"MAN CITY FAN"
My first interest in soccer was the Miami "Fusion". First soccer match I ever attended was a "Fusion" game at old Lockhart Stadium--in Fort Lauderdale.
I remember sitting there that first match watching and thinking, "I like this", I liked soccer.
I got SO into the "Fusion". Had a flag made; bought a shirt (that I still have); went to a lot of games; got on the message board after every match.
The most constant, most prolific, most effusive "Fusion" fan on the message board was a guy who went by the handle "MAN CITY FAN"
I asked MAN CITY FAN once, "Why are you such a "Fusion" fan?" It was because a former Man City player, Ian-something, I think, was now playing for the "Fusion". :o Now THAT was loyalty!
The "Fusion" folded, pardon me, was "contracted" in MLS-speak, after the ONE season that I became such a fan.
But I had been bitten by the soccer bug. Now what am I going to do? It was out of the question that I would adopt one of the "Fusion's" former opponents as the object of my passion. I also wasn't going to become a fan of a foreign language club, I never took to other languages, can't speak any other. I had to have an English speaking club with English-speaking fans so I looked across the pond to the English pyramid.
I couldn't do League One or League Two. Miami "Fusion" matches were NEVER televised and I saw that if you weren't in the English Premier League you didn't exist in media coverage, especially not here in the colonies.
I had a boyhood memory of Nottingham Forest, so romantic a name. They were in the Championship then. I had even attended a "Fusion"-Forest friendly. Forest then? I researched their history and they had been a big club, but alas, my boyhood memory was a false one. The name Nottingham Forest had stuck in my mind but just from fairy tales, not soccer. And they were not on the media radar. It would be difficult and lonely to follow even a club stuck in the Championship.
Thus, to the greatest of club soccer leagues and an English-speaking one, the EPL, I went.
I developed a criterion: I wanted to root for an underdog. Like underdogs. Despise frontrunning fans. I would not become a fan of one of the "Big Four", Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Chelsea. I looked at Tottenham, that queer little bird atop the soccer ball was different...It didn't take.
My people are from the Northeast. The Tyneside region. Coal miners. Mine were coal miners there and emigrated to become...coal miners here.
There were three EPL clubs in Tyneside, Newcastle United, Sunderland, and Middlesbrough. Could I conjure up a fandom that would stick for one of those clubs? I immediately nixed Middlesbrough, it sounded too pedestrian, too sensible brown middle class and stuck there. Those were the days of Alan Shearer at Newcastle and while they were not a historical "Big Four" club they were in the top four (as I recall) of the EPL table at the time. By no stretch were Newcastle an underdog, they would be too frontrunning for me. Plus I didn't like the striped prison shirtings unis.
I tried out Sunderland in my mind. The "Stadium of Light". Wow! Didn't like the red and white striped shirts but they weren't Big Four...Sunderland didn't take, either.
And then I remembered MAN CITY FAN. I looked at the Premier League table. Not there. Rats. I looked at the Championship. There they were, sitting atop too!, which meant that the next season, my first without the "Fusion", they would be in the EPL. I loved their simple, unique sky blue color, I loved their underdog status. Loved everything about them.
It was because of MAN CITY FAN that I became a Man City fan.
BOY, were they underdogs!
Division Two
Maine Road "Temple of Doom"
I jumped in with both feet.
Those first few seasons up tested my stick-too-it-iveness. Giorgio Samaras. Robbie Fowler. Shaun Goater. Calamity James. Joey Barton. We, I was now using "we" for City, had a good middle-of-the-table finish our first year up, but after that first season we had close encounters with relegation. I don't know if my new Man City fandom could survive the blackout of relegation.
We survived. Came then,
"The Manchester Revolution"
Former (and future) Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, "Frank" to local fans, bought the club. 🎵
We're in the money/ We're in the money🎵 Frank sent us on our way, and then went away, back to Thailand. BUT Frank knew billionaires all over the world and sold the club to Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates. The Manchester Revolution kicked into overdrive.
I noticed that City fans were different. We were ecstatic, we were grateful, we couldn't believe we were "really here". We cheered whenever Frank appeared at Maine Road, we hung banners and chanted hosannas to Sheikh Mansour. We were happy.
We booed the Champions League anthem every time it was played. They threatened us. We booed more.😂
The Poznan
We played Lech Poznan one time in the Champs League, maybe Europa, in Manchester. Polish club, Lech Poznan. They cheered their teams' goals by turning their backs to the pitch, putting their arms around their mates' shoulders, and jumping up and down in place.
City fans adopted The Poznan. 😂
You gotta love fans like that.
The Bananas
Now the bananas. I don't know what it's about, supposedly it goes back to the late '90's but I don't know why. But now it has become a sign of our happy defiance of the Premier League's guilty verdicts (and we are guilty). Try as you might, you are not going to shake City fans' loyalty and joy in their club.
😂👏
In all of these ways City fans were, and still are, different from fans of Manchester United, of Arsenal, of Liverpool, the red-entitled-traditional-elite teams of English football. The red elites always have been, and are today even more so, bitter toward Manchester City. We broke up their Firm. They were "cheated" out of titles and lucre that were "rightfully" theirs. They direct their ire at anything and anybody that they feel have wrongfully displaced them.
United fans opposed Glazer family ownership from day one; they oppose it to this day with everything from banners to boycotts, to threats to establish a new green-and-gold club, to everything short of violence. I saw, just within the last couple of weeks, a huge banner inside Old Trafford castigating ownership for "the way you treat us". The "Temple of Dreams" has become a temple of nightmarish negativity. I could never, ever be a fan of a club with fans of such bitterness, of such relentless negativity as those.
Arsenal fans, it was always whining and bitching--at having finished in the top four, or the top three, or runners-up! Always complaining. Piers Morgan and others screamed "WENGER OUT!" Never happy. "The balls were different"-Mikel Arteta, current manager. When Arsenal won the EPL last season, there was joy of course among their fans, but it was more than a little tinged with relief, relief that they had "finally" got what they "deserved" all along and had been denied for...twenty years.😂 It wasn't good enough being a member of the "Big Four"; it wasn't good enough going to the Champions League every year. They wanted it all and they wanted it every year. Arsenal's stadium is so joyless that it is nicknamed "The Highbury Library". Arsenal fans' title "celebrations" were as much an avoidance of "pain"--which isn't joy.
Not us. Not City fans. Joy lives here. Joy lived in Maine Road; it lives in Etihad Stadium.
We ought to hold a symbolic ceremony for the grumpy Reds. Have life-size, blow-up Sir Alex Ferguson dolls, blow-up Piers Morgan dolls, blow-up Brendan Rogers dolls. Have real City fans on the platform, too. Here, poor wittle, bitter Unitard, here Arsie, here Slaverpool, here are your trophies! 🤭
Because they will never have our joy.
I found my soccer club, I found my people in Manchester City.
City Till I Die!
