But fewer drugs.
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Still less doped than Pepās Cheaty
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Just noticed that they dropped points at home against Chelsea this week-endā¦
Oh. My. Fucking. God.
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The merchandising comes from the little blankets and pillows you get on the Etihad airways. If you zoom in 10x, on the bottom right, along the seam, the city logo is there.
Itās all about plastic flags
Thatās some pretty big games that they canāt get a (presumably) home crowd for. It makes you wonder how they really compare to the Maine Road days.
Yup, effectively both Universities in Manchester get a bunch of tickets to sell to Students.
Man Utd only usually do it for cup and European games.
They have a fan base but itās not big enough or global enough.
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Actually, at this point they do have a fairly significant global fan base. In that sense, their plan is working. There are fans here who have grown up always seeing City as a big club, at least on a par with the likes of Arsenal, Spurs, ManU or Liverpool - little sense how relatively recent it is that City have been competing at the top of the table. Globally, they have built up a far more extensive fan base than they have in the UK, where the plastic nature of the project is far more obvious.
It is also somewhat amusing that their commercial director has expressed frustration at just how extensive brand piracy for items like shirts hits them in the developing world. Apparently, they donāt like that particular kind of cheating.
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Not sure what it is like elsewhere, but In Aus it is only the media that try to push the idea of them being a big club. Fans know the truith as do a lot of the general public who donāt get the mediaās obseccion with city
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In Australia, with Melbourne as part of the City group they presumably are actively working the media. At the same time, Australian footy culture has traditional ties to the English game (viz. LFC being able to fill the MCG for a mediocre pre-season friendly).
Here, while there are some traditional ties, an enormous amount of soccer culture is immigrant-driven, people arriving from countries with strong football cultures but not necessarily having ever thought of having an English team. One in four Canadians are immigrants, when you count born to immigrants it is close to half the population. Therein lies the power of the PL, far easier to follow a PL team than any other here. Naturally enough, people pick their team from the prominent set, and City has been in that for the past 15 years.
This is a small personal sample, but I have seen among my American friends that city have a good deal of support.
I moved here in 96 to play football. Other than one Dane, everyone else on my team was American and what was really striking to me was how little āfandomā there was among the group. Their interest as fans was limited almost exclusively to players they liked and so none were fans of a club the way weād understand it. That I guess was mostly an effect of how little football was on the US tv at the time.
Fast forward 20 years, through a now 10 year plus period in which the tv coverage has developed into something really comprehensive, also a period in which city have been dominant. Among that same group of people Iād say over half identify as city fans in the sense they carve out time to specifically watch the city games, buy the merch for themselves and their kids, and travel regionally to watch them on the occasions they come to the US to play.
A global fan base is more than some knock off shirts
I think that dramatically understates how effective City has been at harnessing the profile of the PL. Sure, it is knockoff shirts in some parts of the world, but in other places their plan to cheat their way to big club status is working. There is no question that they are now one of the big draws. In North America, I suspect they have significantly more support than Arsenal.
That said, it is important to bear in mind that 2022 was the first year that PL international broadcast revenues moved past domestic. Fundamentally, the PL is still an English league - a huge percentage of those merchandising revenues are in the UK. The international market receives more attention because there is more possibility for growth.
Where exactly do you read or see anything about the cheating? Ever tuned into a match and heard a robust discussion on the pre-game? Half-time? If you are a casual fan, it is not right in front of you, and the City group spends massively on spin merchants. There probably isnāt a fan base that is more attuned to ManCās cheating than Liverpool, simply because of what is has cost LFC. The Klopp era has been great. Maybe we will even see two PL titles. But it would have been one of the great dynasties in English football without Cityās flagrant disregard for the rules of the competition.
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It takes more than a few years of this.
Global fan bases are built over time they donāt just exist one day.
And evidently they arenāt flocking to the Ethiad like other clubs with them.
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I hate City as much as the next LFC fan, but Iād question the definition of dynasty here. 3 PL titles and a CL titles under Klopp may have been possible (itās not something you can even lock in because how much was the 19/20 a carryover of the hurt from 18/19? Weāll never know) and could possibly be considered a dynasty I suppose.
But in the other 5 years of Kloppās Liverpool career weāve been behind WHU, Spurs, Spurs, United, Newcastle. A fantastic run by Klopp, but a little rich to say that we only have City and their cheating to blame for stopping a dynasty.
I understand the point.
But the whole notion of being unable to overtake cheating will have some psychological effect on the biggest challengers.
City without cheating have fuck all, whether its to Liverpools loss or to others isnāt really the point.
Football has lost.
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