I’ve been a Manchester City fan from Asia since 2012.
Immediately, your average Premier League football fan will draw some of the following conclusions: I’m a glory hunter, a bandwagon fan who only started liking City after the oil money came in, and only after they started winning things, and who will most likely drop my support or interest in the club once they stop winning or once the Sheikh pulls out of the project. They will make these presumptions without knowing who I am and hearing my story, and this is partly (perhaps, largely) because I am Asian.
Football as a cultural spectacle is rooted in social tradition. I’ve read and listened to plenty of accounts of people who started watching football because it was a local event, and because they watched it with their families. Narrowing it down specifically, I’ve read plenty of stories from City supporters, who call City their club because it’s the club of their fathers, their brothers, their mothers and their sisters. It’s the local team, the club where you spent your youth, noses frigid and throats hoarse from yelling and cheering and booing in the cold Manchester weather. Football is tradition because social behavior dictates that you go every week, and join other people who do the same thing as you do. There is a sense of unity in this exercise, a communal something that joins people together, even if they do not know each other. It’s a beautiful image, huddling around together at Maine Road, cheering on heroes Colin Bell, Dennis Tueart, Georgi Kinkladze and Shaun Goater as they excite, disappoint and ultimately unite (it’s not your favorite word, but it’s appropriate). We are Mancs, we are Blues, we are City supporters. This was how it was, and this is how things should be.
In the world of football as a global spectacle and as a commercial product, however, Manchester City Football Club is still in its infant stages. The club is advancing rapidly up the rankings in revenue, but it remains new to the world as a sports product. You can compare the crowds and the interest from their recent jaunts in Asia and in America and you can actually quantify how much further they still have to go, when you compare the reception of the club during their tour compared to, say, Real Madrid, Manchester United and Liverpool. It is a byproduct of the club’s ambition and success (and it is much to the chagrin of plenty of match-going Blues) that they have to build up their profile in these markets, which is why in recent years the club has strived to make themselves more visible and more viable in Asian markets.
If I’m being honest, whenever I see someone in my country (the Philippines) wearing something City-related, I am absolutely thrilled. Those moments are rare and far-between. For every City shirt or jacket I see, I see ten Liverpool jackets, twenty Real Madrid jerseys, and thirty Manchester United shirts. I accept this.
What I cannot and refuse to accept, however, is the prevalence of racist and xenophobic behavior in football to which I am sometimes exposed to because I am not from Manchester. Sadly, the biggest perpetrators of these behaviors are some of my fellow Blues.
I understand completely where they come from. I always contextualize whatever feelings I have about this matter within the understanding of what City supporters went through during the years that Manchester United dominated the global scene and they gained millions of supporters from around the world. I do not patronize nor trivialize the experiences that they went through, and why a certain mentality that the truest supporters of clubs are the locals, the match-goers, the long-suffering ticket holders, developed among not only fans of Manchester City, but of other clubs not as popular globally.
To a certain extent, I believe in and buy into this concept. I have never qualified myself as the most authentic of City supporters out there, because I can’t go to matches every week. I’m not a season ticket holder. I am not one of the faces filling the seats in the Etihad. All I can do is wake up at ungodly hours and find City on TV or on a dodgy online streaming website. To believe that this equals the actual experience of a match-going Blue would go against the reason why I fell in love with this club in the first place. I’ve always maintained that it was the supporters that made me decide that this was the club for me; this curmudgeonly, pessimistic and undeniably loyal set of supporters who never fail to astound me with the depths of their gallows humor, their rootedness in reality and their sheer love for the club.
However, I feel it is necessary to point out that some behavior (mistakenly tagged as “banter”) can be alienating and exclusionary for people who want to get into club football and are interested in Manchester City. I discuss this from the perspective of someone who loves the club, the team, the supporters, but has witnessed troubling attitudes that perpetuate the football fan bases in general. I’ve not been called out by my fellow Manchester City fans for being Asian; however, I am affected when they call out fans of other clubs such as Manchester United as being glory hunters simply because they do not come from Manchester. More specifically, I get offended when they call out Asians.
To a certain extent, Asian football fans are silent bystanders of their own stereotype. They let it slide time and time again. There is a social disconnect between Asian football fans and English football fans in particular, because of language barriers and cultural differences. Moreover, I find that Asians (and in a different way, Americans) are held to different standards of being a football supporter because the race is not, with only a handful of exceptions, known for being good at football. I bring this up because I don’t see the same level of exclusion directed against fans of English Premier League teams from South America or other parts of Europe, presumably because they are recognized as football-appreciating countries. Indians, Chinese, Indonesians, Malaysians and Japanese football fans who like say, Manchester United, are ridiculed and even parodied simply because they say that they support said club.
