Noel Gallagher is talking about fatherhood, football and being glad, quite frankly, that Manchester City are not Everton.
“When I explain it to Sonny, my youngest lad, I think the perfect analogy is: ‘If you want to know what it used to be like, look at Everton’,” he says.
“If City hadn’t been bought by Sheikh Mansour, it would have been takeover after takeover, all sorts of f***wits coming in, failure and broken promises. I look at Everton at the bottom of the league, points deductions, and I think: ‘There but for the grace of God go us’. Because that would have been us, or possibly even worse.
“I’ve got two lads who are City fans. The eldest one is more into girls. But my youngest, who’s 13, is aware how lucky he is. His first memory is the Sergio Aguero moment. I’m always telling him, ‘You were born at absolutely the right time’. He’s seen nothing but glory. But I say to him, ‘You’re going to have to go through pain eventually when Pep Guardiola leaves’.”
He has pulled up a chair at the offices of Ignition, the management company for his band, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. He is wearing a ‘Mancunian’ badge on his jacket and we are here to talk football for what, even with some heavy censorship, has been a considerable test for The Athletic’s profanities policy.
We will talk about what it is like to be a City fan at a time when his club feel increasingly unpopular, resented even, and are being branded as financial cheats.
We will discuss the text messages and voice notes from Guardiola that encourage him to think City’s manager might stick around for a few more years (more of that later).
If your affinities lie with Manchester United or Liverpool, you should probably realise he doesn’t care how offended you might get. If you want Premier League games to be staged in the United States, he is here to tell you to (expletive removed) go ruin some other sport. If you are Gary Neville, you might want to look away now. Jamie Carragher, ditto.
Noel, in other words, is on form: as outrageous, quotable and entertaining as ever.
Just don’t expect him to apologise for supporting a fabulously successful club when the man sitting here today is coming up to the 50th anniversary of his first game and has never forgotten the years of drift and melancholy when City seemed to be auditioning, season after season, to be English football’s Slapstick XI.
Noel Gallagher in the offices of Ignition, his management company (The Athletic)
A younger generation might never truly understand what it was like before Abu Dhabi’s billionaires took control in 2008 and turned City from a tragicomedy into a relentless winning machine.
But Noel does. Growing up in Burnage, south Manchester, in a large Irish family made up almost entirely of United and Liverpool fans, he and his brother, Liam, were the only ones who chose City. “And for many years I’d ask myself, ‘Why? Why? WHY?’.”
Alan Ball was in the dugout, not Guardiola, and it was Jamie Pollock in midfield rather than Kevin De Bruyne. City were heading for the old Third Division. Worse, their decline coincided with United’s greatest achievements on the other side of Mancunian Way.
There was, says Gallagher, only one consolation. “The only saving grace was that Oasis were f***ing massive. That was the only thing we could take comfort from: City are s***… but at least we’re the biggest band in the world.”
Gallagher’s first match was against Newcastle United at Maine Road. It was January 18, 1975. He was seven, trying to get a view from the front of the Kippax terrace — the vast stand that ran along one side of the stadium — as Dennis Tueart scored a hat-trick for the home team.
“We won 5-1,” he recalls. “All I remember was Malcolm Macdonald scoring the one for Newcastle. He smacked it in off the underside of the bar. I’ve often hoped it might come up when they show those retro games on TV, but I’ve never seen it since.”
The following year, Tueart scored again and City won the League Cup. What nobody realised at the time was that it would be another three decades before their next trophy. Joe Royle, who managed the club in the late-1990s, called it ‘Cityitis‘. For a long time, there seemed to be no cure.
And yet there was something about City’s fans in those days that endeared them to other football folk in a way that seems to have been lost now. They were stoic and long-suffering and, as their team dropped through the divisions, they got by on gallows humour. And, despite everything, they loved their team.
“I remember we were playing at Stoke one year when there was a train strike,” says Gallagher. “We’d been at a party in someone’s house. It got to midnight and someone just said, ‘Shall we go to Stoke? Let’s f***ing walk, we’ll hitchhike’. So we just got off. Six of us, with a football.”
For anyone not familiar with the geography, it is 45 miles from Manchester to Stoke if you are lunatic enough, as Noel’s gang clearly were, to head for the M6 motorway.
