One man’s story of supporting the wrong side — and how it applies to the Kansas midterms

Here’s my confession: After years of rooting for the wrong side, I am making a change this election season.

For the past decade, in one vital contest after another, I’ve made the wrong choice. Over and over, I have supported a corrupt and evasive cabal. Today, in this column, I come clean with my personal failures.

I admit it. I supported the wrong side, regardless of its dominance.

I write this confession not to congratulate myself for some newfound virtue. It shouldn’t have taken me this long to walk away from this flawed conspiracy of billionaires. The last few years provided dozens of moments when my side acted horribly. I should have long ago abandoned them. So, please don’t mistake this column for self-righteousness. 

Instead, I write it with shame and confusion.

How could I have supported this side for so long — and at so many consequential moments? 

Of course, I am talking about the disgraced downfall of my favorite English soccer club, Manchester City. 

What else could I have been talking about? Certainly nothing in American politics.

I know Kansas Reflector isn’t the place that you come for international soccer news. Bear with me though. Manchester City’s monumental soccer deception contains a lesson in blind allegiance — my blind allegiance — but also a lesson about what happens when that irrational loyalty breaks.

For me, at least, it has morphed into a backlash against the team I once loved.

That dynamic — will rabid fans break away from their chosen team? — pervades Kansas politics right now. In the final weeks before a midterm election, as a deeply unpopular president fumbles and as his flagging conservative party pleads for support, Kansas conservatives must decide: “Is this still my team?”

You don’t need to understand everything about Manchester City’s elaborate and brazen $1 billion cheating scheme. (But maybe you want to.)

To track this analogy, all you need to know is this overly simplified shorthand: Manchester City is MAGA.

And former Manchester City fans like me represent disaffected former Trump voters looking back in regret at our former favorite team.

Here’s the backstory: Since my son and I adopted Man City about a decade ago, the team has risen from mediocrity to dominance. They won tournament championships, league championships, continental championships and world championships with crushing excellence.

However, a recent verdict confirmed the team’s unprecedented run was fueled by a sustained series of sham financial deals. The club’s leadership illegally siphoned the oil wealth of their ownership group into accounts that paid for the best soccer players in the world.

Don’t look for an American sports comparison. It doesn’t exist. Manchester City cheated the system so extravagantly season after season, winning overwhelmingly and performing umbrage at anyone who doubted their purity.

And I cheered along.

When you compare the Man City blue to the MAGA red over the past decade, the similarities are obvious.

Both groups have been routinely threatened by legal proceedings that threatened their legitimacy. Trump supporters had to stomach their president living under indictment and nearly had to reckon with an impeachment (twice). He was never convicted, they reassured themselves.

Man City fans like me similarly could shrug off a 2020 UEFA ban on the team playing matches in Europe. We rationalized: “An arbitration court eventually vacated that penalty,” not because of Man City’s innocence but because of a statute of limitations. (Never mind that those earlier charges mirrored the team’s 114-charge conviction this month.)

Man City and MAGA also share common playbooks in their financial misdealings. Both have pushed money shamelessly from the shadowy authoritative underbelly of worldwide finance into restricted places.

Even their origin stories rhyme. Before its recent supremacy over English football, Manchester City delighted in mocking themselves as hapless failures. They celebrated their clown persona, inflating plastic bananas in the stadium stands to remind their opponents of the club’s perverse pride in slipping clumsily on metaphorical banana peels at every key moment.

Back in America, rewind to 2015. The same Man City jester persona could easily apply to Donald Trump, the reality TV star who surrounded himself with a sideshow cast and delighted in the specter of embarrassment on “The Apprentice.” His signature line, “You’re fired,” was delivered with the faux bravado of a CEO who couldn’t recognize his own silliness.

And yet both MAGA and Man City rose to peak power and popularity, nearly on the same timeline.

I repeatedly have used my weekly column to assail Trump and the MAGA sycophants. At the same time though, I spent my weekends watching (and even a vacation visiting) a sham football team whose winning was based on financial cheatery and evasion.

Yes, I see the hypocrisy.

That’s why, during a recent car ride with my son, I announced that my Man City days were over. No more rooting for lovable Erling Haaland, who charmed America during the World Cup. No more wearing my baby blue Man City team shirt. No more score alerts for the team pinging my phone on Saturdays.

It’s a stretch, you say, to compare leaving an English soccer club to changing your political party allegiance. But maybe not.

Consider our tribal identity to both political parties and sports teams. Passed down through generations, we often choose both based on what our parents and grandparents selected. The family tailgate signals allegiance to a team. The weeknight kitchen table indoctrinates your political ideology.

At this time of year, politics and sports mix in our neighborhoods as college football flags hang on front porches just a few yards away from political yard signs. Our bumpers boast both our teams and our parties: “Vote Kamala” and “Go Chiefs.”

We fill stadiums for both sports contests and political rallies, often cueing up the same songs to pump up the crowds, either for kickoff or the stump speech.

Note also how the red hats of MAGA serve as a team uniform. After all, they are literally baseball caps.

Both in sports and politics, nothing matters more than the win. In winner-take-all America, a thrilling 51-49 nail-biter grips us in both midterm results and basketball. Prediction markets have recently conflated these twin American obsessions, allowing us to bet on politics and sports on the same platforms.

The day after Trump’s 2016 presidential election win felt just like my team being upset by a renegade playoff underdog. “How could we lose to them?” I wondered out loud during my drive to work, like an obsessed sports fan.

If sports and politics aren’t that different, then maybe the anguish of leaving a sports team resembles the conflicted feeling of sadly shuffling away from your lifelong political party, if even for one vote of discontent in this election.

Polling suggests that conservatives are looking back at the Republican party in anger.

Nationwide, voters favor Democratic candidates by 11 points over Republican ones, according to a poll from the New York Times and Siena University. The polling also suggests the Republican party is having trouble convincing voters that it understands and can fix the problems that define voters’ everyday lives.

To my dear wavering Kansas Republicans as we approach Election Day, after my past few weeks of soccer news, I get the pain of not just leaving a team, but actively resenting it. I feel foolish and misled for my allegiance to Man City.

My soccer solution has been simple: Find a new team. That is Aston Villa, one of many teams that was decimated by Man City’s financial misdealings. I figured there was a bit of poetry in supporting my former team’s punching bag, and they have rewarded me with some great recent victories.

For Kansans who want to show their disenchantment with MAGA, there are two political solutions. The easiest would be simply to stay home, holding out their vote for Republican candidates who are in danger of losing previously safe seats. (Yes, I am talking about you, Roger.)

The other possibility is to vote for an independent, Democrat or third-party candidate.

In my current season of sports fan reckoning, I can offer this to MAGA voters who vote blue in November: “Changing your mind feels unexpectedly great.”

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.