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Do Man United or Man City have more fans in Manchester?

Do Man United or Man City have more fans in Manchester?
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Rob Parker
 @ March 10th, 2022

Who has most supporters in Manchester: Manchester United or Manchester City?

Manchester United are Manchester’s traditional footballing powerhouse. Rivals Manchester City had long been in the shadow of their local rivals until their relatively recent resurgence.

As City yo-yoed through the Football League during Sir Alex Ferguson’s Old Trafford glory years, the consistently well-supported underdogs consoled themselves with thoughts of being Manchester’s true club.

While United’s incredible success through the 1990s and 2000s had secured a generation of fans from London, the Home Counties and the rest of the country, City remained the true local club in the eyes of their supporters. Besides, United aren’t even from the city of Manchester; they’re from the metropolitan borough of Trafford (or the city of Salford if you want to make the same point more strongly but less accurately), so the accompanying argument went.

But is there any truth in this suggestion that people from Manchester don’t support Manchester United? Let’s investigate that point and try to establish whether Manchester United or Manchester City have more fans in Manchester.

Most Manchester United fans are not from Manchester

It’s certainly true that the vast majority of Manchester United fans are not from Manchester. The stereotype is supported by a 2014 YouGov poll, which found that only 28% of British-based Manchester United fans are actually from the North West of England.

In keeping with the Cockney Reds jibe, London and South East was the region with the next highest number of Reds, with 12% of Great Britain’s Manchester United fans residing there.

So, even before factoring in the club’s enormous global fanbase, we know that at least 62% of United fans do not live in Manchester.

By contrast, the same survey found that 49% of Manchester City fans live in the North West. Even allowing for the glory-hunting impact of City having won three Premier League titles in the eight years since the poll was conducted, which might have spread the City fanbase a little further around the country, it seems pretty conclusive that a higher percentage of Manchester City fans come from Manchester than do Manchester United fans.

So, that’s done and dusted, right?

Well, not quite. The question we set out to answer was: do Manchester United or Manchester City have more fans in Manchester? Just because a higher proportion of City fans are from the Manchester area it doesn’t necessarily follow that most people in Manchester support City.

Number of Manchester United season ticket holders in Manchester vs number of Manchester City season ticket holders in Manchester

Another study that tried to get to the bottom of this and other related questions was conducted by Manchester Metropolitan University in 2002. It looked at the postcodes of season ticket holders from both clubs to determine which side had most season ticket holders from Manchester.

The study found that Manchester United had 7,808 season ticket holders with a Manchester postcode, while City had 6,678 season ticket holders with a Manchester postcode.

Despite United having slightly more season ticket holders from Manchester, City — perhaps tellingly — had a higher percentage of season ticket holders from Manchester. The figure show that 40% of City season tickets holder were from Manchester, compared to 29% of United season ticket holders.

The findings of that study are based on each club’s 2001 season ticket database, which was analysed by MMU. Clearly, City’s stadium capacity, on-field performances and financial standing have all changed dramatically since then, as have both club’s ticket prices and number of season tickets holders. United now have more than 50,000 season ticket holders (they had 27,667 when the survey was conducted), while City — aided by their move from Maine Road to the Etihad Stadium — now have around 36,000 season ticket holders (compared to 16,481 in 2001).

It also has to be said that while being a season ticket holder is a decent barometer in this regard, it is by no means the only measure of whether somebody from Manchester supports either one of the teams. Armchair supporters, people who have to work at weekends and those with no more than a passing interest in football apart from on derby day might all consider themselves to be fans of City or United to some degree.

Where do City and United fans really come from?

In 2012, arguably around the peak of the rivalry between the two Manchester clubs, local newspaper the Manchester Evening News carried out a — by its own admission — unscientific survey to determine where in Manchester fans of each club hail from.

As you might expect, the study found City strongholds in Stockport and the areas in south Manchester near City’s old ground, Maine Road. Equally unsurprisingly, Salford and the M16 postcode area near Old Trafford was dominated by United fans.

Perhaps most helpfully for our attempts to answer this question, the survey received 2,163 responses from United fans and 1,175 responses from City fans — does that small sample size offer a clue as to the breakdown of Manchester’s football allegiances? It’s hard to say for sure.

Social media clues

A 2020 study of Premier League club Twitter accounts suggested that Manchester United have 7,218,427 UK-based Twitter followers, while Manchester City have 2,005,012 UK-based Twitter followers.

If we take those figures and apply the YouGov poll percentages from the start of the article to them, we can estimate that around two million of those seven million United fans and 982,000 of those two million City fans are from the North West.

Again, it’s not a perfect measure. Does a Twitter follow equate with support for a club? Does having more followers in the North West also mean you have more followers in Manchester?

What is striking is that the 2:1 ratio in United’s favour is almost identical to the Manchester Evening News survey.

So, do Man United or Man City have more fans in Manchester?

It’s very hard to say due to the difficulties in establishing what constitutes a fan and finding reliable statistics on which to determine where footballing loyalties lie within Manchester.

Putting together all the various and, when it comes to answering this question, in their own ways flawed pieces of evidence, it is notable that United always seem to come out on top when it comes to the number of fans. The fact that this is by similar margins in a couple of the surveys we’ve considered makes this a compelling if not entirely concrete conclusion.

On the balance of probabilities, we’d have to hazard a guess that while a greater proportion of Manchester City fans are likely to hail from Manchester (thereby arguably making them the club most grounded in the local community within Manchester) it seems likely that there are more Manchester United fans in Manchester than Manchester City fans.

In short, it looks like Manchester City have more of their fans in Manchester, but Manchester United have more fans in Manchester.

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