Libero 052: Does The Manchester Derby Still Matter?

Libero

Sports, Soccer, Society & Culture

4.9 • 867 Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sunday sees the first Meeting of Manchester United and Manchester City of the season at the Etihad. On today’s Libero, Jack Pitt-Brooke, Miguel Delaney and John Brewin look at the fixture and ask whether it is still one of the biggest in the Premier League calendar. The dynamic between the two clubs has been flipped in the last 15 years, with City now the dominant team of this era and United lurching from crisis. The fixture has lost its edge since its golden period between 2009 and 2013, when City were the rising force trying to topple Sir Alex Ferguson’s United. And while the local rivalry is a huge part of Premier League marketing, the question is whether a game like this can become a global product while still retaining its local appeal. Does it still matter in the same way? P1: (02:43) P2: (33:57) Produced by: Tom Bassam Email in via liberopodcast0@gmail.com Subscribe to our YouTube channel @liberopod Follow us on X @podcast_libero Follow us on Bluesky @liberopodcast.bsky.social Follow us on Instagram @liberopod Follow us on TikTok @liberopod Follow us on Facebook @liberopod Music: Kid Kodi - Blue Dot Sessions Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Libero, the podcast about the most important of the least important things,
0:07.1	as George Best used to say to Mike Somerby.
0:13.4	My name is Jack Pitbrook. I'm from The Athletic. I'm joined today by Miguel Delaney from the Independent and by John Bruin.
0:19.8	Miguel, we had a lovely time in Serbia, didn't we?
0:22.3	Yeah, we did.
0:23.5	An interesting city.
0:25.3	Obviously, it's also interesting politically right now.
0:29.4	But it reminded me a little bit of Budapest in that sense,
0:31.4	and that you don't necessarily feel that around the centre,
0:34.4	which actually feels quite liberal.
0:36.4	People are very nice, obviously. And
0:38.6	the Americana was a stadium that I always wanted to go to, so delighted to have been there.
0:45.4	Yeah, it was great. It was great seeing the famous old tunnel leading up into the ground.
0:50.0	The atmosphere was, I mean, there was so much talk about the atmosphere beforehand, but it actually felt like the Serbian crowd were more... They were kind of less interested in England and more interested in their own political issues. Yeah, I mean, we were there, like, there was protests while we were there. There was a lot of chance about the government and obviously Kosovo as well.
1:11.7	Yeah, it did feel they were much more consumed by their own issues.
1:14.2	I have been to more intimidating atmospheres, as I'm saying.
1:17.3	That was obviously an element I was looking forward to.
1:20.3	We also had quite an interesting.
1:21.3	Are we not to say this on air where me and Jack were standing outside the mix zone afterwards
1:26.4	to do our usual stuff and basically
1:29.0	just walked right down into the tunnel, the intimidating tunnel, although I was stopped by a local
1:33.7	when I tried.
	...

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