The Etihad Stadium has not hosted a men’s match since the Premier League’s verdict against Manchester City was announced. As the fallout from the case moved into a second week, attention turned as much to the reaction of the club’s own supporters as to the findings themselves.
Liam Gallagher, the Oasis singer and a lifelong City fan, was asked what he made of rival supporters wanting the club stripped of all its trophies after it was found guilty of all the serious charges against it. His answer, posted on social media, was blunt: “There all NEUROTIC little GIMPS.” It was one of dozens of sweary, punchy and often amusing responses, all of them resting on a single article of faith — that City will somehow find a way to wriggle free.
Gallagher is far from alone. On Bluemoon, the club’s largest fan forum, the mood has been just as defiant, seasoned with gallows humour. “Have we been blamed for the Titanic hitting the iceberg yet?” asked one user. “Manchester City shot JFK,” wrote another. A third framed the case in grander terms: “This isn’t just a fight between the PL & City. It’s a fight for the heart, soul & future of football.” The forum has now passed 192,000 posts since the initial charges were brought against City in 2023.
What stands out, in Sean Ingle’s reading of it, is a reluctance among supporters to accept wrongdoing or to criticise the club’s owners. He argues that this is not simply a matter of tribalism, nor of a determination to wait for the club’s appeal to play out.
The Irish academic Colm Kearns offers another explanation. The United Arab Emirates, he says, has not only delivered unprecedented success and forged emotional bonds with City’s fanbase, “but have also co-opted elements of the club’s fanbase as aggressive defenders of their regime”. In 2023, Kearns and his colleagues analysed large numbers of posts from City fans going back years. They found that some supporters would not only “overlook ethical violations by the Group, but decry and — in some cases — attack the Group’s critics”.
Kearns also says some sports journalists had self-censored because of online abuse from City fans. He describes a pattern in which fans would hunt down a writer through their personal social feeds and send the material to their editor in an attempt to get them into trouble.
Social media is a second major factor. Thirty years ago, most City fans would have lived near Manchester and encountered supporters of other clubs at work and in the pub. Today they can spend their time in online spaces populated entirely by people who follow their own club. Kearns believes this makes fans “perhaps more tribally myopic than they would have been before and less likely to look outside of their own club’s perspective”.
Academics talk of “sports fandom circles” — a phenomenon that emerged from east Asia alongside popular culture and music, in which supporters across the world mobilise to defend athletes or teams. It encourages a laser focus on one’s own tribe, but hardly lighthearted banter or compromise. In City’s case, Kearns suspects some fans are putting the club above the wider game, pointing to a Reddit post that read: “I am a City fan first and a football fan second.” He concedes, though, that it is impossible to know how many online posters do not live in Manchester or attend matches, and so feel a need to prove their credentials by sticking up for the club at all costs.
The picture elsewhere is different. Ingle went through the fan forums of other clubs and found that the overwhelming majority welcomed the guilty verdict, even if some doubted City would be properly punished given the relationship between Abu Dhabi and the British government. “Once you lose faith that the rules apply equally, football becomes something else,” one supporter wrote. “Every title, every match, carries a question mark. I feel cheated. I’m one of the victims. And for that, I hate Manchester City.”
That raises a question Ingle leaves hanging: would the same poster feel the same way if the boot were on the other foot, and their own club were in the line of fire?