I cannot speak for the millions of Asian football fans. I cannot defend them and say that their reasons for supporting other clubs are equally or more genuine than someone from Salford or another area of Greater Manchester. I don’t know why they like United or Real Madrid or Liverpool. It really probably is because they won a lot of things at the time when the Premier League was gathering steam as a globalized sports product. Maybe they like the color red. I don’t know. Perhaps their reasons for supporting the clubs really fall within the definition of glory hunting, and maybe they will lose interest when their clubs stop winning all that often. That doesn’t make them less valuable to the club, or to the supporter groups. This does not trivialize their experience of football.
A few weeks ago, a Manchester United fan from Manchester called me a bandwagon fan, and my fellow Blues defended me and said that it didn’t matter where I came from, only that I supported the club from wherever I was. I appreciated that wholeheartedly, but it also sometimes strikes me as false when I see other Blues retweet the Angry Asian Manchester United parody account (“Beijing Red 4 Lyf, with over 25,000 followers). It strikes me as behavior which is xenophobic and racist, because it’s exclusionary in nature and it perpetuates these stereotypes which Asian fans are unfortunately saddled with. Some of my dearest friends who are football fans are Asian. They are Indian, Chinese, Indonesian and Filipino, and they are equally well-versed and knowledgeable about football, and yet their participation in a conversation about statistics, tactics and formations is questioned more than someone who was born in or lives in England. Why do we think this thought is in any way acceptable?
Twenty, thirty years ago, this might have been a more logical conclusion, but football (the globalized, packaged product) is now being broadcast to a record number of audiences worldwide. Twitter and other forms of social media have broadened local pub discussions into a public worldwide conversation where anyone can express what they think and someone will generally always be listening. It cannot be assumed anymore that a person sitting on his couch in Malaysia watching a Spurs game will be less conversant about football compared to a person sitting in London watching the same game, except that maybe the latter’s word will be seen as more authentic than the former’s.
Moreover, we must also ask why we find that aforementioned ‘Beijing Red 4 Lyf’ Twitter account hilarious. The profile of said account reads: “#MUFC Since 2007 & #MCFC Since 2012”. It’s an offhand joke about how this fictional Asian supports a Manchester club depending on which one is more successful at a given time. It’s funny, you think, as you press the retweet button on one of the exaggerated tweets as it rants in all caps that this manager should go, that this player is shite, and that this transfer is terrible, then makes an offhand Asian reference to reinforce the stereotype. (As an aside, I wonder if the person running the account is a person of color or not; I also don’t know which answer would be less disappointing.) Is it funny because it’s true, or is it funny because you think it’s true? Why can’t we encounter an Asian football fan without assuming that their interest in the club is reduced to simply how many trophies they have won? Why does the authenticity of a person’s support have to boil down to their geographical location?
It troubles me greatly, in light of Manchester United’s spending spree, that there is an increased level of hostility between the non-United and the United fans, and that a lot of the insults (“banter”) boil down to the fact that these supporters that they fight with on Twitter are from places which are not in Manchester, whether they are from London, Croatia, Bangladesh or even the Philippines. I am not one to state that these kinds of exchanges should be banned, for I know that one of the greatest things that a City supporter holds onto is that affinity with Manchester, to those cold nights standing on the Kippax, making jokes about shit players, stuffed animals and inflated bananas.
I just want to point out that we cannot presume that supporters are any less loyal, or less attached to a club, simply because they are not from Manchester. Just because I am Asian does not mean I do not understand what it is to love and understand and appreciate the club in a similar way that a local set of supporters do. I speak not just as a supporter of Manchester City, but as an Asian fan of football. I know several fans of Manchester United and Liverpool and Barcelona fans from Asia, and they are not at all like what you perceive a “typical Asian fan” to be. To trivialize our support for our club simply because of where we come from is not only disappointing and discouraging, it belies the very ethos of football as the world’s most popular sport, the beautiful game, the most unifying experience in sport.
In this age of sport as a multinational spectacle, the notion of football as a solely local activity is understandable, but it is also antiquated. It must be seen as part and parcel of a new worldwide phenomenon of a global audience. I am not from Manchester. I am Asian. But I love Manchester City Football Club, in a different way, as a consumer of a global product and not because it was tradition for me to love it, but I love it with my whole heart and soul nonetheless.
