Why Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool and other northern clubs have always won (and still win) more titles than southern clubs?
Think about the biggest football clubs in England. Are Manchester City, Manchester United and Liverpool the first clubs that come to your mind? And what do they have in common? Yes, they all are from the north of England.
Clubs in the north of the country have dominated the beautiful game ever since it was created: they have won most English leagues and more Champions League since the end of the 1890s until this day.
Despite being the capital of the country and one of the biggest economies in the world, London is not the home of the biggest clubs of England, and it is not even close in numbers compared to clubs outside the M25.
Let’s have a closer look at the numbers to make things even clearer:
*Clubs in the Midlands have been included in the north group as their history relates more to the northern clubs and it’s more appropriate for the purpose of this article. It must also be said that even if Midlands clubs were not included in the count, the dominance of northern clubs would still be as high.
OK, BUT WHY?
Numbers are shocking, and we tried to look for the reasons behind it.
The answer to this is not straightforward, and there’s not only one single cause. In order to get to the bottom of this, we will need to get experts involved. We will be looking at factors like history, demographics and economy, and we will be diving into the 19th, 20th and 21st century.
But before we get straight into it, what do football fans think about this? We talked to Chelsea and to Manchester City fans as our south and northern representatives, and this is what they had to say:
What about fans other tan Chelsea and Manchester City? Here are the results of a poll we published in our X account:
And now, let’s have a closer look at the reasons behind the northern dominance in English football.
INDUSTRIAL AREAS: PERFECT ECOSYSTEMS FOR FOOTBALL DEVELOPMENT
Professionalisation of English football came in 1888, which means that clubs were professional almost from the beginning. What does this mean? That money has always been an important factor in the development and success of clubs. But how did clubs make money in the late 1880s?
Before football was shown on TV and clubs started to get money from TV rights, big players sales and juicy sponsorship deals, their main source of income was made by selling tickets. Therefore, the more a club could fill the stadium, the bigger their income. Even though in the beginning football was a sport for the higher classes, the main game-goers belonged to the working class, and most of the working class population of England was located in industrial areas, which are mainly outside of London.
David Goldblatt, British sports writer, broadcaster, sociologist, journalist and author of books like The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football, has something to say about that: “Football crowds were never exclusively working class, but obviously they’re the bulk of the numbers through much of the late 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. And the south of England, beyond London, does not have many concentrations of working class constituencies.”
There’s no doubt that the main industrial hubs in England were and still are in the north of the country. For example, in 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first inter-city railway in the world, was opened to connect an industrial city with a port city, which marks the importance of those industrial hubs. In the early 1900s, Manchester was home to Trafford Park, the first Industrial Park of Europe, which is located just a few steps away from Old Trafford. Other cities like Birmingham or Leeds, were and still are big industrial areas, and the ratio of industries and workers compared to the population in those areas was much bigger to the one in London. The era of huge and rapid development for industries came together with the beginning of football, a perfect opportunity for clubs to fill their stadiums given the increase of the working class populations.
“In the 1930s, London was home to 9.5 million people, whereas Greater Manchester’s population would have been 1.5 million”, Goldbatt adds, “so London was big, yes, but the south is not like the north that is just full of these industrial cities with one or two big football teams, and there are examples of other big cities like Oxford that just didn’t have a football thing going on at the moment”.
More class working people meant more tickets sold, which meant more money, which meant better players. That, mixed with the fact that football was a bigger thing in the north, is the first reason.
LONDON: JACK OF ALL TRADES, MASTER OF NONE
London is without doubt one of the most important cities in the world. An economic superpower, cosmopolitan and powerful metropolis home to 10 million people. But when it comes to football, the UK capital is definitely missing something.
Only one club in London has won the Champions League: Chelsea. This century, only two London clubs have won the Premier League: Chelsea and Arsenal. That translates into a league success rate of seven times out of 23. How is it possible that a city with seven clubs in the top tier of English football and with a huge economic impulse behind it is failing to dominate?
Tony Collins, a British social historian specialising in the history of sport and author of Sport in Capitalist Society, thinks that “one of the interesting things is that despite the fact that London is a much bigger city and elite in sporting terms, it doesn’t have a single identity, there is no such thing as a London football team”.
Football is about that feeling of belonging, about having an identity. Supporting a club sometimes means supporting a city, a region or even a country. “For example, Liverpool and Everton, these are clubs that are in a big city, obviously not the scale of London, but still a big city”, Collins adds, “so that means that they have in a sense a much bigger catchment area and then they become the focus for local civic pride”.
In the 2022/23 season, there were 17 professional teams in London, whereas there were only six in Manchester and only two in Liverpool. If you are born in Liverpool, you only have two options, whereas if you’re born in London, things get a little bit complicated.
If we go back in time to the 1900s, when football started to grow, Manchester’s population was 700,000, bigger than it is today, and there were the same two big clubs that there are nowadays. In London, on the other hand, there were seven million people, and all the big clubs, except for Chelsea, had already been founded. So this problem has existed since the beginning of English football history. And things are looking the same way nowadays.
