99% of our fans are outside Manchester apparently

Manchester33 said:
I'm pretty sure the club's definition of a fan is different to the majority of our definition.

For example, I would say a fan is a 'fanatic'. Someone who watches pretty much all of the games, understands our history, could sing 10 different City songs...

The club probably says 'that random person in Mongolia liked one of our posts on X so they are a fan.'
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Like Labours definition of a working man.
 
The Stockport Iniesta said:
Can you explain how non match going fan's make the club money?

Are or you taking about day trippers, in hospitality etc?
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Social media 'likes' and 'follows' generate huge amounts of investment for individuals and businesses alike.

The (notional) value of business increases, attracting investment and generating growth. It's capitalism at its finest.

As a source of income and sponsorship etc, social nedia massively outstrips cash on the gate. It is, of course, a bubble that will burst at some point as fashions change, and punters lose interest, or realise that their financial return would be greater elsewhere.

Is capitalism, yes?
 
metalblue said:
Games becomes too sterile pal. What do any of us go for? Have a laugh/drink with your mates, dig out the opposition fans or a player with a witty song or three, cheers on the blues. It’s not for the game, I can watch that on TV in the warm. Out of the 3 main reasons I go, only really one still keeps me going, the atmosphere isn’t owt like it was, and you can’t insult folk like you used to for fear of upsetting some **** or other.

I was ready to chuck it all in with VAR but it’s been ok of late.
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I agree mate, and many people will be turned off for the reasons you mention. It just properly fucks me off that these nobheads have absolutely no idea about this club and what it means to the people of Manchester and the people that have followed for years. These are the people that will/might still be there when the bubble bursts. They’re bending over, lubed up to anyone with an internet connection that has no real affiliation with the club, other than they’ve decided they like City because they’re good. They’re putting these people first and doing it at the expense of actual supporters.
 
David White said:
I agree mate, and many people will be turned off for the reasons you mention. It just properly fucks me off that these nobheads have absolutely no idea about this club and what it means to the people of Manchester and the people that have followed for years. These are the people that will/might still be there when the bubble bursts. They’re bending over, lubed up to anyone with an internet connection that has no real affiliation with the club, other than they’ve decided they like City because they’re good. They’re putting these people first and doing it at the expense of actual supporters.
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For a club that is very good at taking a long-term view, it seems incredibly short-sighted to prioritise distant fans over local fans. It would hardly cause a blip in the accounts if local fans were better rewarded and encouraged with more favourable pricing, for example.

Or put it this way. The club wastes multiple times more money on poor recruitment for no long-term reward whatsoever than it would need to invest in shoring up and developing the local fanbase.
 
Prestwich_Blue said:
I agree it could well be seen as poorly expressed but we have to accept that City/CFG are a global brand these days, whether we like it or not. It's that sort of recognition and following that gets us sponsorships, particularly ones that don't involve Abu Dhabi.

And you also have to understand that CityXtra seemingly tend to amplify any negative they can, hence why I've blocked them on Twitter.

Did she say those exact words? Did she say them recently or a while ago? Is there a wider context? I don't know but I'm not going to lose my shit over it. Around 2/3rds of our OSC members are outside the UK. So it's quite possible that 80-90% of the total OSC membership are outside Manchester.

I want our overseas fans to feel part of the City family but the fans who regularly pass through the turnstiles should be top priority.
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Let me try to reply to this in a reasoned way, Prestwich, because you're a poster I always find worth reading.

I'm absolutely not losing my shit over this. What I am claiming is that it's insensitive. However, I'm at a point where that no longer surprises very much. And that's a bad thing in itself.
A number of the professionals that City have brought in in various capacities are, of course, not City supporters. It seems to me at least possible that they're not interested in football, or weren't until they got this gig. They are marketing managers, finance controllers, communications directors.

Football, however, is not like a commodity that one shifts around. It's not like being in oil futures.