“We set off from Levenshulme and walked all the way to Knutsford Services. It was the middle of winter, absolutely f***ing freezing, and we got stopped by the police on the way. They wanted to know what we were doing. ‘We’re going to see City at Stoke’. But it’s not until tomorrow. ‘Yeah, but there’s a train strike’.
“We made it to Knutsford and a guy called Stan gave us a lift for the rest of the journey. I remember his name because we were singing, ‘Cardboard Stan is a City fan’. We got to Stoke about seven in the morning and hung around the train station, waiting for the cafe to open so we could get some breakfast. Then we ‘jibbed’ the coach on the way back to get a free ride home.
“Those were just the kinds of things you’d do. You knew that if you got to Stoke, you were probably going to get beat 1-0 in the rain. You didn’t know how you were going to get home. But you went anyway because it was your team.”
These were the attitudes that, ultimately, helped to shape Oasis and made them what they were. So much of that band — the fashion, the swagger, the laddishness — was rooted in football terrace culture.
Oasis play Maine Road in 1996 (Dave Hogan/Getty Images)
“I used to go to City with a load of lads from Levenshulme,” says Gallagher. “We’d meet at Johnny’s Cafe off Stockport Road, get the train into Piccadilly station and then jump on the football special to all these different places.
“It was a bit more wild, a bit more free and easy. You were with your mates who you grew up with on the estate. All lads the same age, all from the same kind of working-class families.
“A certain section of my generation will always miss that… the gooseflesh, the day out. You’d end up back in Levenshulme at 10 o’clock, you’ve been to Bradford away and you’ve got away with it.
“It wasn’t just mindlessly going for a fight, you were following your team. But I got into a lot of scrapes and, at some places, it was violence the minute you got off the train.
“Oldham away was a tricky one. Blackpool. I was never brave enough to go to Millwall. But anywhere in Yorkshire-Lancashire on an away day was hardcore. There were two or three times when I got done in.”
One occasion was before a game at Sheffield United when the mob that set upon him could never have known that the target of their kicks and punches would become one of British music’s greatest songwriters.
Another time involved a pre-season ‘friendly’ against Manchester United in the late 1980s. “One minute I was walking past this bus shelter,” says Gallagher, “and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in the bus shelter. I’d got two black eyes and a busted nose. I never went to get my nose fixed — that’s why it’s still crooked now.”
It is different these days. At the Champions League final two weekends ago, Gallagher was a guest in one of the corporate lounges. It was full, he says, of “actors, American rappers, ‘Go Madrid’, that sort of thing”. It wasn’t really his scene.
Nor did he seem too enthused recently when the television cameras picked him out at Fulham, just as the entire City end turned their backs to the pitch for the ‘Poznan’. Well, the entire City end bar one man.
“I was too hungover,” he explains. “I’d had a spectacular night out on the Thursday — it wasn’t even the night before. But it was such a late night I was still feeling rough even by the Saturday. The Poznan starts. And suddenly the whole City end are looking at you. This lad in front is going, ‘Come on you miserable c***, join in’. And I’m like, ‘Oh f***ing grow up, will you? I’m sweating here’.”
Let’s be clear about this: Noel Gallagher doesn’t do the Poznan … pic.twitter.com/Qf0slgDBsT
— Daniel Taylor (@DTathletic) May 11, 2024
Overall, though, he loves the away days. “I hate going in hospitality. I don’t want to be watching City in a box with three Tottenham fans, a Sunderland fan and some lad who likes ice hockey.
“So I take my lad and we go in the City end. He loves all the swearing and he gets all the drunk City fans kissing him on the head.
“We time it to get into the ground five minutes before kick-off. If you go in 20 minutes early, you’re asking to be mithered. But City fans are cool as f*** anyway. Most football fans are. The only places we have to be careful are Liverpool and United. Arsenal, maybe. And Tottenham’s always been a bit tricky for me, because I’ve been slagging them off for years and that part of town is bandit country.”
His experiences make him streetwise. Plus football, as a whole, is a lot less dangerous anyway these days. He prefers it that way, too.
