote that foreigners consider England an eccentric country, but Russia should be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. At my previous firm, I worked with an English girl and the two of us used to joke that our whole lives in Russia were being staged for that television programme where Jeremy Beadle sets people up in ludicrous situations and plays the footage back to about ten million viewers.
At times, you can almost hear his voice-overs. When, as almost always happens, you're met by unbelievably woeful customer service, he'll be chortling in that peculiarly irritating way of his, "This is me dressed as the world's most unhelpful waiter. I'm going to tell Peter and his girlfriend that they can't eat here tonight even though there are only four people in the entire restaurant." On those frequent occasions when you encounter stultifying bureaucratic intransigence, he'll be there too - "This is me disguised as a ticket seller at the railway station. I'm going to tell Peter after he's queued for an hour to buy his ticket that he actually needs to be in a different queue because he's a foreigner." And when your Russian acquaintances come up with ideas based on surreal flights of fancy, he'll be saying, "This is me pretending to be a Russian with a great money-making scheme. I'm going to say I'll blackmail an English ballerina performing in St. Petersburg by threatening to cause her untold shame when I throw birch twigs on the stage [a traditional Russian gesture of disapproval] during her performance unless she pays me five thousand dollars." I'm sure you can see the parallel with City, as the involvement of Jeremy Beadle is in fact the most rational explanation for some of the events at Maine Road in the last few years - "This is me posing as the manager of Portsmouth Football Club. I'm going to tell Frank Clark we want three and a half million pounds for Lee Bradbury."
There's that rather tired sign which is sometimes seen at various workplaces - "you don't have to be mad to work here but it helps". I think you actually do have to be slightly mad both to support City and to want to live in Russia. I'm not saying for a minute that we should all be carted off to mental institutions because we can't function in society; for example, I work as a lawyer for a big international law firm so for most of the time, I have to pretend to be a sane and normal person. However, the point is this: I went to a very academic school, attended a very traditional university and am in a very orthodox profession. I'm not knocking the educational institutions I attended or my job, but for me, life in those contexts somehow lacks colour or drama. That colour and drama is provided by where I live, by my support for the team which, despite my geographical isolation, consumes an unnatural proportion of my leisure time and by a personal life which could best be described as turbulent (but which is beyond the scope of this piece). I have long suspected that most committed City fans, whatever their own personal reasons, are people who are seeking out an emotional outlet where predictability is never a possibility. It is precisely this kind of mentality which anyone wanting to come to Russia has to develop.
I never cease to be amazed at the time and energy potential investors spend investigating Russia. In fact, there is a very simple, cheap and effective way to come to an understanding of this place - it would cost about three hundred quid and take nine months. It is, of course, a season ticket at Maine Road. You see, the similarity goes far beyond the fact that both City and Russia seem crazy enough to have been invented for the benefit of a spoof TV show. There are all kinds of other striking allegories, too, going far beyond the fact that both have managed to get themselves into disastrous and largely self-inflicted messes. Consider the following:
History
City have always had a propensity for crisis. As Ardwick, we managed to go bust within two years of joining the Football League, and after the club was re-formed, we managed within little more than a decade to be involved in a bribery and illegal payments scandal as a result of which the club had to sell all its best players for a pittance. Most ended up with our local rivals, who duly won the league twice with the nucleus of our team. Since then, we've had relegations, cup humiliations, boardroom battles and managerial upheaval on a fairly regular basis. Russia has likewise always been prone to disorder and chaos. There's a period of Russian history known as the "Time of Troubles" - it was in the seventeenth century when there were problems over succession to the throne. This title has always surprised me, as it could refer to most of the last thousand years here. They've had regular invasions by the likes of Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler, bitter struggles for power, civil war, famine, revolutions and economic crisis.
Under-Achievement
All the disasters are made much worse by the knowledge that things really shouldn't be that way. City have a fan base which, had the club managed to harness properly the financial resources generated by such support should have ... well, let's say should have seen us not rubbing shoulders with Chesterfield or Northampton. Russia has absolutely staggering deposits of natural resources, and had it been able to exploit them properly, it wouldn't ... well, let's just say it wouldn't be facing economic meltdown.
