In ordinary circumstances, these should be the moments when we reflect on Yaya Toure’s legacy at Manchester City and ask where, in his pomp, he would rate in a list of the Premier League’s outstanding footballers.
Today, after all, is a special day in the club’s modern history.
It is the 10th anniversary of Toure scoring the seminal goal that defeated Manchester United in an FA Cup semi-final at Wembley and announced City’s arrival as the new force of English football. Toure is a club legend, one of the greatest players ever to wear City’s colours.
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These, however, are not ordinary circumstances. There are difficult issues to address and, though Toure is rightly proud of his achievements for City, there are obvious glimpses of hurt, too.
Today, he will reveal that he has written a letter to Pep Guardiola in an attempt to repair a relationship that has become so fractured — “complicated” is the word he repeatedly uses — that Toure no longer feels welcome at the club where he played with such distinction.
Toure wanted to apologise for a 2018 interview in France Football magazine in which the former Ivory Coast international, still raw about his departure from the club, lashed out at Guardiola and made comments he now wishes he could take back, including that his former manager had a problem with black players.
It has been a year since he wrote to Pep to ask for forgiveness and, despite follow-up messages to intermediaries and club officials, there has never been a reply.
Toure has tried on at least one occasion to see his former manager, face to face, but that has never got very far either. Guardiola, it seems, does not want to listen to the apologies of his former player.
“When something happens that is wrong and you make a mistake, or people use your name and use you to do some wrong stuff, you have to make it OK,” Toure says. “This one was wrong. I want to apologise for what happened, I want to apologise for doing something wrong.”
How, though, do you say sorry to somebody who does not want to listen?
Toure says he and his advisers decided the best way was to put it in writing. His letter was not just for Guardiola but also the chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, and the club as a whole.
It was Toure’s mea culpa, a long and detailed attempt to explain his position and acknowledge that, when it came to his criticisms of Guardiola, he knew he had crossed the line between what was acceptable and what was not.
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“We decided we would try to communicate with some important people at the club to apologise and say I’ve been indecent to the club,” Toure says, and there is unmistakable sadness in his voice. “Since then, it has been a very, very long while waiting for an answer, but we don’t get it. And, of course, if he feels like that, I cannot do anything. Of course, I’ve been in touch with some people there. But the people at the top, it’s impossible.”
April 16, 2011. The scene is Wembley. It is half-time: Manchester City 0, Manchester United 0. And tempers are frayed in the City dressing room.
“They dominated us in the first half,” Toure recalls. “They had four or five clear chances. Joe Hart made some incredible saves. Dimitar Berbatov missed the unmissable. It was incredible: two or three yards from goal, over the bar. We were a mess. They bullied us. We didn’t understand what was happening. We should have expected it from United because they were very powerful. We had good players but they were great.
“We got back to the dressing room and we battered each other. We were shouting. This cannot happen! If we lose, then we lose, but not playing like that. Imagine going back to your house and watching that game again. We couldn’t continue to play like that. We had to show we wanted to win. We were suffering. We had lost all the duels, it was horrendous. We couldn’t manage three passes in a row. We were shocked.”
What happened next will always be remembered as a turning point in City’s history and, without exaggeration, the shift in power that changed the landscape of English football.
Toure remembers every team-mate joining in the half-time inquest. Nobody, however, was more involved than the player who had signed from Barcelona and would go on to become the match-winner.
“When I was sleeping, I dreamt that one day City would go past them (United),” Toure says. “God gave me the opportunity that day. The guys needed pushing. You can talk but you have to show it. We came back strong with a different mentality and that was when I told the players behind me, Gareth (Barry) and (Nigel) de Jong, to cover for me.”
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In the 53rd minute, Edwin van der Sar scuffed a clearance from the edge of his goalmouth. Michael Carrick was back to cover for United but followed up the goalkeeper’s mistake with a careless pass of his own. And suddenly Toure had the ball at his feet, just outside the penalty area. He was surging forward, trying to get a yard to the side of Nemanja Vidic. And Toure, in full flight, was an almost unstoppable force.
“It was rare for me to recover the ball in that part of the pitch,” Toure says, and now he is smiling. “Vidic was in front of me, I just pushed the ball into space and ran. Van der Sar was a great goalkeeper. But some goalkeepers open their legs. I knew what I had to do.”
The following month, he and his colleagues were back at Wembley to take on Stoke City in the final and, again, it was Toure who contributed the game’s decisive moment, surging through the middle to lash in a left-footed winner.
