United and City ensure Manchester derby is not just about the football | Jonathan Liew | Football

A couple of weeks ago, at 8am New York time, Manchester United plc held its quarterly earnings call, in which senior board members talked through some of the club’s recent successes. For instance, the last week of January saw the club’s second-highest social media engagement ever, with more than 300,000 mentions of the new signing Bruno Fernandes on Twitter, and 38 million interactions in total. Odion Ighalo was the top trending topic worldwide, beating both Brexit and Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. Meanwhile the Chinese New Year product line had performed well, and the megastore was experiencing what the managing director, Richard Arnold, described as “strong increases in average basket size”.

The following night, at the Bernabéu, Manchester City beat Real Madrid 2-1 in the Champions League, a competition in which United are not playing this season.

Perhaps this is a slightly tendentious juxtaposition to make on the eve of the 182nd Manchester derby. What it does encapsulate, however, is the increasing clarity with which these two rival clubs have come to define themselves against each other: each, in a way, craving what the other has.

Starved of competitive success since the Ferguson era, United’s off-field plan has been geared towards building a business model more or less independent of it. Instead they have sought to leverage their enormous fanbase, boasting to potential investors about their “worldwide platform” of “1.1 billion fans and followers”. It was two years ago, during a similar quarterly conference call, that United’s chief executive, Ed Woodward, admitted: “Playing performance doesn’t really have a meaningful impact on what we can do on the commercial side.”

This does not mean United are indifferent to results, not least because their turnover is forecast to plummet next season as a result of failing to qualify for the Champions League. But it is interesting that, when Arnold recently named the two key factors in keeping United’s sponsors happy, trophies and winning were not mentioned at all. The first factor, Arnold said, was “fan engagement” – growing their fanbase and turning them into consumers. This is why United are so fixated on social media numbers: they are a measurable gauge of the audience they can offer to advertisers. Winning trophies is a good way of driving engagement. But then so is a video of Alexis Sánchez in front of a piano.

The second factor, according to United’s managing director, was analytics and data – not the sort of data that helps to identify potential signings or flag up players in need of a rest but the sort that can help a brand reach a captive audience without them even realising they are being shown an advert, the kind of thing that, until recent years, has largely been the preserve of big platforms like Facebook rather than sports teams. And United believe that, however far behind the elite they may have fallen on the pitch, this is one area in which they are undisputed market leaders.

To see how it works in practice, just download the official United app. From the moment it opens, you are exposed to what Arnold refers to as “enhanced personalisation” and the “gamification of content”. The very first screen asks you who your favourite United player is. The next invites you to “sign for United” by creating your own personalised United shirt and entering some user details. At every turn you are confronted with quizzes, polls, tactile interactive features, all subtly branded and studded with reminders to visit the online shop or buy a hospitality package. And every time you tap the screen, you are providing United with more data: data that can then be used to provide you with your very own personalised advertising experience.

City, naturally, yearn for just a fraction of this reach. They would love a data goldmine on United’s scale and complexity. They would love to be able to recreate the grip United seems to hold on both social media and traditional, their ability to shape the conversation, their coterie of former players on television. And so, in the absence of United’s historical footprint and global fanbase, they have instead tried to establish their dominance of the market in very different ways.

The City Football Group’s umbrella of franchise clubs, from New York to Melbourne to Mumbai, is an attempt to recreate in composite what United are trying to achieve on their own: an organic presence in every key market. It is an idea that City’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano, first developed at Barcelona, and the recent investment of the US private equity firm Silver Lake values the entire group at £3.7bn.

Unlike the United model the City model demands competitive success as a prerequisite. Its entire brand is founded on the idea of exceptionalism: an exemplary standard of football, of coaching and player development, even of beauty. It thus needs titles and accolades and jaw-dropping feats in order to sustain itself. “Achieving a specific level of revenue or income is not an objective on its own,” writes Soriano in his book Goal: The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance. “A good football product is a team that wins.”

These are two definitions of success, of dominance, even of size. If City could be forgiven for envying United’s turnover and audience, United fans must long for the sort of targeted investment and long-term vision that has sustained City’s decade of success on the pitch. When your stadium is falling to bits and your club has been laden with half a billion pounds in debt, it is hard to summon too much enthusiasm for another week of record social media engagement.

And so to a derby that over recent years has specialised in confounding expectations. United tore City to shreds in the reverse league fixture at the Etihad in December. The following month City did the same at Old Trafford in the first leg of their Carabao Cup semi-final. Two years ago a gleeful United forestalled City’s title celebrations with a remarkable 3-2 comeback win. Sunday’s meeting between an in-form United and formidable City is equally tough to call.

Perhaps this should not be so surprising. This is, after all, how football is supposed to be: wild, untameable, impossible to predict. You build the strongest commercial machine the sport has ever seen and end up missing out on the Champions League three seasons out of six. You make European success your entire raison d’être and Uefa chucks you out for two seasons.

In a way this is the greatest irony of all: for all United’s and City’s designs on control, for all their attempts to iron the caprice and uncertainty out of the game, there will always be a piece of football that defies all attempts to control it.