“I’ve been to hundreds of matches all around the world — Boca Juniors, Celtic-Rangers, all of them, and the worst I’ve ever seen was the Euro final (in 2021) when England played Italy at Wembley. It was the Wild West. So let’s not harp back to that. Because that kind of s*** — girls coming out of football matches because they’ve been hit on the head with a pound coin — nobody needs that.”
The FA Cup final last month wasn’t much fun, either. Mike Pickering, another well-known face from Manchester’s music scene, was with him. Pickering, a DJ and record producer, was a legendary figure at the old Hacienda nightclub and formed dance band M People. Sonny was there, too.
“It was the one time in the last 10 years when we’ve had real abuse from United fans,” says Gallagher. “They were filming us in our faces: ‘You f***ing blue c**ts’. I’d got hold of my lad’s hand and was asking him, ‘Are you all right?’.
“That was just one tiny 45-second example of what football used to be like. Nobody needs that.”
He thinks about it for a few more moments. And now he is rocking with laughter. “Mike Pickering, to be fair, did get called the funniest thing ever. He got called a ‘blue Hacienda c**t’. I said to him afterwards: ‘Mate, that’s got to be on your gravestone’. I want to see it on a T-shirt. We need a banner. ‘Blue Hacienda c**t’. Brilliant!”
Noel Gallagher watches Manchester City endure a rare off day in the FA Cup Final against Manchester United (Robin Jones/Getty Images)
This might be one of the few interviews since Oasis split in 2009 when Noel has not been asked if he and Liam are going to get the band together again.
He does bring it up himself, though, when the conversation turns to the role Oasis played in the football-music crossover and how, at their pomp, a big part of their audience came from the football crowd.
“Oasis inspired that kind of feeling because of a lot of different things — the music, the attitude, that kind of thing — but predominantly because the people who came to see us saw themselves in us, and vice versa. That has never gone away. I could make one phone call this afternoon (clicks fingers) and the world would come to an end. And it’s never going to go away.”
Unless you have been living on Mars these last 15 years, you might have heard the two brothers had a bit of a falling-out. Life with Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds is not so dramatic. But it’s not entirely straightforward now City-Liverpool is the biggest rivalry of modern-day football.
Russ, the bass player, used to be a goalkeeper in Liverpool’s academy. “Oh, it’s tense,” says Noel. “He’s a Liverpool fan. The drummer, Chris, is a Liverpool fan. Two of the brass section are Liverpool fans and my guitar tech is a Liverpool fan.
“When the rivalry first started, before the arrival of Guardiola, we watched the games together. And then one night — I think it was the Champions League quarter-final — it got a bit out of hand.
“The Scousers celebrated a little too much and a little too close to my personal space. And I was like, ‘I will f***ing fire someone here’. So now we watch the games separately and we’re not allowed to mention it.”
Noel Gallagher has grown friendly with Pep Guardiola (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Interestingly, he has a warm (or warmish) eulogy for Jurgen Klopp, as the manager who has done the most to challenge Guardiola’s supremacy.
“I don’t like the chest-beating and all that s***. I know it’s required of you at Liverpool to play to the gallery. But I’ve met him a couple of times.
“He was a bit tall for my liking. And he was a bit of a sore loser — the grass was too wet, it was a bit windy. But he was a lovely dude. His teams were unbelievable and, if it wasn’t for Guardiola, they would have won three leagues. That Liverpool team would have destroyed pretty much every team that came before us.”
By that, he includes the United side that won the treble under Sir Alex Ferguson.
“We would have annihilated them,” says Gallagher. “In 1999, football was not what it is today. I was watching Sky Sports the other day when they showed an old United game in their pomp. There was nobody pressing. One player lofts the ball out one way, another player lofts it back. It was so slow.
“Then I watch City play Liverpool and it’s the best football I’ve ever seen. Everything’s so quick, so ferocious, Bernardo Silva has run 28 miles and I’m thinking, ‘This is insane… how do these lads play at this ferocious speed and never make a mistake?’.
“So when people ask, ‘Would today’s City beat Ferguson’s United side?’, the answer is, ‘Yes, I’ve seen the evidence’. We would have annihilated them. And Liverpool would have f***ing annihilated them, too.”
