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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.

Essay

Awe and wonder

Creed

Easter

21 March 2025

7 min read

At the tilting points of the year, we ask what kind of world we want to build

Equinox is still a threshold between darkness and light.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Sun rise casts a shadow over Stonehenge.

Nik, via Unsplash.

At the spring equinox, we appreciate and talk about the arrival of light in the northern hemisphere. For a brief moment, the Earth’s axis is tilted neither away from or toward the sun, and day and night are roughly equal length – ‘equinox’ is Latin for ‘equal night’. From here, we enter astronomical spring.

But it is not entirely accurate to talk about this being the moment when the darkness is finally diminished. That moment is the ‘equilux’ – equal light – and it happens a few days before the equinox, its date varying with latitude. Because the sun appears as a disc in the sky, the top half rises above the horizon before its centre does, which – when coupled with light being refracted by the Earth’s atmosphere – gives extra daylight. By the time of the equinox, and depending on your latitude, we already have 12 hours and 10 minutes of daylight. It is not much, but it is enough perhaps to read a few pages of a book without an artificial light, or to have “just one more” kick of a ball outside, as my daughter has learned to say.

There is beauty in the idea that for a brief moment during the equinox, we are all experiencing the same light and dark. But it is not true. At any particular moment, some of us experience more darkness than others, and some of us receive more light than we think.

Whenever its moment of arrival, though, the light will arrive. It always has, since the world was set spinning and tilting in space. We have always found ourselves poised at the threshold between the long dark of winter and the gathering light of summer. It is a threshold that is embedded in creation itself; all of life must in one way or another face the work, the inevitability, the challenge of transformation. This threshold is echoed through our own lives too – in the in-between spaces where one thing is ending, but the next has not yet fully begun. There are personal thresholds: a change in career, a birth, a loss. And there are collective ones: times in history when the old ways no longer work and we strain toward something new, unsure of how to get there.

Ancient people marked the equinox with purpose and care, watching for the moment the sun rose in the east and set in the west. At places like Stonehenge, huge stones were arranged to capture the exact angle of equinoctial light, as if the builders knew this threshold was something worth marking. Recently, archaeologists have suggested that Stonehenge was built not just for religious reasons, but for unification too: its stones come from Cornwall and Wales and Scotland – from all parts of the land. Their slow journey to their resting site on Salisbury plain would have been a chance for celebration and feasting, with thousands of people joining in along the way. It was a journey that would have brought together different people, including groups that had migrated from modern day Europe. Gathering light was a shared effort, and one worth celebrating.

For the early Celtic world, the equinox was a hinge between Imbolc, the season of early stirrings, and Beltane, the riot of summer. It was a time for reckoning and renewal – counting what food remained after winter, deciding what animals to keep or cull, what seeds to plant. To live well meant paying attention to the balance between what had been and what was to come. Lately, I have realised that it is not change itself that feels hard so much as not knowing the nature of the change that I, that we, will be called to. My young daughter has brought this into sharp focus. On the days when the dark feels relentless and the light seems distant, I find myself fearing for her future. I think of those Celtic people; the way they did not know the future but prepared for it anyway, perhaps in their rituals asking, how do the past and the future speak to each other at this moment, who are we, who might we become?

Even if we long to cling to what is familiar, the familiar will eventually change. Easter, and the equinox, are not just about light triumphing over darkness, but about transformation.

In a world where crisis seems to be following crisis, it is easy to feel that everything is tipping off balance. The equinox suggests though that equilibrium has never been static, and balance has only ever been fleeting, a transition between states of being. It is a moment of poised readiness, a preparation for movement. The world will keep tilting and tipping as it always has, and we will keep changing as we always have.

In the Jewish calendar, the equinox often falls near Passover, the great festival of liberation. The story of the Exodus is a story of transition – of leaving behind what enslaves us even when the road ahead is unknown. The Israelites did not step from captivity into freedom overnight. They wandered, and wrestled with doubt, and longed for the certainty of their old lives even as they were being offered something new. Thresholds are rarely comfortable.

I find myself at a threshold now: I am trying to shape a life that has reformed around motherhood, with past roles and jobs behind me, and the new identities yet to fully clarify. I have been feeling the truth of farmer-author Wendell Berry’s idea that "it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work." This real work has been stimulating but also confronting, as thresholds often are.

If we are, as many believe, living through a threshold moment in history – where old systems are failing, where climate and conflict threaten the future – how do we walk forward? How do we resist the temptation to cling to what is familiar, even when it no longer serves us? Easter falls just after the equinox. Shoots push through soil, lambs stumble into life, a chorus of birdsong swells, and we remember that nature is all resurrection. Even if we long to cling to what is familiar, the familiar will eventually change. Easter, and the equinox, are not just about light triumphing over darkness, but about transformation. Jesus did not return from the tomb unchanged; he was made new, unrecognisable at first, even to his closest friends.

The balance of light and dark is fleeting; it does not last; a threshold is not a place to linger. The world is always moving towards light, or toward dark, but always through change, and so are we. Balance is not an end in itself; it is a preparation for change. Perhaps these tilting points of the year are good moments to ask who we are becoming, and what kind of world we want to build, and how we will bear witness to the light, but also to the dark, as we do so.

This equinox, then, we will turn and face the coming light, but perhaps too we might turn and notice the faces that the light shines on – or doesn’t. Virginia Woolf reminds us that "A light here required a shadow there." When the light comes, darkness will too. These turning points of the year are an opportunity to sit in the truth of that, to appreciate the hope and the beauty of this spring threshold, but also to get to work. We can reach out to those who are experiencing more darkness than us, help build the world in such a way that draws attention to the light like the makers of Stonehenge did, take stock of what has been and who we are becoming, step away from what enslaves us even if we are not yet sure of the shape of freedom.

We cannot know what will happen next, but we can choose how to move forward. I wonder about those ancient people who somehow moved huge stones weighing up to 30 tons to Stonehenge; I wonder what they saw as they moved through the land, when they looked to the horizon, when they stood in the tension of their own now. They carried not just the weight of stone, but of their own unknowable future. Those ancient people persisted and celebrated and became us, passing on their burden, passing on their particular stone-bound, collectively built way of focusing the light. This equinox, I am thinking about how I can do the same – despite and because of the darkness, despite and because of the unknown path ahead.

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