Today, Manchester and Liverpool have a population of half a million people. With two big clubs per city, that’s one big club per 250,000 people. In London, on the other hand, there’s a Premier League club every half a million people. But it’s not the pure figures that are meaningful here, it is the fact that all the attention is put on one or two clubs per area. One or two big teams per city means not only more following but also more attention from local authorities, local media and local investors and businesses which at the end of the day possibly transforms into more revenue.
BEING IN THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME
Nowadays, most of the clubs’ income comes from TV rights. In total, the Premier League clubs make more than £1b combined from that source. Back in the day, though, TV money wasn’t that big, but clubs were getting back something as important from their exposure in the small box.
English football on television saw its first days in 1936, but it wasn’t until the 1960s and the 1970s that full matches were being televised more often and that it was more accessible to the general public. In other words, it became popular.
Manchester United, Liverpool and Nottingham Forest won European cups in the 60s and 70s, and in those two decades, Arsenal was the only non-northern team to win the league. Whoever would switch the TV on back then, all they were going to see were northern teams winning trophies.
Remember when you were a kid and you watched your first games of football on TV. Wouldn’t you fall in love with that team that was winning it all or with that player that just did things you didn’t think were possible with a football at your feet? That’s how clubs increased their already-existing massive fanbases.
Tony Collins believes that that was key in increasing their following: “In the 1960s, you get the rise of televising of games, particularly Manchester United winning the European Cup in 1968, and rebuilding from the immediate disaster, the rise of Liverpool in the 1970s. You didn’t have to go to Old Trafford or Anfield to see a match, so they became not just local symbols of local pride and local achievement, they also became national symbols. And that led the basis well for them to become global from that point.”
What started as a northern dominance was just followed by more northern dominance, but now it was fed by the exposure on TV, which translated into more fame and bigger followings, meaning that numbers will rise in terms of match-goers, TV rights and kits sales. And, as usual in football, more money potentially means better results.
That increase in popularity, on top of their already-existing dominance in football seems an almost unbeatable cocktail. “These clubs continued to build on previous successes”, Collins adds, “so that is in a sense building stepping stones for them to get a prominent place in world football.”
AREN’T PLAYERS FROM THE NORTH JUST BETTER?
Is there a chance that for some reason the players born in northern areas are just better footballers? Maybe because of lifestyles outside the capital or maybe because northern clubs’ academies are just better. Let’s have a look…
Having big clubs all over the country gives the possibility for young players to join their local teams without having to move to bigger cities to play football, so having a look at the demographics of the players can also give away some useful information.
Within the top 10 players with most England caps, six were born in the north of the country and four were born in the south. But there are some cases where the London boys, like David Beckham with Manchester United, spent most of their career at northern clubs despite having been born in the capital.
In 2020, Sky Sports did a report about the birthplace of all the players to have played for England, and found out that, out of the 1,217 players in the report, 806 have been born in the north of the country. That translates into a 66% northern representation in the national team, in a country where the population is split 50/50 between north and south.
When asked about this, ex Everton player and current England U-21 manager Lee Carsley said that “there’s no clear difference between youth academies across the country and there’s no difference between the players either, it’s just a matter of luck that the most of the good players are from the north and get to play for great clubs which also happen to be up north”.
Even though player development can be ruled out as one of the reasons for northern success, the fact that most of the top English players come from that part of the country cannot be ignored.
If the best players are born in the north of the country even out of good luck, that means that northern teams have better chances of having the best players in their squads, possibly leading to better results. But Goldblatt is warning us all: “nowadays, the players keep coming from everywhere because there’s loads of money in very unregulated markets like the Premier League or the Football League, and it’s minimal the number of academy and domestic players that you have registered, so things are changing.”
WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?
The answer is not straightforward, but we have identified historic, social and economical factors that all combined could help us get closer to it. But what is happening right now that could affect this north vs south battle in the foreseeable future?
“One of the things that is slowly happening now”, Tony Collins thinks, “is that the big clubs are becoming detached to some extent from their traditional local communities, and that’s been replaced with the idea of the club as a global ground. Football is becoming more part of the entertainment industry of Hollywood, it’s part of the same industry, but it’s still very locally based and that’s what it drew its strength from”.
David Goldbatt believes that in the future, the success of the clubs will depend on “which petrostate owns them, Man City and Newcastle are looking pretty good”, he adds, “it’s also important whether you can make yourself a global brand, which is why Manchester United, despite being completely sh*t, continue to have loads of money because they’re a global brand, and Man City is now a global brand, which will be relatively self-sustaining”.
Although it might seem that this dominance belongs to the past century, it is still an ongoing thing: in the last 10 years, northern teams failed to win the league only twice. So maybe the future will still look the same? When asked about winning titles in the future, Pep Guardiola was clear: “We will do it again.”
Football is a competition, and for the northern clubs to start losing there has to be other teams that start winning. When asked where that competition could come from, Goldblatt answered with total confidence: “Surely not from the south of England.”