‘If only he’d joined earlier’: Ali Benarbia’s glorious spell at Man City

It’s weird, but there are football fans today who don’t remember a time when Manchester City were glorious failures and not the top-four staples we now know them as.

Just 14 years passed between Sergio Agüero’s title-winning strike against QPR and Jamie Pollock’s solo own-goal against the same opponents which saw the club relegated to the third tier.

City’s squad under Pep Guardiola is full of world-class talent, and though some players are better than others, there certainly aren’t any so far apart in quality that you wonder how they ever wound up sharing the same pitch.

The same can certainly not be said, however, about Ali Benarbia and the City squad he was a part of.

The Algerian joined City in 2001, reportedly at the express behest of manager Kevin Keegan, who had never forgotten Benarbia’s displays for Monaco a few years prior.

In the 1996-97 UEFA Cup, just a couple of months after Keegan had left Newcastle United, the Magpies were decimated by the playmaker and his team-mates in the principality.

Benarbia scored twice that night – a powerful left-footed volley into the top corner, followed by a sublime free-kick with his right –  while the other scorer was Sylvain Legwinski, a man who would incidentally join another of Keegan’s former clubs, Fulham, that same year.

City signed Benarbia while in search of an immediate top-flight return, having been yo-yoing between the top few divisions, and it didn’t take long for their manager to sing the praises of a player who clearly still belonged at a higher level.

“I don’t think Manchester City fans in the last 20 or 30 years will have seen many players like him,” Keegan said, just a couple of months into Benarbia’s two-year stint.

“They will come up with names like Colin Bell and