Motivation Quote by Alan Hansen

Hansen’s line lands like a shrug with a scalpel in it: not just that Manchester City were bad, but that their brief flirtation with hope was structurally doomed. “In the doldrums” is seafaring language smuggled into football punditry, framing City as a club stuck in dead air, incapable of catching the wind that lifts others. It’s a soft phrase that sets up the punchline, because “they came up and went straight back down again” is brutally plain. No metaphors, no mercy. The rhythm mimics the narrative arc he’s mocking: rise, immediate fall, end of story.

The intent is diagnostic as much as dismissive. Hansen isn’t only recapping promotion and relegation; he’s sketching a club culture of instability. The subtext is that relegation isn’t a freak accident here, it’s the gravitational pull of mismanagement, thin squads, and a lack of institutional seriousness. Coming from an ex-player turned TV authority, it’s also a kind of public grading: you don’t just lose matches, you fail the basic test of belonging in the top flight.

Context matters because this is pre-oligarch/mega-money City, when the club’s identity in the wider English imagination was defined by underachievement and self-sabotage. The line works because it crystallizes that old City: talented enough to tease, chaotic enough to collapse, and familiar enough that the audience recognizes the pattern before he finishes the sentence.