Why the successful activism of Manchester City supporters should inspire fans of all clubs

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Protest is in the Manchester City fan DNA.

Much of the 1980s and 1990s were characterised by efforts to remove former chairman Peter Swales, a period that included a sit-down protest and pitch invasion at Maine Road. Only a few years ago, there was the flashpoint around the threatened European Super League (ESL) breakaway.

But generally speaking, and certainly since the 2008 takeover by the Abu Dhabi United Group, any supporter criticism of the club has been at a minimum.

“Since 2020, us at the food bank have been one of the few regular dissenting voices around ticket prices and things like that. When we started doing that, we were getting people replying to us saying, ‘What have we got to moan about? Look how successful we are’,” Nick Clarke, of MCFC Fans Foodbank Support, tells The Athletic.

That has only really started to change over the past 12 months, sparked chiefly by City’s decision to put ticket prices up last March. Since then, a sudden fan movement has become so influential that the club’s leadership, having originally put forward yet another increase for next season, felt compelled to freeze prices for the first time in a decade.

Confirmation came last week, eight days after thousands of City supporters stayed in the concourse for the first nine minutes of the Premier League game against Leicester City, in what was described in a statement by the Football Supporters’ Association (FSA) as “arguably the most visible in-stadium ticket price protest since Liverpool fans walked off the Kop in 2016”.

It was a staggering display of organised defiance considering how quickly the fan movement has gathered pace, but given the amount of dissatisfaction over other issues related to ticketing and fan engagement, few of those involved in organising the protests and conducting negotiations with the club have thought to give themselves a pat on the back.

Manchester City fans protested against ticket prices in the home game against Leicester City this month (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)

“It’s been successful in terms of fan activism and engaging the wider fanbase, but all of that means very little if you’re a parent who can’t get their kid a season ticket,” Loukas Gregory of the 1894 fan group says.

“Freezing season ticket prices was the absolute minimum that they could do. Freezing matchday tickets isn’t a win for fans because they’re already outrageous; if you look at the Aston Villa game, it’s £71 ($94) for a ticket — who’s got that money?”

As well as the costs, complaints have focused on the inability to purchase new season tickets — other than a controversial ‘Flexi-gold’ card that comes with a £150 charge — and in recent weeks, there has been considerable anger over the presence of away fans in home areas of the Etihad Stadium. There was already enough consternation about City’s eight official ticket resale partners before the club announced a ninth, Viagogo, a fortnight ago, the straw that broke the camel’s back and led to the partial boycott of the Leicester game.

What makes the success of the activism more impressive is that there has been a “vacuum of supporters’ movement at City”, as Clarke puts it. City are one of five clubs in the Premier League without an official supporters’ trust.

In its place, a coalition of fan groups has come together almost by chance.

City Matters, a Premier League-mandated fan advisory board founded in 2018, is the most obviously placed to convey any supporter discontent to the club and it pushed back on the suggested price increase to negotiate the freeze.

“In terms of actually influencing policy, City Matters has had its impact on operational or day-to-day issues, but where it has struggled historically is with strategic issues like season ticket pricing,” City Matters chair Alex Howell says. “In the past week, we’ve bucked that trend.”

Banging the drum alongside them is 1894, a fan group that has primarily organised banners inside the stadium and focused on improving the matchday atmosphere.

“Through doing the flags, banners and displays, we are probably the group that has the voice, so we’ve ended up doing a lot more because we have been the obvious people to do it,” Gregory from 1894 says. “And if we don’t do it, then who else will? Sometimes it’s better to just crack on and do it and see what the fallout is.”

Then there is the food bank support group, which has provided nearly 30,000 meals for disadvantaged people in Manchester since starting its collections five years ago. They had no intention of getting involved in this way when they began — although there is a ‘but’.

“We didn’t plan to be doing this when we started the food bank, but perhaps we could have seen it coming,” Alex Timperley of the group says. “At the end of the day, we’re City fans first, last and always, and we’re inclined towards organising and activism, so maybe it’s not such a surprise in hindsight that we ended up working to make a change in other City-related areas, too.”

It may just be that the lack of an established supporters trust has actually helped these voices be heard: 1894 does have a direct line to the club as part of the process of approving pre-match displays, but there is sufficient distance between the parties that its members are in a position to rock the boat, and that is the case for the food bank group as well.

With some City Matters members feeling that they have struggled to influence the club on bigger issues in the past, it is no doubt harder to overlook 1894’s recent video montage that shows different angles of a Liverpool fan being punched at the Etihad — as a result of City’s ticketing policies, the group argues — set to Manic Street Preachers’ iconic track If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next.

“There has always been a streak of us being fairly antagonistic,” Gregory says, pointing to measures taken against the ESL and Champions League ticket costs in 2016, “but I would say that we are reflective of our membership; if they did not want us to be antagonistic, we wouldn’t do it because we are led by them.

