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rfmcdonaldNow that Ronaldo is here in Toronto and making the city that hosts Toronto FC feel like a real soccer city, people wonder how far the team would go. Wouldn't you know, this Simon Kuper essay in the Financial Times makes some interesting suggestions about the past, at least.
It may be possible to draw some useful analogies. Toronto is a very quickly growing, increasingly post-industrial city with weak hierarchies. And, despite double-digit unemployment and relative decline, it's still a wealthy city. Torontonians may have good reason to hope for a flourishing team in the near future.
Let’s take the archetypal provincial city with giant club, Manchester, because what happened there prefigured later events in towns such as Barcelona and Milan. In 1878 a football club for workers of a railway company started up in Manchester. Newton Heath played in work clogs against other works teams. Newton Heath, of course, became Manchester United. What matters here are its origins. The workers were “sucked in from all over the country to service the growing need for locomotives and carriages,” writes Jim White in Manchester United: The Biography.
Almost all of Europe’s best football cities were once new industrial centres. Clubs grew bigger here than in capitals or towns with entrenched hierarchies. That’s why no team from Paris, London or Berlin has won the Champions League.
In most leading European football cities, the industrial migrants arrived in a whoosh in the late nineteenth century. Munich had 100,000 inhabitants in 1852, and five times as many in 1901. Barcelona’s population trebled in the same period to 533,000.
[. . .]
In all these cities the industrial revolution ended, often painfully. But besides the empty docks and factory buildings, the other legacy of the era was beloved football clubs.
These were the cities with the fewest long-standing hierarchies, the weakest ties between people and place. Here, there were emotional gaps to fill. Contrast these cities with traditionally upper-class towns. In England, Oxford, Cambridge, Cheltenham, Canterbury and York have more than 100,000 inhabitants each. Yet between them they have just one team in the Football League. In places with settled hierarchies, people did not need football to root themselves.
It may be possible to draw some useful analogies. Toronto is a very quickly growing, increasingly post-industrial city with weak hierarchies. And, despite double-digit unemployment and relative decline, it's still a wealthy city. Torontonians may have good reason to hope for a flourishing team in the near future.
