Dribble
Well-Known Member
This thread is for those who fancy reading an interesting article on Manchester City and what our club means to us as seen through the eyes of some Americans. (Glazier's not included though) :-)
"What is the role — and what are the rights — of the fan who follows a soccer club religiously from birth until death?
“City until I die†is the terrace chant of Mancunians whose team is, and always will be, Manchester City rather than United. But those fans, local and far off in other lands, are having to come to terms with the reality that they are no longer gallant losers, no longer indigenous poor relations to Manchester United’s global wealth.
City’s new purchasing power is matched in the world only by Real Madrid. And while Madrid is heavily indebted to the banks, City can pay cash for whatever player it wants.
In 12 months, City has recruited 12 players from 10 different nations. The total cost, about £195 million, represents about $330 million in petrodollars, paid by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Abu Dhabi's Minister of Presidential Affairs.
Since the sheik bought out the previous owner, the transient former Thai prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, in August 2008, the wage bill has soared toward the £200 million price for the whole club, lock, stock and barrel.
What was impoverished City became Thaksin City, and is now Abu Dhabi City. The only constant has been the fan who, because of his or her tribal allegiance, has nowhere else to go, no color other than blue in his heart.
They are far from what you might call the common fan.
On Monday, Colin Shindler, an author who has supported City since he could walk, wrote a lament to his club in the Daily Mail newspaper. “Mancunians sold my love to a man from Thailand who was on the ‘most wanted list’ of Amnesty International,†he despaired.
“Shinawatra’s money was all smoke and mirrors,†Shindler continued. “At least this Abu Dhabi lot have got money, but that’s all they’ve got. They’ve taken my love, who Shinawatra turned into a whore, cloaked her in the finest of silk dresses and doused her in the most seductive of Arabian fragrances.
“She might look beautiful, but she’s rotten to the core.â€
Shindler’s lament opened a Pandora’s box of emotions. Some blogged that he had become a grumpy old fan, out of touch with the modern game, the business. It is City’s time, they reasoned, to buy what its abhorred neighbor United has been buying for decades.
“I hope your kids never get rich,†he was chastised by somebody signing himself off as Bluenose, Manchester. “Because by your logic, you’ll have to stop loving them, too.â€
Later Monday, I spent 30 minutes on the phone to a converted Man City addict 6,000 kilometers, or 3,760 miles, away in Richmond, Virginia. “It’s complicated,†said Thad Williamson, assistant professor at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond.
“I understand Shindler’s point of view. For him, a big part of belonging to City is being the underdog. I can see how it feels weird.â€
Williamson’s fascination with City began 10 years ago. It was to an extent the light blue color of the shirt, identical to the North Carolina blue that he says is “hard-wired†into his brain as a follower of that basketball team. He used his studies in political science, religion and theology to write a book in 2001 entitled: “More than a Game: Why North Carolina Means So Much to So Many.â€
He was by then already infatuated with City. “I needed a team to support,†he concluded. “My anticorporate sensibility made rooting for a behemoth like Manchester United out of the question. They play great soccer, but rooting for United is like rooting for Exxon.
“City is the true club of working-class Manchester, but what really impressed me was the stellar loyalty of the club’s long-suffering fans. In 1998, culminating in half a decade of poor management and decline, City was relegated to the third division. Yet its fans didn’t desert. If anything their loyalty increased.â€
Williamson was hooked by that culture. He crossed the Atlantic, once, to experience it at City’s old Maine Road stadium; he writes blogs on the team; he has become, for better for worse, an institutionalized follower.
Top-flight soccer, he acknowledges, has moved away from its community roots. “It increasingly treats supporters like cash boxes rather than the spiritual owners of their clubs,†he has written.
Yet “Citizens,†as the City supporters are known, are as loyal to the dream as they were in the postwar days when the club was a match for United. Shindler’s generation has passed their incorrigible love for the team on to their children and grandchildren.
Williamson, isolated among basketball followers and scholars in Richmond, now belongs to that club. He can no more shake it than Shindler thinks he might.
“I am less troubled by the ownership of Abu Dhabi than I was by Thaksin,†Williams now says. “Whatever way you look at it, he was using the club as a pawn in a political agenda. I don’t get the same feeling about the sheiks.â€
It is, Williamson agrees, “peculiar†that inordinately rich men with no allegiance or background to the sport, gain ownership of a British institution. But England, indeed Europe, has immovable clubs that cannot be uprooted the way professional sports franchises have been in the United States.
City, he says, is closer to college sports, institutions that stay rooted and stay loved wherever the fans end up in their professional lives.
In some ways, “More Than a Game,†the motto of Barcelona soccer club, is parallel to what Williamson studied in 2001 and what he still studies in his latest book, “Sprawl, Justice and Citizenship: The Costs of the American Way of Life.†The basketball fan, the soccer fan, the constancy of following a team no matter what is a part of life. For Williamson, in Richmond where he reckons not 5 percent of the people understand his adopted “English†game, there is less to fear from Manchester City’s takeover than Shindler imagines.
“English soccer,†he reasons, “has been tilted toward money ever since the formation of the Premier League,†in 1992. “The logical conclusion is that the 20 teams in the Premier League will in time be owned by 20 sheiks. If there are that many around.†"
A message to all other clubs: It's just the way the world is today, please don't be jealous of us as we've suffered more than most and deserve our break!!!
