On Sunday, the eyes of the world turn to Old Trafford for the 199th derby between Manchester United and Manchester City; a Premier League game in a city whose politics, culture and economy have dominated the UK’s national conversation in 2026 in a manner arguably not seen since the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago.
In June, Andy Burnham ended his time as Greater Manchester’s mayor and in July became the new prime minister of the United Kingdom. He described his personal brand of politics as “Manchesterism” and swiftly opened a No. 10 North in the city, a symbolic step to take power away from London and spread it out more evenly across the country.
During this summer’s men’s World Cup in North America, England’s fans and players adopted Wonderwall, by Manchester band (and City fans) Oasis, as a de facto national anthem, while Burnham also took Manchester’s music across borders. On his first trip to Ukraine as prime minister, he strummed a song by The Smiths, a band formed in Manchester, on a guitar in a mobile recording studio.
Manchester is at the heart of a possible bid for the north of England to host an Olympic Games in the 2040s, seeking to dispel the old notion that only London could do it; and Manchester is central to Burnham’s desire to bring a men’s World Cup to Britain for the first time since 1966.
City’s Etihad Stadium home will soon expand to a capacity of over 60,000, while United have acquired land to build a 100,000-seat successor to Old Trafford that their co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe has called the ‘Wembley of the North’. The Etihad will host five games during the 2028 men’s European Championship and is part of the bidding to host the Women’s World Cup in 2035, while United have previously expressed a desire for their planned new stadium to host the final of that competition if it is played in the UK.
Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium will host the derby against Manchester City on Sunday (Mark Cosgrove/News Images/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Both clubs played men’s Champions League football again this week, with City winning 2-0 away to Portuguese side Porto and United beating Sabah of Azerbaijan 4-0 at Old Trafford.
Manchesterism will, to a large extent, always be footballism too. There is a reflex reaction to saying Manchester in any part of the world, where a person used to respond with ‘United’ but now sometimes will answer with ‘City.’
But the story Manchester is telling now is not only of football but a city of optimism and of possibility, where people believe good things may happen.
In short, Manchester is back — and it wants the world to know it.
“Manchester is the bit of England that most obviously had a contemporary renaissance,” says Jonathan Reynolds, the UK’s secretary of state for business, innovation, science and trade, in a phone call on Friday. “There are lots of parts of this country where people feel uncertain about the future of their area, or feel the best days are behind them. Manchester doesn’t have that; it has this exciting feeling, ‘We’re doing things’. It is looking to the future.”
The numbers are striking.
Manchester’s economy has disproportionately outperformed the UK across a decade, tracking 3.1 per cent annual growth. Most visually striking has been the development of the city centre, a place that housed just a few hundred people at the turn of the 1990s but is now home to more than 100,000, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
A report earlier this year forecast Manchester to become Europe’s fourth-tallest city by 2030, bringing it the nickname ‘Manc-hattan’. A 76-storey tower, which will largely consist of luxury homes and a hotel, received planning approval last year, and will be the tallest residential building in Europe.
The number of people moving from London to Manchester outpaced those who head south seeking opportunity and prosperity, according to the latest official internal migration data. It is also a thriving university city, a place where graduates increasingly see not only somewhere to study but also to make a life afterwards.
“There’s a reason why Chanel asked us if they could do their catwalk in the Northern Quarter,” says Bev Craig, Burnham’s successor as mayor of Greater Manchester. “There’s a reason why the Brit Awards moved themselves out of London for the first time in their 50-year history and still saw a rise in their global viewing figures. There’s a reason why the NBA chose Manchester to sit alongside Paris and Berlin when it comes to hosting a regular-season game in January.”
Manchester’s Northern Quarter hosted Chanel’s Metiers D’Art Show in December 2023 (Stephane Cardinale/Corbis via Getty Images)
Quite what Manchesterism is, or ought to be, may differ depending on who is asked the question.
To Burnham, it refers to the transfer of power from London to cities and regions across the country, in the belief that those working on their own doorstep are more likely to have a clearer sense of the area’s needs, hopes and anxieties than politicians cocooned in the capital’s Palace of Westminster. It taps into a resentment that has developed in cities around the UK where people wonder why they, too, should not be afforded the type of integrated transportation system afforded to Londoners. It also ties into people craving pride in their place.
