

Has City Lost Its Soul? (And Can a Club Have a Soul Anyway?)
By: Thad | August 4th, 2009In the past, author Colin Shindler has been credited with capturing the spirit of what it has meant to support Manchester City over the decades, in books such as “Manchester United Ruined My Life” and “Fathers, Sons, and Football.” This week, however, Shindler is being credited with setting off a massive, er, sandstorm on the City blogosphere with his Daily Mail piece declaring that “the heart has been ripped from the club I loved for 50 years.”

To say the least, most City fans are not pleased with Shindler’s reaction to recent developments at the club. Some City supporters are resorting to ad hominem attacks in response, but for a particularly thoughtful rebuttal (written in the form of a letter to Shindler) see this post by “Prestwich Blue” on the Blue Moon message board. Prestwich asks Shindler, “Do you really think we had any more “soul” when we were owned and run, with varying degrees of ineptitude, by a series of local businessmen made good? Or was that ineptitude, in your eyes, what gave us that ’soul’? Was being everyone’s favourite laughing stock, the Comedy Club, the Theatre of Base Comedy what gave us that ’soul’?”
I’ve had my own say (indirectly) on this in the form of Rob Hughes’s piece in The New York Times today in which I am quoted, as a counterpoint to Shindler.
I may have more to say on this subject later, but for now I invite responses not just from City fans but supporters of other clubs, to these questions: Do clubs have a soul, an identity, an ethos, or is it just a matter of turning out to see players in a certain color shirt kick a ball? If so, what is that soul? Has the modern game destroyed, or at least tainted it?
What do you think?
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Gundoszkf
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JonJon
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BB
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city
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Ramzi
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soulcaliber
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CSD
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Paul
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Thad
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matt











