Researchers and commentators point to online mobilisation as Manchester City fans defend club after guilty verdict
Manchester City fans have mounted vociferous online defences of the club after it was found guilty of all the serious charges against them, researchers and commentators reported as the fallout entered a second week. High-profile supporters and large forum threads have become focal points for confrontational responses on social media.
A resurfaced video of Liam Gallagher playing in a 1996 charity match circulated on social media, and the Oasis singer later reacted to rival fans wanting City to be stripped of trophies by posting: “There all NEUROTIC little GIMPS.” On the Bluemoon forum, users posted remarks such as “Have we been blamed for the Titanic hitting the iceberg yet?”, “Manchester City shot JFK,” and “This isn’t just a fight between the PL & City. It’s a fight for the heart, soul & future of football.” The forum has recorded over 192,000 posts since the initial charges against City, which date back to 2023.
Irish academic Colm Kearns, who studied City-related posts, said the club’s owners have not only delivered on-field success and emotional bonds with fans but also “co-opted elements of the club’s fanbase as aggressive defenders of their regime”. In 2023 Kearns and his colleagues analysed large volumes of fan posts and concluded some supporters would “overlook ethical violations by the Group, but decry and – in some cases – attack the Group’s critics.”
Kearns told the author that online abuse has affected sports journalists. “We had people talking about how fans would go online and try to find their troll through their personal social feeds, and it sent that on to their editor to get them in trouble,” he said, describing a climate in which some reporters limited what they published.
Kearns and others attribute part of the phenomenon to changes in how fans consume sport, with social media creating spaces dominated by fellow supporters rather than geographically local communities. “I think it makes fans perhaps more tribally myopic than they would have been before and less likely to look outside of their own club’s perspective,” he said, and researchers note a related trend of “sports fandom circles” that mobilise global supporters in defence of teams and athletes; the article links the emergence of that phenomenon to popular culture and music from east Asia.
The author surveyed other clubs’ fan forums and reported most supporters welcomed the guilty verdict, although some questioned whether meaningful punishment would follow given the relationship between Abu Dhabi and the British government. One user wrote: “Once you lose faith that the rules apply equally, football becomes something else,” and added: “Every title, every match, carries a question mark. I feel cheated. I’m one of the victims. And for that, I hate Manchester City.”
Some of the most forceful online defenders say they will await the club’s appeal to play out, while researchers warn the pattern of online mobilisation has already altered debate around the case and affected those covering it.