MANCHESTER CITY

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Manchester City Football Club are a football club in Manchester, England. Founded in 1880 as St. Mark's, they became Ardwick Association Football Club in 1887 and Manchester City in 1894.

The History of Manchester City F.C. begins with Reverend Connell and William Beastow who founded the club as St. Mark's in 1880 in Gorton, Manchester.

The history of the club is split into separate pages spanning different eras of the club:

Members of St. Mark's Church of England, West Gorton, Manchester, founded the football club that would become known as Manchester City, for largely humanitarian purposes. Two church wardens sought to curb local gang violence and alcoholism by instituting new activities for local men, whilst high unemployment plagued East Manchester, specifically Gorton. All men were welcome to join, regardless of religion.

A church cricket club had been formed in 1875, but no equivalent for the winter months existed. To rectify this, and as part of Rector Arthur Connell's general push to intervene in social ills, church wardens William Beastow and Thomas Goodbehere started a church football team called St Mark's (West Gorton) (sometimes written as West Gorton (St Mark's)) in the winter of 1880.

The team's first recorded match occurred on 13 November 1880, against a church team from Macclesfield. St. Marks lost the match 2–1, and only won one match during their inaugural 1880–81 season, with a victory over Stalybridge Clarence in March 1881.

City gained their first honours by winning the Second Division in 1899; with it came promotion to the highest level in English football, the First Division. They went on to claim their first major honour on 23 April 1904, beating Bolton Wanderers 1–0 at Crystal Palace to win the FA Cup; City narrowly missed out on a League and Cup double that season after finishing runners-up in the League but City became the first club in Manchester to win a major honour.

In the seasons following the FA Cup triumph, the club was dogged by allegations of financial irregularities, culminating in the suspension of seventeen players in 1906, including captain Billy Meredith, who subsequently moved across town to Manchester United. A fire at Hyde Road destroyed the main stand in 1920, and in 1923 the club moved to their new purpose-built stadium at Maine Road in Moss Side.

This is a chronological list of Manchester City managers, comprising all those who have held the position of manager for the first team of Manchester City F.C. and the club's predecessors West Gorton (St. Marks) and Ardwick. In the Football League era the club has appointed 34 managers; including pre-league managers and temporary caretakers more than 40 men have held responsibility for team selection.

The longest serving manager was Wilf Wild, who was in charge from 1932 to 1946, for a total length of 14 years 9 months. However, as Wild's tenure covered the entire length of the Second World War, in which no competitive football was played, he is not the man with the most games served as manager. Les McDowall, who was in charge from 1950 to 1963, a period of 13 years, managed the club for the most competitive games, a total of 592 games - a full 240 games more than Wild, who recorded the second most. The most successful Manchester City manager in terms of major trophies won, as of 1 March 2020, is Pep Guardiola, who has won eight trophies in four years from 2016 to 2020. Pep Guardiola is City's current manager.