Manchester City Aims to Stay True to Roots While Striving for New Frontiers
Filed under: European Soccer, English Premier League
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| Manchester City’s Shaun Wright-Phillips kicks field goals at Baltimore Ravens practice. |
BALTIMORE — It wasn’t surprising to see (and hear) the majority of the crowd at last Saturday’s friendly between Inter Milan and Manchester City at Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium supporting the European champions.
Inter is a big-name club that’s established itself globally and toured this country before, along with the likes of Manchester United, Real Madrid and others who routinely spend part of their preseason posing for photos and selling shirts in the U.S. They’re football royalty, one of a select few clubs big enough to earn the attention and support of glory-hunting American fans who want to follow a winner.
Manchester City is none of that. The 2010-11 campaign is just its ninth since returning to the Premier League after a spell that included a drop to the third division. Its best finish since earning promotion was fifth last season, and it hasn’t won a major trophy since the 1976 League Cup. It has next to no cachet or name recognition in the U.S.
But it does have money. Lots of it. And ambition. Since an investor group from Abu Dhabi run by a member of the emirate’s royal family took over the club two years ago, City has found itself in the headlines an awful lot for a club with such modest pedigree. It signed Robinho, Carlos Tévez, Roque Santa Cruz, Emmanuel Adebayor and others, instantly becoming a player in every potential high-profile transfer (whether in reality or rumor).
It is the first English club to emerge with a realistic chance to offer a consistent challenge to the dominant “big four” of United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool. That quartet seems to have captured the allegiance of about 95 percent of “football” fans in the United States.
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