Blue Moon
Recent research by a colleague at the Manchester Institute of Popular Culture confirms that proportionally more of Manchester City's regular match-going support (i.e. season ticket-holders) actually live in Manchester than is the case at United. Adam Brown conducted a survey of the postal addresses of City and United season ticket holders in 2001 and found that whilst a whopping 40.5 per cent of City's season ticket holders live in the Manchester postcode area, the same is true for only 28.2 per cent of United's regular followers.
It is interesting to note further that season ticket holders represent the majority of a typical City crowd whereas this category of fan is in the minority at Old Trafford. Additionally, Brown's research raises interesting questions about the definition of a Mancunian. Surely it is not simply someone who happens to live in the Manchester postcode area irrespective of their origins or roots? However, it is useful to bear in mind that British postcodes are, in the words of the Papillon Graphics Virtual Encyclopædia of Greater Manchester, "administrative postal devices allocated for the convenience of postal deliveries [which] do not therefore represent accurate district locations or boundaries". The M postcode, for instance, includes districts that are not actually within the politico-administrative boundaries of the city of Manchester proper such as areas of Bury, Rochdale, Tameside, Salford and, yes, Trafford. To use the research to make sweeping comments about the origins of the respective fan bases of City and United would, then, appear to be somewhat premature. What Brown's research does do, though, is very valuably confirm that the footballing cultural topography of Greater Manchester has changed little in the last twenty years or so. The traditional blue, City heartlands of Didsbury/Withington, Levenshulme/Burnage, Denton and Middleton are still there whilst the historic red areas of Salford, Trafford and Urmston/Flixton are also still very much in evidence. There are even football hotbeds, districts that boast considerable support for both teams, such as Cheadle/Heald Green and Ashton/Sale and these certainly merit further investigation. As such, concludes Brown, we can still see a vibrant and thriving local football culture even within what is increasingly a globalised form of sport.
To
read the full report online, click here
(opens in a new window).
To
learn more about my own research project into the City-United
dynamic in Manchester, go here.
C'est beau un monde qui joue