It was the first of the 11 trophies the club have accumulated under Abu Dhabi’s ownership (or 14 if, as Guardiola insists, we count the Community Shield). Toure was involved in seven of them, including his team’s first goal against Sunderland in the 2014 League Cup final and, two years later, the decisive penalty in a shootout victory to win the same trophy at the expense of Liverpool.
That was the thing about Yaya: he was the man for the big moment.
This is the player, remember, who scored 24 goals from midfield in one of his three title-winning seasons with City. “Everything was perfect,” he says. “At Barcelona, I was surrounded by great players — Xavi, Iniesta, Messi — and that meant people thought it was easy for me to play with them. After I moved to City, people started to realise how capable I was.”
All of which makes it such a shame that a player with this record of achievement now feels awkward, apprehensive even, about the idea of returning to City to use the lifetime’s season ticket that he received as a leaving gift.
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Toure takes the blame for that. His interview with France Football, he says, was “my big, huge mistake”. He had left City the previous month and, to quote the offending article, his verdict was that Guardiola had done “everything to spoil” his final season at the club.
Toure was hurt, reeling, angry. He was out of football for the first time in his adult life. He hadn’t welcomed City’s offer to move him to their sister clubs in New York or Melbourne and, in the heat of the moment, he decided to lash out. Guardiola’s reputation, he said, was based on a “myth”. But then he went even further. Too far.
“He (Guardiola) insists he has no problems with black players because he is too intelligent to be caught out,” Toure said. “But when you realise that he has problems with Africans, wherever he goes, I ask myself questions. He will never admit it. But the day he will line up a team in which we find five Africans, not naturalised, I promise I will send him a cake.”
The comments were picked up by media outlets across the world. Guardiola, responding via the Catalan television station TV3, called it a “lie and he knows it”.
Three years on, Toure makes it sound like the interview was not presented as he wished. “I trust people too much. When you give your voice to someone, people can twist it or print it the way they want it.”
But he quickly makes the point that he is not trying to pass the buck.
“I was aware some (City) staff were not happy. I was the first to say, ‘OK, I apologise’. When something is wrong, I will say, ‘That is wrong, I don’t like it’. Unfortunately, a lot of things have been done wrong and a lot of things have been going on.
“We’ve been working hard on it, trying to find out what to do, sending the letter, sending people (City officials) messages. But it has been a year now and we don’t have any feedback. I said, ‘OK, it’s better to move on’, and hopefully I can send some messages to the players wishing them good luck for their games. I will always do that but, with the people at the top, it’s quite complicated.”
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When Toure describes the situation as “complicated” it is noticeable he uses the same word to describe his final year at Barcelona and his reasons for leaving a team that had just won the Champions League. He did, after all, struggle to find common ground with Guardiola at the Nou Camp, too.
Briefly, it seemed as though they could work more harmoniously in Manchester. But it turned out to be an illusion. In Guardiola’s first season with City, Toure did not start a Premier League game until the third week of November and was left out of their Champions League squad. The following year was Toure’s last in Manchester and the only league fixture he started was his farewell one, against Brighton, in City’s final home game of the season. So, yes, “complicated” is one word for it.
Emotionally, however, it is clear he still has a strong attachment to City. They matter to him. Maybe, in a strange way, that is part of the problem. “Sometimes,” he says, “when someone is in love with their club, and thinks passionately about everything, it can become emotional.”
Nor has he given up on the idea that there can be some kind of rapprochement and that, in time, Guardiola will be open to the idea of hearing him out.
Toure has been in Ukraine since February, having accepted an offer to become Olimpik Donetsk’s assistant coach, and seems to be enjoying it, even if a run of bad results has left them 11th in a 14-team league. But there are people working on his behalf, he says, who are offering to mediate with Guardiola and trying “very hard to get things done properly”.
Ideally, he would like to meet Guardiola and apologise in person, but he is also prepared for the possibility that it may never happen.
“Unfortunately, it’s been a year and we still haven’t had a response,” Toure says, not sounding hugely optimistic. “We did try to talk to them by messaging people at the club and trying to get the situation settled to get some peace.
“I call (my advisers) to say, ‘What’s going on? What do you think we should do to repair it?’. At the end of the day, we want peace. For the love of the fans, for the love of the club, sometimes things have to be settled the right way.”
They still sing Yaya’s name at City (lockdown excepted). Yaya and Kolo, to be precise. There is a pitch named after Yaya at City’s training ground and a specially designed mural, unveiled by Al Mubarak, to mark the player’s contribution in eight years with the club.
“Yaya had a positive impact from the moment he signed with us in the summer of 2010,” Al Mubarak said in his farewell speech. “The word ‘legend’ can often be misapplied but, in describing Yaya’s status as a City player, there is a no more appropriate term.”
