Did you know that Alice Price’s lounge is a Manchester City fortress? We’ll let the Champions Journalist fan reporter explain

Don’t get me wrong, nothing will ever top the electric atmosphere at a packed-out home game, with the sound of thousands of fans chanting the same Man City songs at the tops of their lungs. But at the same time, watching your team play from the comfort of your own home, surrounded by your favourite people, is hard to beat.

There’s a certain twinge of excitement that lingers in the air as we all huddle around the TV, everyone wearing City shirts as we try out hardest to fend off any nerves that may have started to settle. “Surely we’ve got this in the bag”: the unspoken thought that the lot of us share but dare not say.  

We’ve all found City through our different walks of life, and we’ve all been fans for differing amounts of time: Elley and Aofie were practically born die-hard City fans, with the rest of us slowly being eased into Manchester blue. There’s something so beautiful about people finding the same thing that makes them happy at different stages of their lives; a shared passion that only grows stronger over time.

We all have our own pre-match rituals – superstitions, you might call them. Ben, my younger brother, always kisses the badge of his Phil Foden shirt before kick-off; Zara, one of my closest friends, tries her hardest to harmonise with the Champions League song (and it’s actually surprisingly good). There’s a definite whiff of takeaway in the air too, another pre-Champions League ritual that we’ve adopted – after all, nobody has time to cook when there’s a game to prepare for.

Oddly enough, the small crowd of friends that sit cross-legged in front of the TV screen mirrors the crowd that the camera zooms in on every now and then: a wave of sky-blue shirts and rosy cheeks. And when that final whistle goes, there is that same, immense feeling of emotions simmering around the room: joy, happiness, relief.