Column

Creed

Football

Grace

Sport

24 May 2024

8 min read

Manchester City and the surprises of Grace

What a footballing dynasty's dominance tells us about the problems of meritocracy

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A football team wearing a sky blue kit leaps for joy holding a trophy.

Celebrating winning the English Premiership.

Manchester City.

So Manchester City didn’t quite win the double double. Manchester United, against all the odds, spoilt the party and created their own by winning the FA Cup. But City won the Premier League yet again. That makes six times out of the last seven seasons. It would take a brave person to bet against them doing it again next season. Supporters of other teams look on with a mixture of resentment, admiration and envy. Despite losing the Cup Final, Manchester City fans are basking in the time of their lives.

When our team wins, we football fans gloat. Especially over our rivals. We all do it. We assume it means our team is superior, that victory is deserved, that there is some kind of moral credit involved in winning. Football fans are meritocratic to a tee.

In 2020, Michael Sandel, Harvard Professor of Political Philosophy published The Tyranny of Merit. In the book, he traced the rise of the idea of meritocracy, the notion that if you succeed in life it is to your credit, and if you fail it is your fault. We talk about “going as far as your talents take you”, “getting what you deserve in life” and so on. Speaking from the American context in particular, he argues, it means a belief that we are masters of our own fate, that achievement is to our credit and failure due to our fault.

He also sheds light on the dark side of meritocracy. The most important factor in whether people voted for Trump or Brexit was educational background. Getting into college or university meant you stood a much better chance of landing a good, well-paid job and rising through the rungs of society. And if you did so you tended to end up more liberal in political and social outlook. If you didn't go to college, you were more likely to stay in manual or blue-collar work, looking at a distance at the educated class of people who ran the government, the economy and the legal system, and feeling they didn't represent you.

Meritocracy, Sandel argues, generates on the one hand hubris and on the other hand shame. It makes the successful feel proud in their own achievements, looking down with a secret smugness at those who didn't get the big jobs with the big money, and on the other, generates resentment and a sense of shame in those who missed out on the educational and financial gravy train.

A meritocratic society makes parents more and more obsessive about getting their kids the advantages that will set them up for life. Yet such obsessive parenting for success has so often led to an epidemic of teenage depression and distress. College life becomes increasingly competitive, aiming to build an impressive CV to land the big jobs when you leave university for the big wide world of competition.

Yet the reality is, he argued, that most of what made for ‘success’ was fairly random and the result of chance. If you happened to be born into an educated family with a reasonable income you are more likely to get the education that would keep you within that class. Without that origin it is much harder to break through the social barriers. Of course, there are plenty of examples of people born into disadvantaged circumstances who rose through the ranks to get good well-paid and high-profile jobs. Yet such stories fit neatly into the meritocratic story, as these people are held up as the poster boys and girls of meritocracy - exemplars of precisely the kind of moral virtue and character that is needed to succeed.

Some would say beautiful brand of football that out-passes and outplays virtually everyone else.

Aristocracy by contrast, may have contained many flaws and inequalities, but at least the poor didn't feel that their poverty was their fault. We talk about our talents as ‘gifts’, which implies they have been given to us rather than earned by us. If we happen to have a talent for numbers, for writing, an instinct for strategy, reading people well, or managing stress, that is not really to our credit but something we have inherited in our personality. Of course we can and need to develop these skills, but again society has a fairly random way of rewarding certain talents and not others - we pay people skilled at football far more than people similarly skilled at netball, and hedge fund traders far more than nurses.

So what does all this have to do with Manchester City?

In September 2008, Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, who is currently the vice president and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, completed the purchase of Manchester City, a club that had finished ninth in the Premier League the season before and was without a trophy in 32 seasons. From that moment they had the financial resources of virtually an entire Arab state at their disposal. Since then, they have spent a net amount of £1.4 billion on transfers. They hired the best manager and the best striker in the world, and play the most finely-tuned, relentless, some would say beautiful brand of football that out-passes and outplays virtually everyone else. In a recent match against Tottenham, they lost their number one goalkeeper Ederson to injury who was then replaced by Stefan Ortaga, who played a blinder and effectively won the league by keeping Tottenham from scoring. Ortega would walk into almost any other Premier League club. City’s strength in depth is such that they could almost turn out two teams that could win the Premier League on their own.