More on Sir Alex Ferguson…
Neville, presumably, would disagree, as a stalwart of that United team. And it hasn’t escaped Gallagher’s attention that the Sky pundit – with whom he has had an on-off, often lighthearted, spat – had a nibble at him recently. Why was he sounding off about City, Neville wanted to know, when he didn’t even live in Manchester?
“Is that the best he’s got? That I’ve lived in London for 25 years?” says Gallagher. “When he and Carragher came along, they were a breath of fresh air. I liked them. They were fresh out of the dressing room, fresh off the pitch, and they knew what they were talking about.
“We’re at a tipping point with those two now, though, where I just think, ‘You’re full of s***, the pair of you’. Neville can’t see past that United team. And fair enough, that’s the team he played for. I just think they’re becoming dinosaurs. They’re stale.
“A lot of the old guys on television are United-Liverpool based and seem to think none of us has ever watched football before. Mate, I was watching football before you were born. I know what it is, I know what I’m seeing.
Gary Neville (left) and Jamie Carragher are ‘dinosaurs’ according to Noel Gallagher (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
“I was watching the other day — him (Neville) and Roy Keane going on about Italian teams and, ‘Oh, there were times when we came off the pitch thinking that team wasn’t clean’. And, honestly, I was just laughing. You mean, because you got beat?
“The insinuation was that ‘you had to be on drugs, you had to be dirty, because no way could you have beaten us otherwise’. They (United) lose a game and it has to be somebody else’s fault. The players were on drugs, or the referee was bought, or there was some conspiracy. No, you just got f***ing beat!
“That’s how arrogant they were. Their fans revelled in it. They had a banner — ‘Not Arrogant, Just Better’ — and now United fans my age are like, ‘I don’t go to football any more, it’s not the same as it was, it’s all about money now’. Hahaha! Come on, man. You mean, because you’re not winning?”
It might surprise you to learn Gallagher, now 57, would have been quite happy with a European Super League — as long as there was one key change.
Perhaps that is another indication of what it is like to be a City fan these days. “At the time, it felt like we were playing Shakhtar Donetsk every f***ing week,” says Gallagher. “We play Real Madrid every time. So I liked the idea until I saw the no-relegation thing and then it was, ‘No, you’ve lost everybody there’. Other than that, I thought it was a great idea. One minor tweak and I think everybody would have gone for it.”
Otherwise, he speaks passionately about what he sees as “the Americanisation” of England’s top division and his suspicions about what will happen if the number of American owners in the Premier League (currently nine) reaches 14, the number needed to vote through changes.
In particular, he wants to make some points about the ’39th game’ — advocated recently by Tom Werner, Liverpool’s chairman — to take the Premier League abroad. And it’s a heck of a speech.
“I know a lot of guys in (American) bands who have got into the Premier League over the last 10 years and got a team,” says Gallagher. “We live in a world where the lead singer of the Black Crowes is a Chelsea fan — who’d have thought it? — and every game is now a multi-faceted, cosmopolitan experience.
“I’d rather that, any day of the week, than a load of geezers with skinheads and flat caps.
Manchester City play Bayern Munich at Lambeau Field in 2022, part of the club’s efforts to go global (Justin Casterline/Getty Images)
“I just struggle with this idea that we should play Premier League games in America. Why are we talking about Chelsea playing Tottenham in Miami? They say, ‘Because American TV is willing to pump money in’.
“But hang on a minute, this is still our game. ‘Oh, but American sports come to London’. Well, that’s their problem! I don’t see why, because the New York Jets play at Tottenham and the Jacksonville Jaguars go to Wembley, we have to go to Connecticut.
“I couldn’t care less if a Man City ‘customer’ in New Jersey wants to see a game. Get off your f***ing arse and come to Manchester, then.
“Why are we talking about schlepping out to Abu Dhabi for a League Cup final? Why are we talking about FA Cup finals in Bangkok?
“It (football) will change drastically in the next decade and, 20 years from now, it will be unrecognisable. Once there are 14 American owners in the Premier League, it’s over.
“They will vote for no relegation. There will be rule changes and all sorts of mad s***. Honestly, the Americanisation of football is not good for the game. It will be a slow erosion. And we are going to be powerless to stop them.”