“We use the identity of what it means to be a Mancunian to bring about social change but also bring economic opportunity,” Craig tells The Athletic.
Dan Jones, a football finance analyst and former head of the sports-business group at Deloitte, adds: “Manchester was once one of the richest cities in the world, famous as Cottonopolis during the Industrial Revolution. But then came deindustrialisation and decline in the 1970s and 1980s. What we have seen now is a resurgence.
“Manchesterism is defined by a dynamism and a can-do attitude. It’s a demand from the city and a trust in the city, with some central government, to say, ‘We know the city well, we are ambitious, we want to get the best for our people, give us the room and the support to do it’. Support doesn’t mean handouts. It means, ‘Devolve and let us crack on with it’.”
Craig adds: “Manchesterism is deeper than any kind of caricature that we are just into Oasis, bucket hats and football.”
Yet the football element is undeniable.
United’s brand, and a swathe of musicians, held the city up as the world globalised. But the sports-led regeneration of Manchester was turbocharged when Sheikh Mansour, the vice-president and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, acquired City in 2008. Speaking this week on The Athletic FC podcast, City’s then chief executive Garry Cook recalled the pitch made to their eventual Emirati owner.
“We were selling an investment in the Manchester economy,” Cook recalled, “not only a football team that was going to play every weekend at 3pm. It was a very different proposition, all built off this new global media product of the Premier League.
“Sir Howard Bernstein and Sir Richard Leese, who ran the city council, were using football and sport to leverage and grow their city. They applied to get the Olympic Games in 2000 and didn’t get it. They got the Commonwealth Games in 2002, which turned into a stadium (where City now play their home matches), which turned into new ownership.
“It was the perfect storm of property development, politics and economics all working together, but at the very heart of it in Manchester are two football clubs.”
These days, stadiums are often described as 365 days-per-year ventures, with clubs seeking to optimise revenues beyond the couple of dozen football matches hosted on the premises each season.
“We’ve got a number of restaurants that will be open year-round,” says Danny Wilson, City’s managing director of operations, in a phone interview this week. “This will include a market hall — home to five independent local food and beverage operators.
“We’ve got a new three-storey retail store with Puma. We have office space we’re looking to let out to a private tenant. We have got a space called City Hall which will be a hospitality area on matchdays, but it’s a space also created for third-party conferences and events to come in to do exhibitions, conferences and product launches.
“The NBA is coming to the arena (the indoor, 23,500-capacity Co-Op Live next to the Etihad). There’s the Brits (music awards at the same venue) in February. There could be an ice rink in there for the month of December. We could do small-scale community health, fitness and wellbeing sessions. We’ve got a roof walk, a zip wire across the pitch and an abseil to give people a reason to come down outside of those matchdays. We’ve got Mamma Mia! (the immersive dining and entertaining experience) coming.”
Manchester does not have all the answers. It has continuing challenges with rough sleeping, which Burnham pledged to end when entering office as mayor in 2017 but has risen four years in a row, according to The Mill.
There also remains a 115-ton elephant in the room, as City’s Abu Dhabi ownership has not been without its challenges. The world forever awaits a verdict on whether the club, who have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, will be punished for 115 alleged breaches of the Premier League’s financial regulations.
The local council has also been accused by academics at the University of Sheffield of providing Abu Dhabi with a “sweetheart” deal for public land, which they argued allowed the investors to disproportionately benefit. Former City CEO Cook does not hide that his early presentations to Abu Dhabi included discussions about the corridor of property development to join the city of Manchester to the stadium further east.
East Manchester has been transformed since the 2008 takeover at Manchester City (Mark Cosgrove/News Images/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Local politicians argue the investment worked for Manchester. Others question whether too much latitude has been afforded to the UAE, a country with a highly-criticised human-rights record.
Business secretary Reynolds says: “I remember the accusation that the Manchester leadership sold the city to Abu Dhabi, and as someone who has lived in the city for 20 years or more, I look to that with disbelief.