If the mind of Sheikh Mansour had gone in a different direction, Reading fans might have been celebrating a treble by the M4, or Wigan could be playing Real Madrid.

Back in the 2008 season, presumably the group from Abu Dhabi looked at the Premier League table for clubs they might buy, presumably discounting the already successful ones like Manchester United (who won the league that year), Chelsea, Liverpool or Arsenal. Looking just below City, they would have seen Blackburn Rovers in 7^th (who had won the league as recently as 1995, Portsmouth in 8^th, or a little lower, Middlesborough in 13^th or Wigan in 14^th. Sunderland, Bolton, Reading, Birmingham and Derby made up the numbers further down the table.

Of these teams, this past season, Portsmouth, Derby, Bolton and Reading played in the third tier of English football, struggling to make ends meet before small crowds against small clubs such as Stevenage, Burton, Fleetwood and Bristol Rovers. Birmingham were relegated into the third tier. None of the others were playing in the Premier League, let alone the Champions League.

Manchester City, by contrast, in their spanking new stadium, fresh from a season where they had won the treble (Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League), were winning the World Club Championship, marching towards another League title, only just missing out on the Champions League on penalties in the semi-final.

Did the rulers of Abu Dhabi consider buying Reading? Or Blackburn Rovers? Or Portsmouth? Whether they actually did or not, in theory they might have done. In other words, picking out Manchester City has a high degree of randomness. If the mind of Sheikh Mansour had gone in a different direction, Reading fans might have been celebrating a treble by the M4, or Wigan could be regularly playing Real Madrid.

Maybe they can teach us the humility of knowing that our success or failure is much less to our credit or fault than we think.

Manchester City is a prime example of the element of randomness in success. Now of course it's not all random. Many other clubs have spent huge amounts of money but without the success of Manchester City. You have to say their owners know how to run a football club, unlike the shambles of the owners of clubs such as Chelsea or Manchester United in recent times.

Yet there is undoubtedly an element of sheer chance, luck, or to put it in Christian terms, undeserved Grace about it. Manchester City’s being chosen by Abu Dhabi is a strange worldly echo of the Christian doctrine of Election (no - not that election!). This is the idea that in the Bible, God chooses a part out of the whole, for example choosing Humanity out of all the species of animal life on the planet to look after and care for it, choosing Israel out of all the nations of the world to bear the message of God's care and love for that world, and choosing the Church as God’s chosen people, to bear witness to Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world.

The difference in this Christian notion is that election is never for success. God does not choose humanity, Israel or the church so that they can outstrip all the others and bask in their own superiority, even though all three have fallen into the trap of thinking that way many, many times. God chooses them precisely so that they might be a blessing to the rest of the world, the channel through which God desires to pour out his goodness to everyone, the bearers of a message of good news that everyone needs to hear. Election therefore breeds not a sense of superiority, but a deep sense of humility at having received a status that was not earned, undeserved, but that carries great responsibility.

So Manchester City's triumphant progress is perhaps an object lesson for the rest of us, that any success we may have achieved in life, anything we are tempted to boast about, whether privately or publicly, is not as much to our credit as we think. Just as they were plucked from mid-table obscurity to become one of the great teams of recent times, while the likes of Reading and Wigan languish in mediocrity, a large part of any success that may have come our way, is not down to our credit, but derives from a gift, something bestowed on us, so that we might use whatever good comes our way to raise up others and be a blessing to those who don’t have such fortune.

While Manchester City win everything (and it won’t last, as we Manchester United fans know only too well) maybe they can teach us the humility of knowing that our success or failure is much less to our credit or fault than we think. We can learn generosity to those less fortunate than we are, contentment when things go badly, and gratitude for the grace that we have neither deserved or earned.

Article

Belief

Creed

Identity

Truth and Trust

18 November 2025

5 min read

Calls to revive the Enlightenment ignore its own illusions

Returning to the Age of Reason won’t save us from post-Truth

Alister McGrath

Alister McGrath retired as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University in 2022.

In the style of a Raeburn portrait, a set of young people lounge around on their phones looking diffident

Enlightened disagreement (with apologies to Henry Raeburn).

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Is truth dead? Are we living in a post-truth era where forcefully asserted opinions overshadow evidence-based public truths that once commanded widespread respect and agreement? Many people are deeply concerned about the rise of irrational beliefs, particularly those connected to identity politics, which have gained considerable influence in recent years. It seems we now inhabit a culture where emotional truths take precedence, while factual truths are relegated to a secondary status. Challenging someone’s beliefs is often portrayed as abusive, or even as a hate crime. Is it any surprise that irrationality and fantasy thrive when open debate and discussion are so easily shut down? So, what has gone wrong—and what can we do to address it?