Style of Management / Government
Both City and Russia seem to have been led for long periods by larger-than-life figures. At Maine Road, we had Peter Swales, with his Cuban heels and ludicrous haircut, in charge for twenty years, followed by the triumphalism of Franics Lee's return. The manager's chair has been occupied by flamboyant extroverts like Allison and Bond. In fact, the Russians probably outdo us here, with the likes of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Stalin. Indeed, while most of our failed chairmen or managers have simply been guilty of poor judgement, the sanity of some of Russia's rulers really has to be questioned. Our last manager, for instance, earned the sobriquet "Mad Frank", but if Ivan the Terrible had taken charge of the City team, it's doubtful he'd have confined himself to buying Ged Brannan or playing Craig Russell at left-back. Boris Yeltsin's arbitrary style could also have made him a suitable candidate for the City chairmanship, as shown by the recent re-appointment as Prime Minister of Viktor Chernomyrdin (which translates as "Victor Black Face"), whom he sacked five months ago and whose previous stint in the post was, to be polite, of slightly dubious merit. As an aside, it isn't unusual for Russian political figures to have entertaining names. For instance, the Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, is "George Puddle" in English. However, there's no requirement either to have a silly name or for it to be appropriate, no doubt much to the President's relief as he'd have to go under the rather cumbersome moniker "Boris Doddery-clueless-old-git".
The Old Regime and the Reform Process
Russians call the period under Leonid Brezhnev's rule the time of "stagnation" and the failure to undertake any kind of reform of the Soviet Union's creaking economic edifice had serious repercussions. Admittedly, Peter Swales wasn't trying to build a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons in Moss Side and didn't go round buying himself huge fleets of luxury cars or awarding himself more medals than he could pin on his coat. He is, nevertheless, City's Brezhnev. He was blithely oblivious to off-the-field developments in football in the 1990s or to the requirements of the Taylor Report. He signed away on long-term contracts virtually all of the club's commercial possibilities. Despite the fact that we had a smaller turnover than Norwich (and that we would have tremendous difficulty increasing our income owing to his commercial ineptitude), he created huge debts by spending more in net terms on players in his last two years than the Rags, Arsenal, Liverpool or Newcastle. He increased those debts further to build a stand holding 5,000 fans (when Leeds built a 17,000-seater stand for the same money), ignoring the fact that we were legally obliged to reconstruct the Kippax, which accounted for half our capacity. The irony, of course, is that a lot of very misguided City fans look at the league positions at the end of the Swales era and assume he was correct all along. In the same way, Russians look back to the Brezhnev era and think that, whatever might have been wrong, at least they had job security and didn't need to worry whether they'd have enough money to put food on the table. These views, emphatically, are mistaken. Both Gorbachev in Russia and Francis Lee at Maine Road took over disasters waiting to happen. Admittedly, both made a number of serious errors without which the respective situations of Russia and Manchester City today might be very different and both can quite properly be fiercely criticised. However, those who fail to stop an impending catastrophe are, in my view, far less to blame than those who, gloriously unencumbered by any vestige of competence, created the conditions for it in the first place.
Reactions of the Fans / Populace
Both City and Russia now find themselves in situation where they were badly run for a long time, the people who arrived to put things right botched the job and things have got worse than anyone probably ever imagined they could. In Russia, this has bred an attitude of hardy resilience amongst the people, just as City fans have, I think, now become almost immune to each fresh setback. This is largely why I don't expect to have to use my ticket home. A couple of hundred thousand people might gather outside the government buildings at the White House, but this is the Russian equivalent of a couple of thousand on the Maine Road forecourt chanting "sack the board". I wouldn't refrain from attending City matches because demonstrations outside the Main Stand made me fear for my personal safety, and I don't expect any manifestation of public anger here to have me rushing for that BA flight to London.
The Immediate Priority
To complete the analogy, the task facing both City and Russia now is to make sure they've hit rock bottom and that things improve from now on. To be honest, I rate City's chances as the higher. David Bernstein seems to me to have a much better grasp of the issues he has to deal with than DCOG, while Joe Royle's track record is better than Black Face's. There's also no doubt that the collapse of the Russian currency and the probable demise of the entire banking sector is a more serious blow to Russia's hopes of rebuilding than draws with Wrexham and Notts County are to ours. Actually, Russia is further on in the reform process than we are - Gorbachev arrived on the scene in 1985, while Francis Lee didn't appear until 1994. Both ended up leaving, largely discredited in the eyes of many Russians and City fans respectively. At Maine Road, it's still too early to judge the post-Lee order. However, in post-Gorbachev Russia, it's fairly obvious that the transition to a market economy has been managed catastrophically. The current meltdown in Russia is probably the equivalent of the kind of disaster which would beset City if Bernstein and Royle fail to deliver.
Turning Back the Tide of Fate
I'll leave the final word to Black Face. He's well-known for unfortunate malapropisms, but he once came out with a statement which has entered the Russian lexicon because it summed up perfectly how things here almost seem fated to go wrong, no matter what anyone does. "I wanted everything to turn out for the best," he lamented wearily, "but it's turned out like it always does in Russia." Adapt the phrase for City and think of how many of our chairman and managers it could serve as an epitaph. We, too, often seem fated to lurch into fresh failures whatever steps we try to take against them. The task for the current incumbents at Maine Road is to battle against this apparent inevitability of fate and stop Manchester City from remaining the Russia of English football.
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