Manchester City Football Club
Chapel Hill has always big a pretty big soccer community, and I played a lot as a kid, usually as goalkeeper. I stopped playing the game sometime in junior high but continued to be a fan. I then caught the bug again big time after arriving at Harvard for graduate school, due to a confluence of factors: a knee injury which made playing soccer easier for me than playing basketball, the high proportion of Europeans or Anglo-leaning Americans in Cambridge, particularly among political theory graduate students, as well as the sheer fascination of learning about a different sports culture. Starting in about 1999, I began playing soccer video games, watching as much soccer as I could, and playing pickup soccer wherever I could find it. (Call me a kindred soul to Franklin Foer, author of the justly acclaimed book, How Soccer Explains the World.)
But to really get into it, I needed a team to support. As soon as I heard about Manchester City, from my friend Jason Maloy, I knew who it would be. My anti-corporate sensibility made rooting for a behemoth like Manchester United out of the question--they play some great soccer, but let's face it, rooting for Man U is like rooting for Exxon. And it seemed a bit cheap to a pick one of the other big teams like Arsenal and Liverpool (though I do root for both those clubs whenever and wherever they play Man U). So what better club to support than Manchester City--
the true club of working class Manchester, with a proud legacy of flamboyant, attacking soccer, and a not-so-proud legacy as one of the most frustrating clubs to support in all of Europe.
It certainly helped that City wears a shade of light blue that is virtually identical to the Carolina blue that is hard-wired into my brain. But what really impressed me was the stellar loyalty of the club's long-suffering fans. In 1997-98, culminating half a decade of poor management and decline, Manchester City were relegated into the third division of English soccer, after spending most of its history in the top flight and only rarely spending more than a year or two in the second division. At the very same time as City were sliding down the table, archrivals Man United were in not just domestic but continental and indeed global ascendancy as both a great team and a major corporate brand. How did City fans respond? By increasing attendance at league games during the 1998-99 season, as the club fought its way out of the third division, a struggle chronicled brilliantly in the book Down Among the Dead Men. It took two late goals at the year-end promotion playoff for City even to force extra time against Gillingham in 1999, but City earned promotion on penalty kicks thanks to the heroics of City keeper Nicky Weaver.
I began following City during the 1999-2000 season as the club earned its second consecutive promotion, back into the English Premier League, and have followed them as closely as possible ever since. Since then City has been relegated (in 2001), promoted again in style (in 2002), and in the past three years established itself as a solid top flight side with a good corps of fairly young players. Yet even as City has gotten better on the pitch, its incredible unpredictability has stayed intact: this is a side capable of holding the best team in England to a draw away from
home on a Tuesday and then losing to a third division side the following Saturday!
But no matter what happens, the character of the club is to never give up, no matter what. Never was that spirit better exemplified than in February 2004. Mired in a two month long slump, City found itself down 3-0 at halftime to Tottenham Hotspur, a quality Premiership side, in a 4th round FA Cup match. To make matters worse, City had a player ejected at halftime for arguing with the ref. Surely the second half would be simply a painful humiliation....instead City scored off a set piece to make it 3-1, got a deflected goal to sail in to cut it to 3-2, added the equalizer in about the 75th minute through brilliant young winger Shaun Wright-Phillips, then incredibly scored the winning goal in injury time on a pinpoint header from the generally ordinary Jon Macken, capping what was immediately described as the most incredible comeback in the history of the FA Cup.
You never know what you're going to get with City, but it's usually going to be compelling one way or another. In January 2003 I traveled to Manchester to see two matches live in the last season of City's historic ground, Maine Road, and wrote about the trip in an article for King of the Kippax, a fanzine devoted to the blue half of Manchester.
Part of my enthusiasm for City is also related to the fact that during the period between 1999 and 2003 it became harder for me to be a fan of Carolina basketball in the way I always had. I felt like I had gotten into close; I cared about the coaches and players involved, and about what was happening in the program too much; at some level the games became more like work than fun....it often felt like too much was at stake.
Supporting Manchester City allowed me to enjoy the simple pleasures (and disappointments) of being a fan again, and I'm thankful for that.
Thanks also to Manchester City manager (and England legend) Kevin Keegan, one of Pele's 100 greatest living footballers, who took time to reply personally to a note I sent him at the end of the difficult 2003-04 season–what a thrill it was to find that letter in the mail.