We live in an era marked by cultural confusion and uncertainty, where a multitude of worldviews, opinions, and prejudices vie for our attention and loyalty. Many people feel overwhelmed and unsettled by this turmoil, often seeking comfort in earlier modes of thinking—such as the clear-cut universal certainties of the eighteenth-century “Age of Reason.” In a recent op-ed in The Times, James Marriott advocates for a return to this kind of rational thought. I share his frustration with the chaos in our culture and the widespread hesitation to challenge powerful irrationalities and absurdities out of fear of being canceled or marginalized. However, I am not convinced that his proposed solution is the right one. We cannot simply revert to the eighteenth century. Allow me to explain my concerns.

What were once considered simple, universal certainties are now viewed by scholars as contested, ethnocentric opinions. These ideas gained prominence not because of their intellectual merit, but due to the economic, political, and cultural power of dominant cultures. “Rationality” does not refer to a single, universal, and correct way of thinking that exists independently of our cultural and historical context. Instead, global culture has always been a bricolage of multiple rationalities.

The great voyages of navigation of the early seventeenth century made it clear that African and Asian understandings of morality and rationality differed greatly from those in England. These accounts should have challenged the emerging English philosophical belief in a universal human rationality. However, rather than recognizing a diverse spectrum of human rationalities—each shaped by its own unique cultural evolution—Western observers dismissed these perspectives as “primitive” or “savage” modes of reasoning that needed to be replaced by modern Western thought. This led to forms of intellectual colonialism, founded on the questionable assumption that imposing English rational philosophies was a civilizing mission intended to improve the world.

Although Western intellectual colonialism was often driven by benign intentions, its consequences were destructive. The increasing influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of biological and cultural evolution in the late nineteenth century led Darwin’s colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, to conclude that intellectually and morally superior Westerners would “displace the lower and more degraded races,” such as “the Tasmanian, Australian and New Zealander”—a process he believed would ultimately benefit humanity as a whole.

We can now acknowledge the darker aspects of the British “Age of Reason”: it presumed to possess a definitive set of universal rational principles, which it then imposed on so-called “primitive” societies, such as its colonies in the south Pacific. This reflected an ethnocentric illusion that treated distinctly Western beliefs as if they were universal truths.

A second challenge to the idea of returning to the rational simplicities of the “Age of Reason” is that its thinkers struggled to agree on what it meant to be “rational.” This insight is often attributed to the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued that the Enlightenment’s legacy was the establishment of an ideal of rational justification that ultimately proved unattainable. As a result, philosophy relies on commitments whose truth cannot be definitively proven and must instead be defended on the basis of assumptions that carry weight for some, but not for all.

We have clearly moved beyond the so-called rational certainties of the “Age of Reason,” entering a landscape characterized by multiple rationalities, each reasonable in its own unique way. This shift has led to a significant reevaluation of the rationality of belief in God. Recently, Australian atheist philosopher Graham Oppy has argued that atheism, agnosticism, and theism should all be regarded as “rationally permissible” based on the evidence and the rational arguments supporting each position. Although Oppy personally favours atheism, he does not expect all “sufficiently thoughtful, intelligent, and well-informed people” to share his view. He acknowledges that the evidence available is insufficient to compel a definitive conclusion on these issues. All three can claim to be reasonable beliefs.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell contended that we must learn to accept a certain level of uncertainty regarding the beliefs that really matter to us, such as the meaning of life. Russell’s perspective on philosophy provides a valuable counterbalance to the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism: “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”

Certainly, we must test everything and hold fast to what is good, as St Paul advised. It seems to me that it is essential to restore the role of evidence-based critical reasoning in Western culture. However, simply returning to the Enlightenment is not a practical solution. A more effective approach might be to gently challenge the notion, widespread in some parts of our society, that disagreement equates to hatred. We clearly need to develop ways of modelling a respectful and constructive disagreement, in which ideas can be debated and examined without diminishing the value and integrity of those who hold them. This is no easy task—yet we need to find a way of doing this if we are to avoid fragmentation into cultural tribes, and lose any sense of a “public good.”

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