Manchester City Aims to Stay True to Roots While Striving for New Frontiers

Manchester City's Shaun Wright-Phillips kicks field goals at Baltimore Ravens practice.

BALTIMORE -- It wasn't surprising to see (and hear) the majority of the crowd at last Saturday's friendly between Inter Milan and Manchester City at Baltimore's M&T Bank Stadium supporting the European champions.

Inter is a big-name club that's established itself globally and toured this country before, along with the likes of Manchester United, Real Madrid and others who routinely spend part of their preseason posing for photos and selling shirts in the U.S. They're football royalty, one of a select few clubs big enough to earn the attention and support of glory-hunting American fans who want to follow a winner.

Manchester City is none of that. The 2010-11 campaign is just its ninth since returning to the Premier League after a spell that included a drop to the third division. Its best finish since earning promotion was fifth last season, and it hasn't won a major trophy since the 1976 League Cup. It has next to no cachet or name recognition in the U.S.

But it does have money. Lots of it. And ambition. Since an investor group from Abu Dhabi run by a member of the emirate's royal family took over the club two years ago, City has found itself in the headlines an awful lot for a club with such modest pedigree. It signed Robinho, Carlos Tévez, Roque Santa Cruz, Emmanuel Adebayor and others, instantly becoming a player in every potential high-profile transfer (whether in reality or rumor).

It is the first English club to emerge with a realistic chance to offer a consistent challenge to the dominant "big four" of United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool. That quartet seems to have captured the allegiance of about 95 percent of "football" fans in the United States.

City is out to change that as well. The Inter match was the finale of a five-game U.S. tour that featured stops in Portland, New York, Atlanta and Charm City. Along the way, the club went on a marketing offensive, hoping to loosen the grip on North America maintained by the game's entrenched powers. At the same time, however, City risks losing its identity. For so many years it was the cultural counterweight to its city rival -- an accessible and modest club with roots at home and players with whom local fans could identify. If it becomes another Chelsea or Madrid, the only thing authentically City about the club will be the sky blue shirts.

There were very few of those shirts in Baltimore last weekend. The effort to change that, without selling the club's soul, is partly the responsibility of chief communications officer Victoria Kloss. She's a Manchester native who, incredibly, was City's first official press officer when she was hired back in 2001. The club was relegated from the Premier League that year. Now it's among the most powerful and ambitious in the world.

Following the 3-0 defeat to Inter, Kloss spent a few minutes with FanHouse discussing the changes and challenges facing a club that's trying to go global without sacrificing its identity, some misperceptions that some already have developed, and of course, the pursuit of Landon Donovan.

FANHOUSE: Can you summarize the changes since Abu Dhabi took over, what it's been like to go so quickly from a club hoping to survive in the Premier League to one that has Champions League ambitions?

KLOSS: It's actually very difficult to put into words, because the difference is just immeasurable. I think people focus on what happens on the pitch, what players we buy, stories about player wages -- which inevitably are inflated and exaggerated. I think the real story is what's happened off the pitch since Abu Dhabi came. They came into a club that was broken behind the scenes.

Financially we were a mid-table team who really were struggling to pay wages. It wasn't run as a proper business, which actually isn't too unusual among certain football clubs in the U.K. What they've done, is you can have all the resources in the world, but if you don't have the acumen, the clarity, the understanding of the need to run a football club as a business ...

FANHOUSE: You're Portsmouth.

KLOSS: Yeah. Essentially, yeah. Also I want to give a lot of credit for that to Gary Cook, who is our CEO, who arrived a few months before the Abu Dhabi takeover. He was president of Nike, the Michael Jordan brand. He recognized that. He came from an establishment like NIke, came into Manchester City and thought, "What's going on here?" We didn't have an organization chart. We didn't have an H.R. department. We had nothing. We had 200 employees with no ...

FANHOUSE: Was the club just run like an old school organization ignoring the demands of modern soccer, like it was the 1970s?

KLOSS: I don't want to do a disservice to a lot of the guys who were working there. I can vouch for the fact that there was an awful lot of hard work going on behind the scenes. It wasn't that we didn't have conscientious workers, people who believed what we were doing. We absolutely did. It just wasn't channeled appropriately. It wasn't structured appropriately. And so we were working disparately. And now Abu Dhabi came in, along with Gary Cook, they looked at the football club as a whole. We got consultants in, who came in and actually worked with us to create a proper business, with a core competency of football.

FANHOUSE: How concerned is the club about the image, however, of suddenly becoming nouveau riche and doing things the "right" way and doing things the "wrong" way? Think about how Barcelona was put up on this pedestal for developing so many of their own players, the Unicef sponsorship. How is City going to straddle that line when you now have all this money to spend so quickly?

KLOSS: It's really interesting, because people have heard of Manchester United, and I think it's fair to say that in the States, some people don't know that there are two teams in Manchester. People who then see us come along think that we're new. We've only been around for a couple of years. We were founded in 1880. We have a rich history, a real rich heritage. And we've been doing things very well for a really long time, despite what I said about the structure.