“However, at the moment, there does just seem to be so many different issues creating these divides between the fans and the club.”

The timeline of recent fan dissatisfaction, and the role of the fan groups, is easy to plot: the 2023 Community Shield is regarded as ground zero given City supporters successfully lobbied the Football Association to bring kick-off forward from 5.30pm to 4pm due to the difficulty of travelling back to Manchester from London late on a Sunday.

Even so, the change was not deemed enough and fan groups called for a boycott, which led to 500 fans buying tickets to watch a screening in Manchester, with the proceeds going towards the Manchester Central food bank.

“City fan groups hadn’t really done that before,” Clarke says. “We got the kick-off time rescheduled due to fan pressure for the first time in history. We get the taste of wins and, just as importantly, we get 500 Blues for the alternative screening. It felt like something was possible if we wanted it to.”

Not long after that, supporters criticised City for not giving public backing to a comprehensive report into the treatment of fans at the 2023 Champions League final in Istanbul, compiled by Howell. Dissatisfaction began to grow but, even so, when the club announced price rises in March 2024, there was palpable hesitation regarding protest measures because there was little appetite to disrupt the team’s chances of success on the pitch.

“At the time, we went with the decision to do the banner before kick-off because the thinking was we’ll show our message before the game but, as soon as it kicks off, we’ll be behind the team for 90 minutes,” Gregory explains.

“In a perfect world, that’s how we’d continue. But since then, it’s got quite a bit worse in terms of fan engagement and ticketing policies and what have you, which has ultimately led to what happened in the Leicester game. Fans were so unhappy that we had to make a statement in the game.”

The slogan chosen for that banner against Arsenal — stop exploiting loyalty — was coined by one of the food bank reps and has since been adopted by the FSA in its fight for fans’ rights across the country.

Liverpool and Manchester City fans share a banner protesting against rising ticket prices in December (Carl Recine/Getty Images)

1894’s membership has grown by 50 per cent since that protest and members of the different groups began to stay in regular contact last summer, but while they were ready to campaign against ticket prices going into this season, they had a problem. “We didn’t know how on earth we were going to approach it,” as Clarke puts it.

“Then, the club announced the disabled parking charges and the rest is history.”

Last July, City contacted supporters to inform them of new charges for disabled parking bays: the previously free spaces would, from the start of the season, cost £6 per match, potentially doubling in the future. That caused uproar among the fanbase, with many fan groups from different backgrounds speaking out. Supporters raised £2,420 in just two days to help cover the costs of the first game of the season.

By September, the club announced that they had planned all along — but not communicated it — that they would only collect the £6 if bays were not used, effectively making it a deposit scheme. Fans took that as a U-turn and, therefore, proof that pressure would pay off.

“This is a victory for fans’ engagement and it is great to see that the club are prepared to back down when the strength of support against their decision was so huge,” Howard Cohen, chair of the City Disabled Supporters Association, told The Athletic at the time.

That momentum has continued throughout the season: in February, seven fan groups — Canal Street Blues, Solid Citizens and Manchester City Disabled Supporters Association, in addition to City Matters, 1894, MCFC Food Bank Support and the recently established Trade Union Blues — wrote a letter to chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak over ticket pricing and policy, and continued to lobby for a meeting with the club.

That overlapped with widespread discontent over away fans gaining access to home areas of the Etihad, particularly in games against Real Madrid, where one fan was seen giving a haircut pre-match, and Liverpool, when the worst example involved an away supporter being attacked as he was ejected.

Those issues threw a spotlight on ticket touting and also drew attention to City’s partnerships with official resale partners.

“This is where the collective approach of all the groups has helped, we’ve shown a real collective unity across the fanbase,” Howell says.

(Michael Steele/Getty Images)

Howell is approaching the end of his term as chair of City Matters, but having helped coordinate fan efforts over the past few years, it would be no surprise to see him continue in some guise.

“To be involved in the heart of the response of what happened in Istanbul and representing some of the people who went through absolutely horrible things, it made it really real for me,” he says. “Having seen that side of it, it’s hard to just pack it up now and let that be the end of it.”

Indeed, despite the Leicester protest helping to secure the season ticket price freeze last week, a statement issued soon afterwards by 1894, Trade Union Blues and the food bank support closed by insisting they are “prepared to take further actions as and when they are required”.

If thousands of supporters were prepared to skip the first nine minutes of a game, it begs the question — what comes next?

“Ultimately, the fans are going to dictate this; 1894 can call for whatever, but if the fans aren’t angry enough, then they’re not going to do it,” Gregory says. “But if they are angry enough, then who’s to say it wouldn’t be bigger or potentially worse for the club than the nine-minute protest?”

(Top photo: Michael Steele/Getty Images)

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