Champions League final: Manchester City fans’ journey from Division Two despair
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Manchester City are set to play in the biggest game in club football on Saturday.
Yet, win or lose, many of their ‘legacy fans’ will tell you it’s not even the most important game in the club’s history.
They’ll point to 1999, when City had dropped out of English football’s top two divisions for the first time. They languished in what is now League One, but was then known as Division Two.
City played Gillingham in the play-off final, four days after Manchester United had won the Champions League.
Emily Brobyn, a 17-year-old student at the time, was among the 38,000 “distraught” City fans at Wembley after Gillingham went 2-0 up late on.
“It was all United and Liverpool fans at college and constant bullying,” she says.
“I was sobbing on my dad’s chest and said: ‘You don’t understand the grief I’ll have to deal with. United have just won the Treble and we can’t even get out of Division Two!'”
What happened next would change the course of the club’s history.
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