Manchester City were hoping to kick off a brand new era under Manuel Pellegrini back in 2013 when Pep Guardiola's Bayern Munich brought them back down to earth.
The Bundesliga champions coasted to a 3-1 win at the Etihad and Thomas Muller afterwards likened the movement of City's forwards off the ball to being sat in deckchairs, adding that no forward was allowed to do that for Bayern or Germany.
City would beat Bayern in the reverse fixture that season, but the shine was taken off that by an embarrassing gaffe from Pellegrini whereby he didn't realise the Blues needed to score an extra goal to top the group ahead of their rivals and so took David Silva off and left Sergio Aguero on the bench; City drew Barcelona in the round of 16 and were eliminated, while Bayern made the semi-finals before Guardiola produced "the biggest ****-up of my life as a coach" as Real Madrid beat them 4-0 at the Allianz.
Read more: Cancelo sends brutal reminder to Man City over Nagelsmann sacking at Bayern
Despite that defeat, Bayern had shown the superiority over City on the pitch that their hierarchy had no trouble talking up off it. The German club were one of the biggest critics of City's spending and arrival at the best table in European football, claiming the moral high ground.
Oliver Kahn spoke seemingly without irony in 2020 after the Court of Arbitration for Sport had overturned City's Champions League ban that UEFA had tried to impose, the incoming chief executive urging UEFA to take Financial Fair Play more seriously because "the same clubs winning the Champions League or winning, for example, the Bundesliga or Premier League or other leagues, I think it’s getting a little bit boring".
Bayern honorary president Uli Hoeness, who had to step down from his position in 2014 after being sent to prison for three-and-a-half years for evading €28.5m in taxes, said in 2021 that he was motivated for Bayern to beat City and Paris Saint-Germain (another club with Middle Eastern owners) to tell the clubs that 'your s****y money, that's not enough'.
To say they have been highly critical of the way City are run and where their money has come from, Bayern are a lot less bothered that - as the excellent Swiss Ramble blog points out - their commercial revenues account for a higher cut of total revenue than City's do, and that their commercial income is significantly boosted by three German companies: Adidas, Audi, and Allianz. It is that level of blinkered thinking that gave chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge the confidence in 2015 to tell reporters not just his confidence that Guardiola would stay in Munich beyond 2016, but that "I can't imagine that Guardiola leaves for a club like Manchester City".
As Guardiola prepares to end his seventh year at the Etihad, Bayern are set to announce their sixth permanent head coach since his move. None of Carlo Ancelotti, Jupp Heynckes, Niko Kovac, and Hansi Flick lasted close to two years in the job in a period where the German heavyweights have won the league every year, and Julian Nagelsmann is set to be the latest casualty.
Not only has Nagelsmann been given the boot despite being closer than Guardiola is at City to winning the Treble, reports also suggest that he found out he was being sacked by reading media online rather than being told by his employers. City could certainly have acted better when they sacked Mark Hughes, Roberto Mancini, and Pellegrini, but this was a club new to its circumstances making mistakes as it found its way to where it wanted to be: what is the defence for Bayern? That former Dortmund manager Thomas Tuchel might have gone to Real Madrid this summer?
There is every chance that Tuchel gives Guardiola another night to regret and goes on to win that Treble for Bayern ... but there was also a chance Nagelsmann could have done it. It is still the same Robert Lewandowski-less group of players that will be rocking up to the Etihad in three weeks.
Whatever happens between the teams on that night, the City hierarchy can feel more comfortable than ever that whatever high ground Bayern bosses were boasting about over how to run a club has well and truly disappeared.
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