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Manchester City’s fans do not see themselves as victims. They are — they feel — like the lucky ones, the lottery winners. More than that, in fact. Any fool can win the lottery. Manchester City earned it.
For years, their club traipsed in the wilderness, knowing nothing but disappointment and regret and misery, greeting it all with a wry smile. They endured the derision of their rivals and, in particular, the disdain of their neighbors, Manchester United. And then, with a bolt from a bright blue sky, it all changed.
Suddenly, Manchester City won titles. Suddenly, Manchester City was the best team in England. Suddenly, Manchester City had the best coach in the world. Suddenly, Manchester City broke records: 100 points in a season, an unprecedented domestic treble. It must have felt, on some level, like a karmic reward for all those years of pain.
The fans knew who to thank. A banner has hung from the top tier of the Etihad Stadium for some time now: a decade or so, maybe. It long predates the treble, the centurions, the arrival of Pep Guardiola. Memory is fickle, but it may even have been put in place before Queens Park Rangers and Sergio Agüero and the first title of the new era, back in 2012. It reads, in English and Arabic: “Manchester thanks you, Sheik Mansour.”
Manchester City’s fans do not act like victims, either. Or, rather, a portion of Manchester City’s fans do not. Writing about anything other than the wonderful style of Guardiola’s team, the sublime majesty of David Silva and the shimmering brilliance of Kevin de Bruyne, certainly, requires something of a thick skin.
Suggest that, perhaps, Abu Dhabi’s investment in Manchester City is not rooted exclusively in a love of the sport and happy, hazy, 1990s memories of Georgi Kinkladze, but in a desire to burnish the reputation of a Gulf state with a questionable human rights record, and a relatively small but highly concentrated burst of fury is guaranteed.
Over the last year or so, it has been the same whenever someone mentions the allegations that arose from the emails Football Leaks released: namely, that City not only breached UEFA’s financial regulations, but that the club also deliberately misled the investigators going over its accounts.
The bile comes, as sure as the sun: accusations that the news media is in league with a mysterious “cartel” of clubs, and also with UEFA, to bring down City. The rhetoric has only intensified in the last week, since UEFA threw City out of the Champions League for two years, not simply for breaking the rules of Financial Fair Play but also for misleading investigators.
The club, of course, vehemently asserts its innocence. It will appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and perhaps beyond, with what it has called “irrefutable” proof it has done nothing wrong. Its fans believe it, unquestioningly. This is all, they say, a witch hunt.
They make that clear to journalists on social media — most often in the form of harmless abuse, though it is occasionally more troubling — and to UEFA, now seen as City’s persecutor, in real life.
City’s fans have long jeered the Champions League anthem because of the perceived vendetta against the club; during the team’s game against West Ham on Wednesday, some brandished signs declaring the organization a mafia. Further demonstrations are planned for the visit of Real Madrid in a few weeks’ time.
This is not how victims are supposed to behave, this defiance and rage, but that is precisely what City’s fans are in all of this.
Supporting a sports team is not — though it may seem like it, to nonbelievers — a straight consumer choice. It is, instead, part of our composite identity. Often, quite a large part. There are parallels, according to some studies, to how we regard our gender, our sexuality, our ethnicity. (Though it is not, we should at this point concede, quite as important.)
It may not be integral to who we are, but it is integral to how we see ourselves. A team’s success and failure is seen as “self-relevant,” as Daniel Wann, a professor of psychology at Murray State University, put it.
Imagine, then, being told that the most glorious period of your team’s history — the thing you had dreamed about for so long — was not only in some way illegitimate, thanks to a transgression of a set of rules that you do not fully understand and that seem designed specifically to vanquish your ambitions, but that, as it happens, celebrating all those trophies is actually proof of your warped moral compass.
Fans will defend their club against almost anything; the problem is that that word — club — is a difficult, elusive thing to define. It is not, really, the owner: That is the business. It is not even the players and the coach: That is the team. The club is something else: a shared memory, a badge, a color, a spirit, passed down from parent to child.
Those meanings are often conflated and confused, and it leaves fans in the curious position of defending a tycoon or a company or, in this case, a state, because the maintenance of its reputation seems significant to the good name of a social institution. This is the price Manchester City’s fans have had to pay for their dreams to come true: to see their club transform from a sports team to some sort of pawn in a geopolitical power game. That is not, really, something they asked for.
If the psychological contortions of that are challenging, though, there is another aspect to the Manchester City story — one that has come into sharper relief this week — that reminds us that the club’s fans, the people for whom involvement with Manchester City is not emotionally optional, warrant a little understanding, at least.
