Inside Man City's bid to become the No1 sports team in the US (2024)

A snaking queue had formed off Sixth Avenue and down 47th Street, towards Nintendo’s flagship store. Those at the front arrived at 3am and, around seven hours later, New Yorkers were stopping to ask what the wait was for. The line was not for a new video game but to be the first inside a Manchester City pop-up shop.

City were in America for just over two weeks on a four-match pre-season tour, with a depleted squad full of kids here for reasons beyond just football. ‘You know why: sponsors, commercials,’ said Pep Guardiola.

The trip was a blur of content, from wrestler John Cena announcing it in March on a call with Haaland, to the City mascot recreating a Ghostbusters scene, to a training session in Central Park. You couldn’t move for reminders that City were in the United States.

‘It’s entertaining audiences without losing the footballing authenticity,’ chief marketing officer Nuria Tarre told Mail Sport. ‘You have to balance it, so it doesn’t become gimmicky. We found out Cena is a massive Erling fan.’

In Florida, at the Four Seasons Disney, Tarre was armed with binders and revealed a three-to-five-year plan to crack the United States, and her belief that they have more US followers than the reigning Super Bowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs.

Cracking it, at this point, can only be to become the No 1 followed team in the country. Quite how possible that is, time will tell. More than 200,000 fans have been at their friendlies, sellouts in New York and Orlando, and prices set by the promoters weren’t cheap either.

Anecdotally, the global growth since Guardiola’s appointment in 2016 has been exponential. The eye test in 2017 along Nashville’s strip of bars, each claiming to possess the next Miley Cyrus, offers something of a barometer.

City flags hanging from windows down that street were severely outnumbered by opponents Tottenham Hotspur. Even with two recent league titles at that point, City were playing serious catch up to teams they routinely beat on the grass. ‘We didn't see many sky-blue shirts,’ Guardiola recalled last week. ‘Now, we are better known around the world.’

Four years after that, City had a breakthrough. ‘Playing in Houston against Club America was a wake-up call,’ Tarre said. ‘The numbers we’d seen on paper were actually true. I feel we’ve gone up another ladder since then, definitely the Treble had an effect. It’s put the whole business into a different trajectory. It’s been faster than I imagined.’

Quoting a Nielsen study, Tarre maintained that City are the third most popular football brand in America – thought to be behind Barcelona and Manchester United. City sold more tickets than Barca for their 2-2 draw in Orlando last week. That was unthinkable pre-Covid.

Tarre remarked that, during their Treble campaign, nearly 37million people tuned into City’s games – more than any other English team. Although the caveats are that City played more matches, and more important matches, that it stood 23m ahead of United was striking. In April, NBC’s coverage of the bore draw with Arsenal drew 2.1m, the largest Premier League audience ever.

Their WhatsApp ‘community’, a group where they can post content directly to their fans, was one of the first of its kind and, at 29m, is a third larger than the next (Liverpool). It’s inarguable that on this side of things, City are enjoying the fruits of having to try that bit harder to push their message in the past.

‘I don’t like to compare us to others but I think we look at engaging with fans in a different way,’ Tarre said. ‘We take the trophies around the world. Nobody does that. Fans aren’t naïve, they see the effort we put in.’

Participation at next summer’s Club World Cup will be an advantage in a fluid and congested field, where it’s not uncommon for fans to follow two Premier League teams. Barca and United will not be there and City are planning for that month-long tournament already, much of the strategy coming from their marketing office in New York, set up in 2018. A bespoke American online TV platform, City Studios NYC, has been announced.

When Tarre and media director Gavin Johnson unveiled that to a small industry crowd at a New York speakeasy, potential investors and collaborators were listening. If City are to truly grow here permanently, then commercial partners from the region are needed.

Their tie-up with EA Sports FC, makers of the game previously known as FIFA, is smart. Tarre talked about how American youngsters – whom, on average, don’t pick a team until the age of 19 – are influenced by gaming. Yet of the 35 global and regional partners on City’s website, only EA, Gatorade and Kellogg’s are North American. Private equity firm Silver Lake upping their stake in the City Football Group ought to have a longer-term impact.

There are unknowns to what extent this growth in the US – live game audiences up by 10 per cent, official club memberships up 303 per cent since 2021, retail sales up by 168 per cent in the same period – will hold. Who knows know how this market might react to a period of not winning everything in sight, or possible consequences of 115 charges, or when the global superstars – Haaland, Guardiola, Jack Grealish – eventually leave. So the time to capitalise is now.

‘There is no doubt that winning helps,’ Tarre said. ‘It does amaze me how resilient those brands [United, Barca, Real Madrid, Liverpool] are. But we’ve managed to push through, which means there is a way. Time will tell how resilient we are.

‘You have to get under the skin of this market, which is not easy. It’s why we’re acting less like tourists. Many European clubs just come and go.

‘It requires a specific approach, to be part of the culture. It’s about building crossovers with fashion, with gaming.’

The gaming aspect of their marketing might go over the heads of many reading these pages. City are the first club to build their own ‘space’ on the unbeatably popular game Fortnite. It reaches different generations in a way that’s tough to comprehend.

‘I’m still surprised that we’re the only club in [virtual universe] Roblox, which targets a much younger age,’ Tarre said. ‘Roblox or Minecraft are like the new Lego. That was a big move because we’d said before that we were only about football. Are we smarter? Are we thinking ahead? We’re not afraid of trying.’

And this is before mentioning the documentaries. Guardiola needed convincing to allow the All or Nothing cameras in for their record-breaking Centurions campaign but the success of that has seen the same club producer and cameraman embedded with the squad for years, pumping out behind the scenes videos on their own channels. Their edit of the Treble story sold to Netflix in April, and has 11.3m streams worldwide, outstripping Amazon’s eight million across six years.

The four-in-a-row triumph will be the subject of discussions with streaming sites over the coming months. City accept that another April release date would be too long a wait again.

So there will be more eyeballs on Guardiola’s inner sanctum sooner rather than later. More eyeballs mean more social media coverage and that means more tills ringing.