From a youth development point of view -- not many people know this -- we produced more Premier League players from our youth academy than any other football club. Twenty-eight at last count. This is Manchester City. Not all of them are playing now, they might be playing in League 1 or whatever, but 28 who have Premier League appearances. Which is the biggest total of any of the football clubs. People don't realize that we are bringing kids through.

Dedryck Boyata (a 19-year-old Brussels-born defender who joined City in 2006), who was playing (against Inter). Vladimír Weiss (a 20-year-old Bratislava-born midfielder who joined City in '06). And if you look at the potential English national team, we have Joe Hart, who's commonly believed to be the next England No. 1 (goalkeeper) after the last World Cup. Adam Johnson -- he was on the verge of being picked this summer, now is going to almost certainly be starting. Gareth Barry. We are in negotiations about James Milner (currently with Aston Villa). We have Micah Richards. He's also one of our academy products. Wayne Bridge. We could actually, at Manchester City, be fielding five or six of the England national team. So it's not just a case of buying foreign players and saying "oh, that will do."

FANHOUSE: But you were a club that was always seen as the antidote to United. You were the "people's team." The stereotype was that people who actually were from Manchester rooted for City. Do you risk losing that?

KLOSS: Yeah, that's true. We toured South Africa last year. We toured the U.S. this year. We covered west coast, east coast, down to Atlanta, and what we've tried to do with this tour is be very holistic about it. Teams can come to the U.S., play some games and disappear back to England. But what we've tried to do -- we were in New York and we identified six months ago through our own community program a school in Spanish Harlem through a guy who's a Manchester City fan who coaches out in New York. We have hooked up with the school. These kids don't have places to play. So we, with the United Arab Emirates embassy, teamed together and we've given them a pitch on the rooftop in Harlem. This is incredible.

So we've tried to be a bit more holistic about it, bringing our community work that we do every day of the week -- we reach out to 200,000 people a year through our community outreach program in England -- but we recognize the need to make that more global as we become more global.

Even the way we've launched our kit. We decided to launch our away kit in New York. The drop-in to the Chinatown game. These New York City soccer league guys thinking they were going to play some people from City, probably some admin staff, and then out of the car comes Emmanuel Adebayor wearing the kit for the first time.

FANHOUSE: You'll rarely find an American who claims he's a fan of English soccer who supports a team outside the "big four". Have you run into that sort of "call us back when you win a trophy" attitude here in the U.S.?

KLOSS: We try to do hearts and minds as well. There are two ways. We're the third-most supported club in England. We have the third-highest attendance. We have a solid, solid fanbase. We went to South Africa last year, the U.S. this year. We've already got offers coming in quick and fast for our tour next year. If we continue to take this holistic approach about how we integrate into the country that's hosting us, then I think we can do this through youth development, hearts and minds, community outreach projects, marketing, the launch of an away kit in the country that you're in.

FANHOUSE: To what end?

KLOSS: To inevitably grow a global fan base. It doesn't mean to say that we're compromising ourselves and our heritage if we want to grow that global fan base. It's absolutely vital. But we'll still remain rooted in our Northwest (England) community as well. You can be locally rooted but with global aspirations at the same time.

FANHOUSE: And these global aspirations are a function of the new investment. You didn't go on tour five years ago.

KLOSS: No, we didn't. The offers didn't come through because we didn't have the same profile. That's growing. This year, already, we have offers [for next summer]. This time last year, we had one or two. But already, we know that we can now plan strategically for our tours over 3-5 year plans. We never had the opportunity to do that before. There is a growing interest in us as our profile grows. As we grow globally, our community outreach will grow globally.

FANHOUSE: I wrote that it would be a bad idea for Landon Donovan to go to City. My reasoning was that you're a club with such ambition and such resources, that he wouldn't be given a chance. He wouldn't be given time. The first time he makes a mistake, there's a squad of 30 guys behind him to take his place. Is this a club where a player signing his first long-term deal in Europe can go and feel comfortable?

KLOSS: We're newsworthy because we've had to accelerate our player purchases and one would hope we'd bring on accelerated success, although we know there's no guarantee. That goes without saying. We've got a young kid, Adam Johnson from Middlesbrough, at the time when we signed him (in February) people said he'd be on the periphery, what a waste, and he's absolutely central to our team. Now, we have accelerated, but there are clubs like United and Chelsea, the big guys, who have big squads. They squad rotate because they have to when they've been in the Champions League, the F.A. Cup, the Carling Cup, and we're no different.

FANHOUSE: So would City spend $12 million on a player like Donovan who may be part of a squad rotation?

KLOSS: Nothing is done in that haphazard way. It's just not. Everything is thought through with our owners. Everything is done by a plan. If you put forward a reasonable plan, there will be funds to resource that. Now, we've had plenty of times when we've walked away from players because the demands of the clubs are just utterly ludicrous. They know they can. I don't want to be disrespectful to those clubs, but it's happened time and time again. We'll get linked to players that we've never even had a conversation with, or their agents, because we're Manchester City. Chelsea would have suffered that years ago and probably still do. Just to drive up the price.

Take the first transfer window when Abu Dhabi had taken over, that was January 2009, I think we were linked to around 70 players. Seven-zero. We were actually in contact with around seven or eight, truly, and I think we brought in about five. So you have to take with an enormous pinch of salt the kind of stories that we get linked to.