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2009–10 Manchester City F.C. season

Manchester City
2009–10 season
Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak
Manager Mark Hughes (until 19 December)
Roberto Mancini
Stadium City of Manchester Stadium
(a.k.a. Eastlands and CoMS)
Premier League 5th
FA Cup Fifth round
League Cup Semi-finals
Top goalscorer League:
Carlos Tevez (23)

All:
Carlos Tevez (29)
Highest home attendance 47,370 vs Tottenham Hotspur (5 May 2010)
Lowest home attendance 24,507 vs Fulham (23 September 2009)
Average home league attendance 45,512

The 2009–10 season is Manchester City Football Club's eighth consecutive season playing in the Premier League, the top division of English football, and its thirteenth season since the Premier League was first created with Manchester City as one of the its original 22 founding member clubs. Overall, it is the team's 118th season playing in a division of English football, most of which have been spent in the top flight. The club started the season under the management of Mark Hughes who was controversially sacked in mid-December after the team notched up seven consecutive draws in the Premier League. He was replaced by the Italian manager Roberto Mancini.

New manager Roberto Mancini began the season with only five months in the job at Eastlands, asking for more time to "mould the team to his own image." In his first few months in the job, after succeeding Mark Hughes in December, the Italian did make some noticeable improvements to the team, such as ironing out its occasional lack of focus and cohesion in defence whilst also improving the overall mentality of the team. Yet by the end of the season it had become obvious that there was much work still to be done to convince some of Mancini's higher-profile players to sign up to his personal ethos.

With a prolific 29 goals in his first season at the club, Carlos Tevez was widely regarded as the club's best and most important player this season. The previous season's fan's favourite and top scorer, Robinho, was less successful, and in January he was loaned out to Brazilian club Santos for the remainder of the season only serving to emphasise the magnitude of his failure to deliver on the pitch anything remotely comparable to what he had already received in his bank account.

The loss in the team's last home game of the season to fellow rivals for landing one of the Premier League's "Top Four" elite slots, Tottenham Hotspur, in what had been dubbed by the media beforehand as the "Champions League play-off" game, was considered by many observers to be the Manchester club's defining moment of the season. Breaking the established stranglehold of the "Big Four" had been one of the ambitions of the club's new wealthy owners. However, one of the positives of the season's campaign was that the club reached its first major semi-final since 1981 before finally succumbing to the eventual trophy winners, Manchester United. The City team also notched up some highly noteworthy victories over the other "Top Four" incumbents, Chelsea and Arsenal.


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