Manchester City on tap for Kenan Stadium in second summer soccer showcase?
On the heels of last summer’s successful Chelsea-Wrexham exhibition at Kenan Stadium, an even bigger club may be making a stop in Chapel Hill this summer.
Manchester City, the defending English Premier League and UEFA Champions League champions, will play an undisclosed opponent at the UNC football stadium in late July as part of a four-game, two-week tour of the United States, the Daily Mail reported.
In a text message to the News & Observer on Friday, North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham said nothing was confirmed yet but the university was hoping to host that game.
Last July’s sold-out match between the London giant and the glamorous Welsh upstart owned by actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhinney was the first at Kenan Stadium, with sod laid over the artificial turf for the occasion.
That event, televised on ESPN with all 50,596 seats sold out in four days, was seen as a test case for Kenan Stadium as a big-time soccer venue capable of hosting these kinds of matches between major clubs on offseason tours. Italy’s Juventus and Mexico’s Chivas played at Carter-Finley Stadium in 2011, a field that proved too narrow for top-flight soccer.
But the Chelsea-Wrexham match was a resounding success for both the university and the promoters, and UNC immediately expressed an interest in hosting similar summer matches again in the future.
Manchester City’s tour is part of the FC Series, which organized last summer’s match in Chapel Hill and is run by the same people who run the Citrus and Pop-Tarts bowls in Orlando. Juventus and Real Madrid also played in Orlando as part of the FC Series last summer. That group announced Thursday that more information on this summer’s events would be forthcoming in March.
Efforts to reach FC Series officials for comment were not immediately successful Friday.
Man City is currently four points behind Liverpool in the Premiership table with a game in hand, and is in the Round of 16 of the Champions League, with a 3-1 lead on FC Copenhagen after the first leg in Denmark. Last season, Man City became the second English club to win the Premiership-FA Cup-Champions League treble.
Since being purchased by the Abu Dhabi royal family in 2008, Manchester City has become one of the world’s richest and most successful clubs, part of soccer’s “petrodollar” revolution that also includes Qatari ownership of Paris St. Germain, the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia.
Manchester City will also play Chelsea in Columbus, Ohio, on August 3 to conclude the tour, the Daily Mail reported, with other stops in New York and Orlando.
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