Point made. But it is tempting to think there will be people reading this who might be intrigued to know what he makes of his own club and, specifically, the fact they are facing 115 charges for alleged financial breaches. The scrutiny on City has gone up another notch since their latest title win. It has increased, again, after it emerged the club are taking legal action against the Premier League in an attempt to change the rules.
“It’s a tough one with City,” says Gallagher. “I was getting abuse at the Champions League final recently. They were Liverpool lads, my age, late fifties, calling me a ‘cheating b*****d’.
“I was like, ‘You need to relax’. It (branding City as cheats) is a coping thing for fans of other clubs. When I talk about City, it’s not long before someone jumps in: ‘What about all these charges?’.
“The players aren’t cheats and neither is the manager. If the club have done whatever they are alleged to have done, that’s the club. But I don’t see why, when City have won four titles in a row and Pep has built two vastly different teams, it should hang over the team. And the team are astonishing.”
The obvious retort would be that, if City — who deny all wrongdoing — have cooked the books, it means an unfair advantage for the team. But did anyone expect their most famous and recognisable fan to jump aboard the anti-City bandwagon?
More on Pep Guardiola
Gallagher tells the story about the Saturday afternoon — September 22, 2007 — when his first son, Donovan, was born.
City, then managed by Sven-Goran Eriksson, were playing at Fulham. With an hour gone, City had scored three times. As baby Donovan arrived into the world, the proud dad had his phone in his pocket. He could feel it pinging with goal alerts. “And I’m thinking, ‘F***ing hell, we must have scored six or seven here’. I look at my phone. It’s 3-3. But that was City, wasn’t it? Just f***ing calamitous.”
Everything changed the following year when Abu Dhabi took control. So is it any real surprise that Noel (and Liam, inevitably) is conclusively, emphatically, unapologetically supportive of the alleged rule-breakers?
“You have to give it to the people who run that club,” says Noel. “They don’t f*** about, they go for the best. I remember the first time I met (chairman) Khaldoon (Al Mubarak) and, within five minutes, I was like, ‘Who is this guy? He’s outrageous’.
Khaldoon Al Mubarak has driven Manchester City’s transformation (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
“He was very calmly telling me what he was going to do. We were in the tunnel at City and there was something about the way he spoke that made me go back to my mates and say, ‘They are going to pull this off, you know’.
“There was no hyperbole. Nobody was giving it the big ‘un. It was just, ’We’re going to do this, this and this… all the best players will be coming and, bit by bit, we are going to become the greatest football club in the world’. I was like, ‘Can we get a new kit, too? The kit is f***ing s***!’.”
Did you know that, at the height of Oasis-mania, the chairman of Manchester City wanted to add them to the club’s board?
“Franny Lee tried to get us to invest in the club,” says Gallagher. “We went for lunch with him and a couple of others at the old Platt Lane training ground. They’d renamed the canteen the Oasis Suite and they’d come up with this crazy marketing idea on the basis that, at the time, they didn’t have an official No 1 on the books.
“They were telling us, ‘We’ll sign you, officially, and it will be Gallagher as City’s No 1′. I told them, ‘Listen, if you give me a contract, I’m turning up for training’. Franny Lee asked me, ‘Are you fast? Are you tricky?’. I said, ‘No, but I’m f***ing dirty’.
“They wanted us to put money into the club. I remember my manager asking if we wanted to do it. At the height of Oasis, there were always City fans asking me, ‘Why don’t you invest in the club?’. But it never happened and I’d tell them the same thing every time: ‘Because I haven’t worked all my life for you lot to start throwing s*** at my windows after a 0-0 draw at York’.”
Noel Gallagher was once approached about joining City’s board (Cameron Smith/Getty Images)
All these years later, it feels like a sensible choice. The money has come from Sheikh Mansour instead and City have been transformed into a team of serial champions, accumulating a staggering 23 trophies in 15 years of Abu Dhabi ownership.
Losing the FA Cup final was a blow, just a few days after celebrating their latest championship. “You could tell after five minutes,” Gallagher says of a rare off-day for Guardiola’s team. “Everyone had been hungover for three days. United visibly wanted it more. They were rabid… it was like playing a Championship team.”
Overall, though, it is probably a reflection of the modern-day City that he has an agreement with his management to avoid booking gigs from the end of April to late May. It is the part of the season when the trophies are decided and he wants to be part of it (though he did mix up his dates two seasons ago and, as such, watched them win the Champions League final from a bar in San Diego).
