It was always going to happen. The appearance of Steve Bannon at Wembley stadium, standing shoulder to shoulder with a clearly starstruck Kevin De Bruyne, has been greeted with the usual waves of gnashing and fleshy-ruddy rage. Those smiling Instagram selfies feature more interlocking fleshy bits than your average butcher’s shop display.
How could they? What does this mean? And is it not a little hypocritical for City’s chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak to push selfies with Messi and Mbappe on one hand while cavorting with Steve Bannon on the other?
Tottenham won the match 1-0 by the way. Shut down by far the most insipid performance City have crafted under Pep, it was all so of a piece. Managers berating referee Michael Oliver for things that happened ten minutes earlier, wandering off on lengthy monologues in postmatch media that seem, somehow, acutely paranoid.
Indeed Guardiola looked a little Trumpian himself at times, sidling up the pitch lambasting his players for tackling back too slowly.
But then these are interesting times. If you want a picture of City’s success under Sheikh Mansour imagine an Abu Dhabi state official stamping on Mauricio Pochettino’s face forever.
And perhaps this was simply bound to happen as Pep Guardiola dropped his final tile into place, his master plan complete. Vast sums have been spent converting Silva towers flanking Rodri power works and Walker control stations.
In defence Kyle Walker embodies Trumpian thesis beyond reproof: we will not sharpen except through experience. No innovation is needed here – just enough pace to nullify almost any wide player that turns up within our radar sweep.
The same ethic carried forward: John Stones shingles spread across Ruben Dias vaulting muscles delivering clean-sheet promises everywhere across Europe; Cancelo subduing midfield like Mike Pompeo patrolling NATO.
And yet nobody quite seems happy as referential energies knot around political anxieties mirroring those across broader Europe-worldscape.
Will England’s beleaguered fans fret more fervently now that autocratic tones reverberate beyond garnered goal tallies?
Has football – tribal sweet game creating temptingly recyclable heroes – reached nadir spiralled inside complexity eddy?
