Towards a General Theory of the Football Club’s Soul

By: Thad | August 20th, 2009

A couple of weeks ago in this space we posed the question of whether football clubs can have a soul. A number of folks responded, and most said yes, football clubs can have a soul.

I agree; but not all clubs have the same kinds of soul.

Plato famously divided the human soul into three parts (reason, spirit, and the appetites). I propose that we can distinguish four parts to the soul of football clubs, and further propose that not all clubs have all four parts. In fact, very few do. Got Soul?

The first and most common part of the football soul is the community of memory that is established around each club by their supporters—memories of struggles, triumphs and failures, great and disappointing players come and gone, matches won and lost. This is the memory bank supporters carry around with them, and enjoy sharing with one another. It often consists of match results and great highlights and the like, but it also includes specific places (where one sat in the stadium), people (who one saw the game with), and experiences (what it felt like when the goal went in, the anticipation leading up to the match, the toil and trouble it took to get there). A big part of this aspect of the football club soul, too, is identification with certain players, players who become not just fan favorites but identified with the club and its history.

I think it’s fair to say that all clubs at the Premiership level, indeed the great majority of full-time professional clubs, have a soul in this sense—a set of distinctive memories attached to it widely shared by supporters. Not all clubs have it though. My nearest professional team is the Richmond Kickers of USL-Division 2, who play about six blocks from my house. I go to most games and would be pretty surprised if there are more than a couple of hundred others in the city who follow the team as closely as myself.

But while the games are competitive and the standard not bad, I would not say there is a “community of memory” around the team that is very tangible. Most of the folks who go to the games go to spend time with their families, mainly. It’s pretty rare for the crowd to get that worked up about the actual result (exceptions are championship games or in Open Cup matches when MLS teams come calling). There is no great narrative (one day we’ll make the MLS!) for fans to buy into. And, to cite what may be the decisive standard, the organized presence of away supporters at USL-2 matches is very rare. Visiting teams may bring a few family members, but that’s about it.

The second part of the football club’s soul has to do with the degree to which the club is integrated into the local community, and the degree to which the club has a distinctive personality. Manchester City fans traditionally are known for having a bit of a sense of humor and ability to laugh at ourselves, for being a bit quirky and offbeat (inflatable bananas?) ,and for being loyal through thin and thick. The club itself is also known for being engaged with the community through various programs, calls itself a “family club” and it has deliberately pitched itself as being the club that truly belongs to Manchester and its people.

There are lots of ways small and little to measure a club’s soul in this sense; I will never forget being given an all-access tour of Maine Road and the sardonic, witty, self-deprecating and yet proud way our tour guide led us about, being generous with information while constantly cracking jokes, sometimes at the club’s expense. Perhaps the best recent example of City’s soul in this sense is the crazy effort of a dozen fans to travel to the UEFA Cup qualifier in the Faroes Islands last summer by trawler.

The third part of a football club’s soul has to do with the internal virtues of playing the game—both how a given club plays football, and the degree to which it achieves what UCLA basketball coach John Wooden termed “competitive greatness”, or excellence under pressure. Right now among English clubs, most would say Arsenal have the best style of football, though that could change once Arsene Wenger calls it a day.

In terms of “competitive greatness,” I’d give the devils their due and say Manchester United set the standard. How often, in any competition, no matter who happens to be in the lineup, does United go out and have a shocker? Not very often. Sometimes they get beat, but almost never do they fail to show up; and even when they fall behind by a couple of goals, they don’t give up. That consistency is not an accident, it comes from a club whose players have internalized very high standards and believe they have a responsibility to live up to that standard every time out.

Most clubs are not Arsenal or Manchester United, of course. But you can have a distinctive approach to playing the game even if you are not one of the best teams. City’s approach has historically been attack-minded with a preference for flair when available (Kinky, Benarbia); Stuart Pearce got the sack in 2007 not just because results were bad but because the team had become almost unwatchable. Going forward, if City really are to translate an improved squad into much better results, it will have to display competitive virtues of a different than sort that have been seen around the club in some time, in particular achieving greater consistency no matter the caliber of opposition. That would be a welcome development for all of us tired of “typical City.” But to be truly lovable, the new City will also have to play attractive, attacking football as well as spill plenty of blood and guts.

The fourth part of the football soul consists of what the club stands for in the world—if anything. This part of the soul is the most contested. A club can stand for good and bad things, and most of the time supporters see their own club more positively than others. To take the United case, many of us who are not United fans will say the club stands for arrogance and the embrace of big money, and United fans will respond that that is just jealousy. City fans now find our club being described the same way, and the response is often the same—the other clubs are just jealous.

At their best, though, clubs can embrace moral principles and make them part of their identity. The best example of this by far is Barcelona, a club that is supporter-owned, long identified with anti-fascist politics in Spain, a club that pays UNICEF a fee to wear its logo rather than slapping a corporation’s name on their shirt. Barcelona is not perfect, but they are trying to stand for something and deserve credit for doing so.

In fact, of all clubs in world football, I would judge that Barcelona have the most “soul” in all four of the dimensions described here, taken together. That’s why I regard it as an enormous honour for Manchester City to have been invited by Barcelona to play in their signature final home friendly in Camp Nou Wednesday night, a match City won 1-0 on a Martin Petrov goal.

But the comparison between the two clubs leads us back to the question: how much soul have City got, after the takeover of recent years? Quite a lot, I feel—but the question is perhaps better stated as, how much soul can Manchester City keep in the years to come?

The community of memory around the club is still there and strong; changing a stadium is never easy on a club’s soul, but eventually new, shiny places feel like home, and City supporters have been through several lifetimes worth of ups and downs together.

The way the club is integrated in the community is still there and the new ownership seems to recognize the importance of the club remaining highly involved in the city of Manchester. Maybe Garry Cook will still need reminding every once in a while that cultivating good relationships with the locals is far more important than chasing new supporters overseas, but overall the new owners seem to get this. And the “personality” of the club hasn’t changed, at least as yet. (We may see what a bit of success and heightened expectations will do on that score.) As to the football, the club is still committed to attacking, and most City fans would say the club could do with becoming a bit more like United in terms of consistency of effort and performance.

This leaves the last criteria. Obviously, the huge amount of money attached to the club and the identity of its ownership will dominate the way most outsiders see Manchester City going forward. No longer can City supporters pretend that the club is trying to build the club the “right way,” by developing our own players, or claim to be a humble club trying to live within its means. The academy is still there but it’s not going to be more than a supplement to the squad going forward; and City are not likely to balance the books in the traditional sense any time soon.

But the club does not have to be known only as the rich club that tries to buy everyone else’s best players. It can also maintain commitments to other worthwhile causes. In the past City have been recognized not only for its community work but as a gay-friendly employer (\ and as an environmentally conscious organization.

In the future maybe the new ownership can go one better. Does a club like City really need a shirt sponsor? Why not do a Barca and give the space to UNICEF or another worthy organization? Aristotle pointed out long ago that great wealth makes great deeds—magnaminity—possible. It means you don’t have to go chasing every last pound every last commercial deal. It means you can keep a bit of dignity and use some of that money and cultural influence to help others.

Barcelona is, on balance, a force for good in Spain and in the world. Manchester City, even with its bags of money, could be as well, if its owners want it to. I hope they choose to go that route—it would be good for its own sake, and it would make the club’s soul whole.