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It was, after all, Toure’s goals at Wembley 10 years ago that eventually brought down the infamous banner that United’s fans had permanently on display at Old Trafford to mock City’s lack of success. The “ticker” had changeable numbers to show how many years it had been since United’s neighbours last won a trophy. Thirty-five, before Toure decided it was time to do something about it.
Everybody remembers Sergio Aguero’s title-winning goal the following season but nobody should forget that City would never have been in that position but for the two goals that Toure scored in their previous match at Newcastle.
Aguero, City have announced, will be immortalised with a statue when he leaves the club this summer. Vincent Kompany is getting one, too. David Silva, as well. Some people have questioned why Toure was not honoured the same way. But if it does bother him, he has no appetite to challenge it.
“I’m very, very delighted for Aguero to have such an honour. At the end of the day, it’s down to the people who decided. I can do nothing about it. This is for the club and the people who are able to decide. All I can say is I’m happy for those guys who can have that honour.
“It’s fantastic, it’s delightful, for the guys who are able to have it. For the guys who have not, of course you can feel, ‘Is it OK, not OK?’. I’m delighted to be part of this club and I am always going to say that.
“I’m really happy because, ever since I came to City, I said that one day I wanted it to be the beginning of the United fall. I showed that in the FA Cup semi-final, the FA Cup final and then, in 2012, when we won the league, by scoring important goals.
“When people write about me being at the start of the change for this club, that, for me, is more than enough. If you have to have something else (statues), I cannot decide that. And unfortunately, it’s quite complicated.”
It is some legacy — “the United fall” — for a player who can remember finding it hard initially to adjust after leaving Barcelona, with their many attractions, to join a club that had not won a trophy since the 1970s.
Toure could have gone to Chelsea instead. “That would have been easy because they already had a story as a great club and (Didier) Drogba was there. I don’t want to be disrespectful but, in terms of trophies, City were only at the start.”
His regret is that, off the pitch, he found himself in some awkward positions. “A lot of stuff could be changed, a lot of stuff could have been done better.”
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It didn’t help that his agent at the time, Dimitri Seluk, seemed to be at war with City and would regularly go on the attack. Toure, rightly or wrongly, chose to stay out of it, apart from an early intervention on Twitter (“don’t take words that do not come from my mouth seriously”). But there is no doubt — and he accepts this — that his own reputation suffered because of Seluk’s various public outbursts.
It was Seluk who complained that Toure was not fully appreciated by City’s owners and pointed out that Roberto Carlos’ birthday present from his club, Anzhi Makhachkala, was a Bugatti, whereas all his client received from City was a cake. That has been misreported over the years to make it look like Toure had demanded a cake. But it is not the only time he feels he has been judged unfairly.
“That was a mess,” Toure says. “People were taking what Dimitri was saying and then putting together an atmosphere where I was complaining about cake. I looked like a bad person because of all the negative stuff around me. I didn’t want to respond because, for me, football was the most important thing. I’ve had the feeling that people see me as a bad person but it’s not right. Sometimes it’s a bit unfair but I never want to complain.”
An image is developing of someone who feels misunderstood.
Toure says he has had several bad experiences involving journalists who misrepresented what he wanted to say. He could also probably be forgiven, sitting in his hotel room in Ukraine, if he wonders why someone with his experience — elite footballer, serial champion and, wherever he has been, a popular member of the dressing room — has not had more opportunities to coach in England (Toure’s previous role was an unofficial, and unpaid, one helping out in QPR’s youth system, not far from his home in west London).
Now 37, he makes the point that people often have the wrong impression of him. “People have been taking me as a bad person or a negative person and I have never been able to express myself properly. Sometimes I express myself publicly and people feel more emotion than the message I want to put out. People seem to think I’m a difficult character. But I’m not that person.”
What can never be disputed is that, on this day 10 years ago, it was his goal at Wembley that brought about a change at the top of English football and ushered in a decade of City dominance.
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“I’d come from Barcelona, with their history, the stadium, the jersey. We (City) were trying to achieve something. We’d never been able to win a trophy ahead of United for so many years. It was difficult at the beginning when I realised we couldn’t play like Barcelona. But they explained to me that City were going to change, that they wanted to be a big club, better than their neighbour. I knew I had to help them change.”
A decade later, it is simply the norm. Another four trophies, staggeringly, could be on the way in the coming weeks. Toure has found out that not every story has a happy ending but nobody did more on the pitch to change City’s mentality, remove their inferiority complex and turn them into a trophy-ravenous machine.
He would like to be remembered at City for the right reasons. And he would like to think that includes the manager, too.
(Top photo: Victoria Haydn/Manchester City FC via Getty Images)