Everything Abu Dhabi United Group, the investment vehicle that owns the club, has done since it bought City in 2008 suggests it is in it for the long haul. Its establishment of a network of clubs, at the instigation of its chief executive, Ferran Soriano, makes it clear this is not a short-term play.
But throughout its battle with UEFA, City has given the impression that it would rather fundamentally alter the soccer landscape for good than submit to a set of rules that it does not like. That softened a little this week when Soriano appeared to offer UEFA an olive branch in an interview with the club’s in-house television station, but City remains determined to fight these charges to the end.
But if its appeal to C.A.S. fails, and the Swiss Supreme Court, beyond that, rules against City, what happens then? Does it continue to fight, forcing fans to choose between their team and, to an extent, the structure of the sport itself?
Or does Abu Dhabi, convinced the scales are weighted against it, begin its slow withdrawal from soccer? Does it decide that there are better ways to improve its global standing, and sell off further slivers of the club to the Chinese government or to New York hedge funds?
This is the problem when clubs are not treated as community institutions but as trophy assets, to be bought and sold, available to those whose use for them is not entirely sporting, but financial or, in this case, political. The club as a whole — the part that the fans consider part of themselves — is entirely dependent on the whims of the club as a business.
That made Manchester City’s fans’ dreams come true, of course, and they will doubtless forever be grateful for that. But it also has the power to bring those dreams to an end whenever it wants, leaving the fans, once again, to adjust to a new reality, one that they did not ask for and do not necessarily understand.
There Is No Such Thing As a Bad Player
Tuesday night was, in the end, Erling Haaland’s night. Every night seems to be Erling Haaland’s night these days. He is in danger of making elite soccer look a little too easy: 10 goals now, in his first seven Champions League games, the two most recent coming in his first appearance in the tournament’s knockout stages.
In the 19-year-old Haaland’s long shadow, though, came a quietly excellent performance from Emre Can. He moved to Borussia Dortmund in January, one of those late, unexpected transfers that it is surprisingly easy to miss.
Can had found himself out of favor at his former club, Juventus, starting only twice in Serie A this season, and deemed so surplus to requirements that he was not even named in the team’s Champions League squad. The Italian champion had, it seemed, evolved beyond him, just as another of Can’s former employers, Liverpool, had. Since he left England, in 2018, it has won the Champions League, and lost one Premier League game in 64.
And yet, against Paris St.-Germain, Can was possibly Dortmund’s most significant player: intelligent with the ball, disciplined and imposing without it, dovetailing expertly with his new midfield partner, Axel Witsel.
It was a reminder that there is — at this rarefied level — no such thing as a bad player, not really; that we judge talent too harshly, too quickly; that a player who might appear a weak link in one team might flourish in another.
No, there is no such thing as a bad player; there are just players, as Can was for a time, in the wrong context.
Nearly There, Arsène
This newsletter has long advocated for a change to the offside rule, partly because of the introduction of video technology to judge offenses, and partly because I have always felt the basic, original point of offside has long been lost to the winds. Thankfully, someone is listening: Arsène Wenger, who this week suggested a change to the law so that — as long posited here — if any part of a player’s body is onside, so is the player.
Broadly, I agree with Wenger, though mainly I was struck by the reaction to his suggestion: outright dismissal. This is, sadly, typical of soccer: We have a problem. A change needs to be made. Someone suggests one. Everyone immediately says that, actually, that’s even worse. This is not a great recipe for progress.
Correspondence
A good point, I think, from Richard Lesser, who asks: What is “the logic (if any) behind scheduling knockout games at the exact same time?” This is not an answer that will please traditionalists, but I suspect we aren’t too far away from Champions League spring evenings having two kickoff times: one at 7 p.m. in Europe, and one at 9 p.m. I have a mild objection to that — I think it’s too hard for fans to get from work to the stadium for an early-evening kickoff — but somehow I suspect that won’t be foremost in UEFA’s thinking.
Thanks, too, to all of you who wrote in to offer kind words after what can only be described as the defiling of my Instagram account. I can take it, of course — you get used to it — but those poor Greenlandic dogs didn’t deserve all that vitriol from scorned fans of Neymar. Though most of them would probably regard his move to P.S.G. as a bit of an anticlimax, too.
That’s all for this week. Remember that I am available on Twitter more than is ideal, and that all suggestions, ideas and complaints should be addressed to askrory@nytimes.com. There is a podcast for you to enjoy at your leisure, too. This is where you should direct anyone who you want to impress with how sophisticated you are.
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
