Manchester City are firmly established as one of Europe’s elite these days, but the all-conquering team that won a domestic treble in 2018-19 is a very different beast to the one Nedum Onuoha remembers.
Onuoha came through the youth ranks at City, and the slick machine managed by Pep Guardiola is a world away from the ramshackle facilities and hard-earned reputation for failure and disappointment he was used to growing up.
And though Onuoha was around for the start of the Sheikh Mansour era, he still can’t quite believe just how far the club has come.
“To see the club now, compared to where it was 15 or 20 years previously, is crazy,” Onuoha says.
“I remember in the academy they’d tell you whether you were going to get the next deal. You’d go to a shared training facility with the public and then you had to walk up to the Portakabins at the top, where the manager would be waiting to tell you whether you were going to make it or not.
“That’s where they were then, and now they’re in a situation where they’re organising everything, everyone’s training in the same place with top-quality conditions. Every last detail has been worked on and they know their preparation is as good as anyone else in the world.”
Onuoha did not leave City permanently until January 2012, just a few months before they won their first Premier League title. But having made just one appearance for the Blues in the first half of that season, fate ensured he was still on the pitch for that memorable afternoon in May.
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READ: Nedum Onuoha: ‘Football isn’t as glamorous or dramatic as people think’
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Unsurprisingly, Onuoha has a vivid recollection of a surreal afternoon that featured five goals, a red card and perhaps the most dramatic finish to a title race there has ever been. And for QPR, the club Onuoha had recently joined, survival despite the loss.
“We were going into the City game with our destiny in our own hands, but they…
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