“If you look at New Islington (a central area of Manchester), there was a social-housing estate there that people abandoned properties on — they did not want to live there. Now it’s one of the most sought-after places with families and young professionals. It’s that investment that’s made the area more desirable. The economic positivity of that is very clear.
“It’s not our job to be salespeople for Gulf countries, but the UAE is an incredibly stable, prosperous place with quite a lot of legitimacy for the people who run it. There are some countries where, frankly, with some of the oligarchs, you’d be really questioning whether you’d want the kind of relationship Manchester’s had with the UAE. But the UAE is the third-biggest British diaspora now of anywhere in the world, where a lot of British people are working and going on holidays, too. I don’t see it as some sort of unpleasant thing.”
City Football Group, the umbrella group which owns City and several other clubs around the world, has now overseen over £1billion of investment into eastern Manchester, which the club say included the transformation of an 80-acre, polluted former industrial site into the club’s training ground, while donating over five acres of restored land for community use. The area also houses world-class facilities for cycling, tennis and athletics, and now that major indoor arena for concerts and other events.
“Sports-led generation is what delivered a new library, a new leisure centre, a new school that’s seeing genuinely affordable homes being built as part of that masterplan,” says Craig.
Andy Burnham takes a selfie with Bev Craig after she was elected Manchester mayor in August (Annabel Lee-Ellis/PA Images via Getty Images)
United, whose Old Trafford home is 116 years old, have recruited several executives from City since petrochemicals billionaire Ratcliffe acquired a minority stake in the club from the U.S.-based Glazer family in 2024.
The club have set out plans for a new stadium, securing the majority of the land required for a new 100,000-seater venue which Everton fan Burnham, in his former role as Greater Manchester’s mayor, championed while also warning that no public money would be spent on the arena itself. The state is prepared to assist on investments in surrounding areas, but United have not yet made clear how they intend to fund the stadium, while the Glazers have never invested in Old Trafford or the land around it since taking over the club in 2005.
An Oxford Economics report, commissioned and paid for by United, Trafford Council and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, said the project would bring 48,000 local jobs, over 15,000 new homes and an estimated £7.3billion boost to the national economy.
A UK government minister, speaking on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to speak publicly on the matter, said the state has now set up a “Stadium Accelerator Team”, aimed at making it easier for leading clubs in major cities to lead on big regeneration projects. The Office for Investment has also been made available to co-ordinate conversations.
“It is part of a wider aspiration, under Burnham, that we do things quicker as a country,” the minister said. “It is about, ‘Can we make it easier for you?’ rather than the frustrations you might have about having to deal bilaterally with each government department.”
Craig says the United project is “motoring ahead”, but much remains dependent on their decision-making around the stadium.
United, who declined to make any executives available for interview for this report, remain a major opener of doors for Manchester’s brand. When Burnham met Pope Francis at the Vatican in April 2023, he presented him with a signed United jersey from fellow Argentinian Lisandro Martinez, a defender for the club.
In City’s early days of disruption on the UK football scene, Cook tried to push United to go harder on brand Manchester, as well as brand Manchester United.
“(Then United CEO) David Gill and I used to sit and talk about whether we should play the derby in Beijing or New York as part of a ‘Let’s build Manchester’ idea,” he recalls, clarifying that he meant exhibition/pre-season games, not a league fixture. The clubs eventually played each other in the U.S. city of Houston during their summer tours in 2017, when managed by Pep Guardiola (City) and Jose Mourinho (United).
Craig says the city’s football reputation is most significant when marketing Manchester abroad: “Particularly when we’re in the Far East, or where people might not know much about the UK other than London when it comes to business. We use our assets to help us open those doors. International trips are often supported by Man United and Man City because that helps with global reach.”
So, has Manchester made it?
Craig says: “Fifteen years ago, when Manchester started talking about being a world-class city, there was an element of fake it ’til you make it. We were putting ourselves into categories we wanted to be in rather than where we are. Whereas the cities that we’ve got relationships with now, they want to be friends with us. Places like Barcelona and Berlin, and cities like Toronto and Vancouver.
“Manchester started talking about the Olympics back in the late ’90s but was not in a position back then to take a leading role. Now, it’s become much more realistic.”