Lommel is a small city in northeast Belgium, known for sand mining to the extent that it is known at all. The football team there, Lommel S.K., was formed in 2003. Previous incarnations date to 1927. In all that time, it has never played in Belgium’s first tier.
Until 2020, when the club was acquired by the Manchester-based City Football Group, there was no reason for anyone outside Belgium to be aware of Lommel S.K.’s existence. Even today, as part of the most valuable conglomeration of football assets in the world, only one of its players is estimated to be worth more than $500,000. But Lommel’s advantages over its competitors are more subtle than the size of its transfer budget.
One June morning, Lommel’s performance director, James McCarron, joins a videoconference call to discuss summer recruitment. Brian Marwood, the group’s managing director of global football, leads it from a conference room in the City Football Academy on the Etihad campus. On the call are Gavin Fleig, City Football Group’s director of talent management; Gary Worthington, who has worked for Manchester City‘s player recruitment team for more than a decade; and Joshua Leunissen, a Netherlands-based scout. All three might have contributed to a similar call with Txiki Begiristain, Manchester City’s sporting director. Or with David Lee of NYCFC. Or executives from any of the other eight clubs in which the City group has an ownership stake.
The first piece of business is a reserve goalkeeper. Worthington has just returned from Dublin, where he watched a talented Montenegrin play for his country’s Under-21s. The player already has been vetted by the group’s analytics team, which confirms that he is comfortable with the ball at his feet, a necessary skill at a CFG club. After hearing Worthington’s positive assessment, Marwood asks McCarron to “finish the transaction.”
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Next they discuss a Congolese-born Belgian wing-back playing in Italy‘s Serie B. Signing him would give Lommel a home-grown player toward the league’s quota. It also would provide competition for Caio Roque, Lommel’s starting left-back. If Roque is shifted to a more competitive situation in January, his replacement will already be at the club. But before making a move, Marwood wants McCarron to ask Lommel’s coaches whether the presence of a competing wing-back will motivate Roque or destabilize him. “We like Roque a lot,” Marwood stresses.
At dinner in Manchester the previous night, NYCFC’s Lee had told Marwood that an Ecuadorian defender, who has an inexpensive release clause at a club in his home country, might have the ability to play in MLS. His name comes up on the call. Marwood tells the group that Lommel “could be a good landing spot for him, in terms of development,” but there’s a complication. The group’s South American scouts, who are headquartered at CFG’s Montevideo City club, report that the defender has been living at an academy in Guayaquil in his early teens. Relocating to Lommel would be a jarring cultural shift. Before they make a move, Fleig suggests, a scout should assess his readiness to be on his own.
In January, 2012, Al Mubarak interviewed Soriano in a conference room at the Mandarin Oriental in Paris. Within half an hour, he knew he’d found his man. At one point, after Al Mubarak had asked him what went wrong at Barcelona, Soriano mentioned his failed attempt to create an MLS team. Al Mubarak was fascinated. “We spent an hour talking about it,” he says. “The conversation kept going. ‘What if it’s actually not just MLS? What if we look at ourselves as a group that owns clubs all around the world: Asia, Africa, Europe?'”
Al Mubarak hadn’t read Soriano’s book, but it was as if he was quoting from it. He immediately understood the synergistic possibilities. “We started thinking about this concept almost like venture capitalists,” he says. It was a comparison that could strike football executives as inspirational or chilling, depending on their perspective.
Soriano knew that Manchester City had a rich and colorful past. Its fan base was devoted, though the previous half-century had given it “more downs than ups,” he says. But clubs like Real Madrid, Barcelona and Manchester United had an international presence, while Manchester City had only minimal support beyond its urban core.
Not incidentally, those superclubs also had narratives of historical success. “We didn’t,” Soriano says, “so we had to go to the market and sell something different. We couldn’t be the club of the past, so we had to be the club of the future. We had to innovate. And the bold thing we did was create this group.”
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On his second day at Manchester City, Soriano traveled to New York to meet with Garber. He learned that an MLS franchise was still available, but there were other prospective owners. For Al Mubarak to get it, he’d have to pay the league’s expansion fee of $100 million. As at Barcelona, some of the club’s executives didn’t see the point. Why divert resources across the ocean when you’re working to build a champion at home?
Al Mubarak and the club’s directors didn’t hesitate. On May 21, 2013, NYCFC was announced as MLS’s 20th franchise. It was branded in Manchester City blue.
The breadth of clubs in CFG’s portfolio also helps convince young prospects to come. By the time that Talles Magno, a striker who debuted in Vasco da Gama’s first team as a 17-year-old, was ready to leave Brazil in the spring of 2021, his talents were no secret. He had enticing offers from the Netherlands and Portugal, but City’s recruiters convinced Magno that he wasn’t ready for a first-tier European club. They believed they had a better option for him than a second-tier club, where coaching and facilities might be sub-optimal. “It was ‘don’t go to Europe now. Come to New York,'” Soriano says. “‘And if you make it there, we’ll take you to Europe.'”
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City paid $10 million to acquire Magno — a lot for an untested Brazilian forward, but a minimal investment for a player who might end up at the Etihad. Last season, he scored the winning goal in NYCFC’s Eastern Conference final against Philadelphia. This year, he has started 25 games and scored six goals. He’s only 19. “We think he has the possibility to get to Manchester,” Soriano says.
Soriano admits that the odds of any one CFG player ending up on Guardiola’s team sheet are low. Nobody on the current Manchester City roster came through the pipeline. Currently, six players with Manchester City contracts who have come up through the system are out on loan. Leeds winger Jack Harrison is the biggest name in another group of players that were brought to Manchester and sold elsewhere in Europe.
Soriano considers several others currently at CFG teams as prime prospects to get to the Etihad. “If one makes it,” he says, “that pays for all the rest.”
On an 80-acre urban campus that used to be a dusty field, a multi-building compound built in 2014 combines a training center and academy for Manchester City with a corporate headquarters for City Football Group. Designed in part by Marwood, the attention to detail is extraordinary. The analytics area, enclosed in glass, is positioned so players must walk past frequently. The idea is to get them inside to find out various ways they might improve. “So now, maybe someone comes past and sees a teammate in there and thinks, ‘I should go in and do that,'” Marwood says.
Players with long-term injuries do their rehab in a corner of the vast gym where windows are high enough that training sessions aren’t visible. “That would be demoralizing,” Marwood says. As they get close to returning, they move to a light-filled area adjacent to the field. The expectation is that watching their teammates will motivate them to finish the process.
The center of the main building is called “The Heart of the City.” An open-plan meeting space, it serves breakfast and lunch. Snacks and beverages are always available. Occasionally a player will pass through in his training sweats. Mostly, it’s filled with staffers from various departments who gather in small groups or walk through holding coffee mugs. They could be working at a tech firm or an ad agency.