Any football supporter — from Barnley to Barcelona — could tell them that there is a level of affective investment, sometimes from grandfather, to father, to son, from grandmother to daughter to granddaughter, which is quite unlike anything else that I can think of in modern life, unless it be people who attend a church, a synagogue, a mosque, and who obtain a deeply uplifting sense of spiritual nourishment from that experience.
I'm barely exaggerating. It's not like following a musician, whether they be Taylor Swift or Morrissey (yes, that's a deliberately provocative piece of playfulness on my part), because no musician, no artist, no politician, can lose over and over, and be relegated, tumbling down the divisions and finally, in a ritual of humiliation, be expelled from their league. Nor can they lift a symbol — a cup that's not even made of silver — against their direst rivals on a stage witnessed by literally millions, an event I was privileged to be at two seasons ago at Wembley. And which I will not forget till I die.
City are a business, are a brand, of course on a global scale. That is necessary, and we must welcome it like grown-ups who know how the world works. If I meet someone from Kuala Lumpur or Flagstaff, Arizona who says they are a City “fan” I am of course polite with them, even quite welcoming. Do I regard them as family? No, I'm afraid, really not.(There's some fucking idiots in the “family” at the Etihad, but hey, isn't that true of so many flesh and blood families?) Somebody earlier in the thread made a distinction between “fan” and “supporter”. I've always stood fast by that distinction. A supporter is someone who supports. It matters not a jot to me that what a supporter pays out of their pocket to go through that turnstile does not cover a twentieth of City's running costs. It's a truism, but it does not take account of the vital fact that it's hard-earned cash that may well have involved sacrifices for that particular supporter (and their family), and in any case comes right out of their pocket. Within their limits, they are supporting the team and the club financially by giving back partly what they've earned, by doing a job which, for all I know, they may hate every single minute of. The joy comes on that Saturday afternoon. If they're lucky (and we've been very, very lucky…).
But there's something else, even more crucial. What did the two Covid seasons show us, if not that, you take people out of the ground, no-one there apart from coaching staff and a few club administrators, and it really is just twenty-two grown men in kind of silly uniforms running around chasing a bag full of wind on a patch of grass for one-and-half hours of their time? The Covid seasons were the manifest — painfully manifest — reductio ad absurdam that demonstrated, in embarrassing simplicity, that, without the supporters, there really is no fucking point!
The supporters, those who go often/sometimes/rarely (no matter, I'm not going to get into that) through the turnstile to take their seat and support their team are the beating heart of a club. Any club.

And finally, that brings me to one little grouse, one thing that's starting to get ever so slightly up my nose. Pep regularly goes public in saying, “We need our supporters”. Regularly, the team goes over to clap the away support. That's fine and dandy. He means it, too. He's not being insincere, he's not saying it because he's been told to say it by the comm team. I don't think so. But here's the thing: I'd like someone, just an ordinary fan (myself maybe) but in any case not someone officially employed by the club, to sit down across a table from him, look him in the eye, and quietly explain to him that there is a terrible disjunction, a growing rift, between what he's legitimately calling for, and insensitive statements of the sort that got this thread going. Because it's not the guy or gal in Kuala Lumpur or Flagstaff who's giving their voice in that stadium, groaning or cheering, but in any case being present to give the event meaning. (And I know, there are plenty at the Etihad who sit like stuffed dummies, I don't even know how they do it, I'm not judging them even, I'm as if plugged in to a ten-thousand volt machine on the all too rare occasions when I'm there — because I'm not setting myself up as a model supporter, far from it — it's bad for me, actually, I'm sure it's shortening my life).

Enough.
 
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ninjamonkey said:
What's the issue here? It's simple math's. Let's say we have 100k mancunaian city fans, we'd need a global fanbase of 10m for that to be true. Admittedly I've pulled that 100k figure from my arse but you could double it or even triple it and it would still be comfortably true.

It's no different to any other global football team. Infact it would be impossible to be a club of our stature with the trophy cabinet we've got and the prolonged dominance we've displayed and have that statement not be true.

There's no apparently required in the thread title, it's undeniably true and there's no story here either. It's literally just saying we are a globally popular club
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Do the rags not have 660 million fans? So at this stage we must have at least 100 million.
 
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