A City Revitalized By Soccer
MANCHESTER, England — What Gary Neville sees from the roof of his hotel gives him a sense that something is happening. Not the view to his right of the Old Trafford soccer stadium, with the words “Manchester United” — the club Neville once captained — emblazoned in red in the stands. Mr. Neville points, instead, to the view on his distant left.
“There are cranes,” he said. “When you see cranes, you know that means things are moving.”
Manchester’s name has always carried certain connotations. To Victorians, it was “famed and feared” as the world’s first great industrial city, according to the disc jockey and journalist Dave Haslam. It was here that Friedrich Engels found inspiration for “The Communist Manifesto.”
By the late 1970s, as the city’s industries disappeared and bands like the Smiths and Joy Division documented the bleakness, the music writer Paul Morley believed it a “very boring place to be.”
Then, the turn of the century was accompanied by a rise in gang violence. This Manchester — tough, desolate — still exists, but it is not the only Manchester.
During the past 20 years, the city’s authorities have led a physical regeneration, symbolized by the canopy of glass towers that sprang up after a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army destroyed much of the city center in 1996. The revival of the spirit, though, has come from elsewhere.
Music led the way, with the socalled Madchester era of the late 1980s turning the city’s image on its head. Abandoned buildings became nightclubs, and a cottage industry of record shops and independent labels flourished. Music gave the city its confidence back.
Two decades later, sports is the driving cultural force in the city, which is home to two Premier League soccer teams: Manchester United and Manchester City.
“Since the mid-1990s, it has become an increasingly important part of what is special about Manchester,” said Richard Leese, the leader of the Manchester City Council. The city is home to British Cycling’s so- called Medal Factory. But it is soccer that has had the most impact. “The rivalry between the clubs has enhanced the international consciousness of the city as a whole,” Mr. Leese said.
United hosted events while on tour in China this summer to attract businesses to the city, and City, 13 percent owned by a Chinese consortium, welcomed that country’s soccer-mad president, Xi Jinping, to its training facility last year. Hotel Football, opened 18 months ago by Mr. Neville and several of his former teammates from United’s famed class of ’92, was partly financed by foreign investment.
Mr. Neville said that with a soc- cer-themed hotel and Britain’s National Football Museum, the sport is part of the fabric of Manchester in a way rarely seen elsewhere.
It is around City’s home in the east of the city that the difference soccer has made is most visible. It was, for many years, a forgotten part of the city. Hundreds of millions of dollars from Abu Dhabi, through City, changed that.
Along with a stadium, the club has built training facilities. City’s investments have also brought a college, a library and new housing.
Mr. Leese said: “Manchester is the third-most-visited city in Britain. The single biggest draw is football. In most parts of the world, people have heard of Manchester. Without football, that would not have been the case.”