Will Guardiola stay? “I speak to him quite a bit and he’s never given me any inkling that he’s not 1,000 per cent happy living in Manchester,” says Gallagher. “I can play you messages where you’d go, ‘That doesn’t sound like anyone is retiring from football soon’. He sends me texts and leaves voice notes about how much he loves the club. He’s one of us, believe me.”
The respect is mutual. Guardiola is a big Oasis fan, with a verse from Rock ’n’ Roll Star — the first track of their debut album, Definitely Maybe — on his office wall. But that doesn’t change the fact he is in the final year of his contract and has talked about needing fresh motivation.
“When he goes, the Premier League will breathe a sigh of relief,” says Gallagher. “But it will also be good for City to think, ‘OK that was our golden era, what are we made of now? Can we get it right?’. By the time he leaves, all the charges will be done. And then it will be a big reset.
“A good 50 per cent of me thinks he’s going to stay, though. Because where’s he going to go? He won’t retire, as he’s younger than me. He won’t go to Italy, as there’s no money in it. He’s already done Germany. He’s not going back to Barcelona. America? Maybe. But he’s a competitor, a warrior, he’s an inspiring dude.
“So many football fans are desperate for him to leave because they have got it into their heads that no one is going to win anything until he does. It’s great. He just lives in everybody’s heads.”
The interview is coming to an end and, 90 minutes in, we might have to condense the long and rather hilarious story he tells about asking Mario Balotelli for the iconic “Why Always Me?” shirt from City’s 6-1 win at Old Trafford in 2011.
Mario Balotelli with his famous t-shirt (Andrew Yates/AFP via Getty Images)
Gallagher was thrilled when the Italian striker offered to send it on. He was even more elated when, preparing for a gig in South Korea a month later, a parcel arrived from City’s kit department and, inside, there was his gift. Retelling the story, he is punching the air to celebrate the sheer joy of that moment.
The excitement did wear off, however, when he realised on closer inspection that the question mark of ‘Why Always Me?’ was an upside-down G with a dot stuck below it.
It wasn’t the original, after all, and Balotelli had misunderstood the request. “So I’ve got a snide ‘Why Always Me?’ shirt,” says Gallagher. “I still love the guy, though. He was a warm, friendly, funny kid who didn’t give a f***.”
He is less complimentary about Gareth Southgate and, for context, he is speaking here before the England manager decided to cut Jack Grealish from his Euro 2024 squad.
“I was at the Euros final (in 2021) and my England mates were over the moon when they scored,” says Gallagher, recalling Luke Shaw’s goal in the second minute. “I was telling them, ‘It’s way too early — for you to win this game, you have to score with three minutes to go. Because he (Southgate) won’t know what to do now’.
“If England had a different coach, you could put money on England winning the tournament this summer. Southgate is a cautious manager.”
The truth, however, is that Gallagher is not hugely bothered about what happens to England over the coming weeks.
“My indifference to England stemmed from the 1990s when it was all Liverpool and United players,” he explains. “For the month or so when England are playing in tournaments, when the pubs are full and the whole country gets behind the team, those nights are great. But I’m not an England fan. Because all my family are Irish, I don’t particularly feel English. And because I was born in England, I don’t particularly feel Irish.”
For him, it is all about City. He even has a cardboard cutout of Guardiola on stage at gigs. There is another at his studio in London. And another in his kitchen, for no other reason than it makes him feel happy.
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, complete with Pep Guardiola in the background (Kate Green/Getty Images for Bauer Media)
“Someone came up to me at the Champions League final. ‘You’re a big City fan’, he said. ‘Be honest, though, do you not miss the old days?’. I replied, ‘Are you mental?’.
“What I miss about those days is being unrecognisable. I miss being just a face in the crowd, so I could misbehave all I wanted. But if you’re asking me if I prefer that City to this one, you’re insane. Or you know nothing about football.”
He is chuckling at the idea, amazed it could even be asked. “I remember Ricky Hatton (the City fan and former world champion boxer) saying once: ‘I just want the old City back’. I was like, ‘Mate, seriously, just behave with that s***’.”
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
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