Manchester City's Cup Draw Conspiracies.

You’ll thank me for encouraging you to read this, even if as writing it I felt myself becoming less intelligent by the minute. But needs must, as the subject of Manchester City’s easy Cup draws is once again “a thing”. The thought of Port Vale being an easy game causes any Blue of my generation to emit a hollow, bitter laugh. I associate them with scraping through a very close cup tie on January Saturday that was bleak and freezing even by the standards of Stoke in 1991 and two of the most horrific, scarring home defeats of my life. But whatever, the internet machine is telling me that Sheikh Mansour is paying for easy cup draws.

So I examined the evidence to see if the Sheikh was getting Eliaquim Mangala or David Silva levels of value for money for his investment. As we are currently being bombarded with reviews of the decade, I thought a time frame of ties played between January 2010 and December 2019, finishing with the upcoming League Cup quarter finals was reasonable as that seems a bigger sample than, for example, this season so far. I also excluded semi-finals and finals from my analysis. Why? Because one measure of a cup draw – home advantage – is removed, because the later stages of tournaments will skew the sample towards stronger opposition and because the identity of a team’s opponent in a final, for obvious reasons, is not down to chance. So this means that City’s January 2010 third round cup tie away at Middlesbrough – which of course we all remember like it was yesterday – is in but League Cup semi-finals against United later the same month featuring Carlos Tevez, Craig Bellamy, Gary Neville and the rest, are out. I also needed a control for my experiment, a team to compare to. As Liverpool fans seems to have such a close interest in this, and because they have also had success in cup competitions, I chose them. I then hit google up, and all that was between me and a whole world of conspiracy theories was the pesky evidence. Sadly, this involved the creation of a spreadsheet.

So what does it say? Within my parameters, City have played 56 cup ties (or 55 plus the upcoming trip to Oxford United). That’s a healthy number of individual events and the Sheikh would expect a return on his investment in skulduggery over this sort of timeframe. Liverpool have played slightly fewer ties – 47 (including the imminent Villa tie) to be precise, indicative of the fact that they have been slightly less successful in the domestic cups over the decade. But that’s still a good number and they’ve been broadly successful.

Home & Away

The first measure is the simplest and according to many by far the most important measure of a cup draw. Are we home or away? As for Liverpool, their 47 ties have been split 24 at Anfield, 23 away. Even Empire of the Kop would struggle to get a petition going on that. City’s 56 split slightly unevenly, 25 at home to 31 away. It’s not a big thing, but the Sheikh must be wondering slightly about whether this is really worth it. Whatever, on the most important and least arguable measure, City’s cup draws over a 10 year period have been notably if not catastrophically tougher than Liverpool’s. But who are you playing? Chesterfield away should always be easier than Chelsea at home. I then looked at opponents by the division they play in. And the results are in. Six of Liverpool’s 47 ties were against teams in League 1. Another six were against League 2 teams and one (Mansfield Town as you ask) were non-league at the time. That’s 13 out of 47 or 28%. As for City, none of their 56 opponents were from non-league or indeed League 2. But there were six league one teams in there, including Oxford twice, last season and the match on December 18^th. That’s just 11%.

But how can this be, asks @clinicalmagicalpeakfirmino when you look at City’s cup draws? There is a curiosity here in that there is a cluster of League 1 opponents at the start of the decade (Scunthorpe United, Notts County) and another cluster at the end (Wigan, Oxford twice and Newport County) and absolute nothing, nil, zero between Notts in February 2011 and Wigan in March 2018. For seven years and 39 draws, City only drew Premier League or Championship clubs. No, I’m not calculating the probability of this, but yes, it’s a very unlikely event and it happened. We are going to talk a lot about media narratives and recency bias later in this piece, but if Mansour had been paying for this, I think he would have told Khaldoon to ask some fairly searching questions by 2013 at the very latest. Whatever, the numbers don’t lie so by this measure, City have once again got the short end of the stick.

So City must have been drawing loads of mediocre Championship clubs, then? Well, sort of, and it is certainly true that certain types of Yorkshire second tier clubs have been regular opponents. Sheffield Wednesday (twice), Barnsley, Rotherham, Huddersfield Town, Hull City and Leeds United have all played us. It’s amazing that we’ve also been able to fit in habitual fixtures with Leicester City (three times), Boro (three times), Aston Villa (three times) as well as the modern classics, Wigan (three times plus a final) and Watford (twice plus a final). I have spent decades watching City play Leicester in the cup every couple of seasons but if we have ever played Nottingham Forest in a cup, it has totally slipped my mind. But we do seem play at least one of these, and often more than one, every season for reasons way beyond my analysis. Still, Shakhtar Donetsk know how they feel, just as some of their never-changing defensive players now feel like old friends of ours. As they left the Etihad last week, we all confidently said thanks for the game and see you again next year. Anyway, we’ve played Championship teams 22 times over the decade, markedly more than Liverpool’s 12.

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