Manchester City gets a lot of bad press for the almost £300million that Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan has paid on new players since he brought the club a little less than two years ago.
But Thursday in New York City, we saw the other side of Manchester City. City are in New York for The New York Football Challenge, and today they stopped by the Spanish Harlem section of NYC and in particular the PS72 Elementary School.
Like most schools in New York, PS72 has no park area for organized sports. The kids had to walk 12 blocks in order to play a game of soccer. No longer!
Toda, PS72 has an astro-turf football pitch on the roof of the school courtesy of Manchester City. The cost for the field was £500,000. Manchester City paid for it.
School principal Tony Hernandez yesterday thanked the club, saying:
“You must realise what this means to us. Of the pupils who come to our school, 89 per cent of them do not have English as their first language. What’s more, 88 per cent of them are Hispanic, from countries such as Mexico and Puerto Rico. Soccer is the number one pastime in those countries. As such, we have been dreaming about this moment for years – to have our own facility is incredible. Thank you from the bottom of our heart. This will change our pupils’ lives.”
What Manchester City did in New York today was amazing. They left something in New York that kids will cherish and enjoy for years and I salute them for that.
