MANCHESTER: City Football Group (CFG) introduced on Tuesday Cityzens Giving For Recovery, a 12-month recovery campaign bringing together its nine clubs, thousands of staff, players and coaches, and millions of fans, to help communities get back on their feet.

CFG is the world’s leading private owner and operator of football clubs. It is best known for its ownership of English Premier League Champions, Manchester City FC, and also comprises New York City FC in the US, Melbourne City FC in Australia, J-League champions, Yokohama F. Marinos in Japan, Montevideo City Torque in Uruguay, Girona FC in Spain, Sichuan Jiuniu FC in China, Mumbai City FC in India and Lommel SK in Belgium.

CFG has been supporting the emergency COVID-19 response for the past three months, through almost £1,000,000 ($1.25 million) of donations, in-kind support and loaning of facilities.

As the Premier League season prepares to restart, CFG is now aiming to deliver a minimum of another £1,000,000 of funding and support through Cityzens Giving for Recovery, which will focus the Group’s donations, expertise, facilities, resources and voice, on making a positive difference to the recovery of its communities globally.

CFG will action this through its clubs, its staff, its players, coaches and fans. Many of the Group’s partners will be supporting too, one of which is Etihad Airways, which is helping to kick off the campaign by dedicating the front of Manchester City’s shirt, ordinarily bearing its company branding, to “Cityzens Giving for Recovery” for the Club’s first game of the Premier League restart. 

CFG will be matching pound for pound, donations for the funding of nine recovery-linked projects near to each of its clubs; an extension of the traditional annual Cityzens Giving campaign.

The Group is also enabling every member of staff across its network to spend a day volunteering, amounting to thousands of hours of giving. Fans can get involved too, by donating to the projects, fundraising and submitting ideas to help their communities which CFG may be able to support.

Ferran Soriano, Chief Executive of City Football Group, said: “Front line workers around the world have heroically responded to the immediate threat of COVID-19. At CFG, we have been privileged to play our own small part in helping to address that immediate threat.

“Now is the time for us to look forward, committing to meeting our responsibility to help our communities recover.

“For the first time, we are harnessing the global resources of our nine clubs, our entire network of offices, staff, players and coaches to focus our efforts on recovery.

“This multi-faceted campaign is going to use our expertise, our facilities, our platform and our voice to help people and our communities to heal and recover. And we will do it together. We are calling on our global community of Cityzens to help us to give and to help as many people as we can to recover.”