It is quite difficult to narrow down the cast of City’s most successful ever decade to just eleven players. Over the past ten years, we’ve been lucky enough to see some of the world’s most talented footballers bless the Etihad pitch with their presence - long gone are the days when Joey Barton could finish as the club’s top scorer with a tally of six league goals, and Richard Dunne could be crowned the club’s best player for four consecutive years.
Now, the competition is so strong you can make a legitimate case to leave out a player as talented as Leroy Sane. With that said, here are the eleven players that I believe merit a place in City’s Team of the Decade.
It’s hard to believe now, but once upon a time Burnley’s bench-warming goalkeeper Joe Hart was one of the best ‘keepers in Europe for Manchester City.
His precipitous decline has prompted a kind of amnesia about this fact – it’s not unusual to hear fans say Hart was always overrated. Not so.
In Roberto Mancini’s successful 2010/11 and 2011/12 campaigns, Hart was an integral member of the team.
Some of his performances in the Champions League afterwards, against Barcelona and Borussia Dortmund in particular, were phenomenal.
He won the league’s Golden Glove award on four separate occasions, which is a testament to his ability to organise a defence and his reliability between the posts.