"What is the role — and what are the rights — of the fan who follows a soccer club religiously from birth until death?
“City until I die†is the terrace chant of Mancunians whose team is, and always will be, Manchester City rather than United. But those fans, local and far off in other lands, are having to come to terms with the reality that they are no longer gallant losers, no longer indigenous poor relations to Manchester United’s global wealth.
City’s new purchasing power is matched in the world only by Real Madrid. And while Madrid is heavily indebted to the banks, City can pay cash for whatever player it wants.
In 12 months, City has recruited 12 players from 10 different nations. The total cost, about £195 million, represents about $330 million in petrodollars, paid by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Abu Dhabi's Minister of Presidential Affairs.
Since the sheik bought out the previous owner, the transient former Thai prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, in August 2008, the wage bill has soared toward the £200 million price for the whole club, lock, stock and barrel.
What was impoverished City became Thaksin City, and is now Abu Dhabi City. The only constant has been the fan who, because of his or her tribal allegiance, has nowhere else to go, no color other than blue in his heart.
They are far from what you might call the common fan.
On Monday, Colin Shindler, an author who has supported City since he could walk, wrote a lament to his club in the Daily Mail newspaper. “Mancunians sold my love to a man from Thailand who was on the ‘most wanted list’ of Amnesty International,†he despaired.
“Shinawatra’s money was all smoke and mirrors,†Shindler continued. “At least this Abu Dhabi lot have got money, but that’s all they’ve got. They’ve taken my love, who Shinawatra turned into a whore, cloaked her in the finest of silk dresses and doused her in the most seductive of Arabian fragrances.
“She might look beautiful, but she’s rotten to the core.â€
Shindler’s lament opened a Pandora’s box of emotions. Some blogged that he had become a grumpy old fan, out of touch with the modern game, the business. It is City’s time, they reasoned, to buy what its abhorred neighbor United has been buying for decades.
“I hope your kids never get rich,†he was chastised by somebody signing himself off as Bluenose, Manchester. “Because by your logic, you’ll have to stop loving them, too.â€
Later Monday, I spent 30 minutes on the phone to a converted Man City addict 6,000 kilometers, or 3,760 miles, away in Richmond, Virginia. “It’s complicated,†said Thad Williamson, assistant professor at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond.
“I understand Shindler’s point of view. For him, a big part of belonging to City is being the underdog. I can see how it feels weird.â€
Williamson’s fascination with City began 10 years ago. It was to an extent the light blue color of the shirt, identical to the North Carolina blue that he says is “hard-wired†into his brain as a follower of that basketball team. He used his studies in political science, religion and theology to write a book in 2001 entitled: “More than a Game: Why North Carolina Means So Much to So Many.â€
He was by then already infatuated with City. “I needed a team to support,†he concluded. “My anticorporate sensibility made rooting for a behemoth like Manchester United out of the question. They play great soccer, but rooting for United is like rooting for Exxon.
“City is the true club of working-class Manchester, but what really impressed me was the stellar loyalty of the club’s long-suffering fans. In 1998, culminating in half a decade of poor management and decline, City was relegated to the third division. Yet its fans didn’t desert. If anything their loyalty increased.â€
Williamson was hooked by that culture. He crossed the Atlantic, once, to experience it at City’s old Maine Road stadium; he writes blogs on the team; he has become, for better for worse, an institutionalized follower.
Top-flight soccer, he acknowledges, has moved away from its community roots. “It increasingly treats supporters like cash boxes rather than the spiritual owners of their clubs,†he has written.
Yet “Citizens,†as the City supporters are known, are as loyal to the dream as they were in the postwar days when the club was a match for United. Shindler’s generation has passed their incorrigible love for the team on to their children and grandchildren.
Williamson, isolated among basketball followers and scholars in Richmond, now belongs to that club. He can no more shake it than Shindler thinks he might.
“I am less troubled by the ownership of Abu Dhabi than I was by Thaksin,†Williams now says. “Whatever way you look at it, he was using the club as a pawn in a political agenda. I don’t get the same feeling about the sheiks.â€
It is, Williamson agrees, “peculiar†that inordinately rich men with no allegiance or background to the sport, gain ownership of a British institution. But England, indeed Europe, has immovable clubs that cannot be uprooted the way professional sports franchises have been in the United States.
City, he says, is closer to college sports, institutions that stay rooted and stay loved wherever the fans end up in their professional lives.
In some ways, “More Than a Game,†the motto of Barcelona soccer club, is parallel to what Williamson studied in 2001 and what he still studies in his latest book, “Sprawl, Justice and Citizenship: The Costs of the American Way of Life.†The basketball fan, the soccer fan, the constancy of following a team no matter what is a part of life. For Williamson, in Richmond where he reckons not 5 percent of the people understand his adopted “English†game, there is less to fear from Manchester City’s takeover than Shindler imagines.
“English soccer,†he reasons, “has been tilted toward money ever since the formation of the Premier League,†in 1992. “The logical conclusion is that the 20 teams in the Premier League will in time be owned by 20 sheiks. If there are that many around.†"
A message to all other clubs: It's just the way the world is today, please don't be jealous of us as we've suffered more than most and deserve our break!!!