What Champions League Failure Would Mean for Manchester City

Manchester City's ambitious Abu Dhabi-based owners have long targeted success in the Champions League as setting the seal on their transformation of a club that, don't forget, was languishing in English football's third tier not too long ago.

The club's first two assaults on Europe's elite club competition have not exactly gone to plan, and the thought of a third group stage exit will send shivers down the spines among the hierarchy at the club.

The 2011 campaign was scuppered by early on, when a home draw with an underrated Napoli was followed by a chastening defeat away to Bayern Munich.

Carlos Tevez's notorious non-appearance off the bench that night in Bavaria came on a night when City's lack of Champions League know-how was shown in sharp focus, and a tough draw a year later did not help.

One point from the first three games—albeit two of them away to Real Madrid and Ajax—holed the Blues' Euro ambitions below the waterline and did Roberto Mancini no favours in the long run.

But while a reasonable draw this year—they will play Bayern again as well as CSKA Moscow and Viktoria Plzen—rightly gives cause for optimism, what would another failure mean?

Don't think that the money available through the Champions League is not important to a club whose owners have pockets so deep that James Cameron is considering taking a dive into them.

The club is on a drive for sustainability, and the kind of money available from a long run in this competition for a high-profile club like City is not to be sniffed at, as Bleacher Report's Christopher Atkins explained back in April this year.

Prestige and credibility are all-important to City's owners and fans alike, and failing to get out of the group would damage the club's standing. The sight of City's players trudging off at a rain-lashed Wembley having failed to win the FA Cup in May appalled life-long fans and may have seen more recent, casual converts head elsewhere. The club are constantly striving to attract new fans around the globe, and the Champions League is an important shop window.

But in Manuel Pellegrini, the club have a man who knows how to pilot sides through the Champions League to the business end of the competition. The Chilean got Villarreal to the semi-finals in 2006 and was minutes from doing the same for Malaga last season, so his Euro-cred, such as it is, was a major factor in getting the City job.

With bigger stories elsewhere this summer—Jose Mourinho, David Moyes, Gareth Bale, Wayne Rooney—Pellegrini has had an easy ride with the media so far, but that would change if his attempt on toppling Europe goes the same way as Roberto Mancini's.  

With British clubs failing to make the quarter-finals last season, plus an all-German final, there is a feeling that the club game in this country has lost ground on Europe. If City's expensively assembled squad failed to progress yet again, that feeling would increase, but this time around it should be different. 

The draw, the new manager and a group of players who should have learned from past mistakes mean that the knockout stages of the Champions League are within City's grasp this time.

What do you think? Leave your comments below or follow me on Twitter @TimOscroft