Manchester City football club was founded in 1880 by Anna Connell, the 25-year-old daughter of a clergyman.
Local thugs and drunks had been running amok in the city's slums. Connell hoped sport would divert them. She knocked on hundreds of doors recruiting players. Three men showed up the first time the team met.
After a bit, Connell's church mixer became a settled amateur side, then a professional one, did very well for a while, went into a long period of decline and was repeatedly lapped in the global consciousness by its crosstown rival, Manchester United.
Eventually, City was the sort of team only a local or a contrarian (usually both) could like.
Given that reputation, the club was an odd choice to spearhead an Arab takeover of world soccer. But after five years and hundreds of millions of unrecoupable dollars spent, it is starting to get somewhere.
On Saturday, City won its 16th Premier League game in a row, a record.
Its opponent was Tottenham Hotspur, a very good young team featuring some of England's best domestic talent and led by the man advertised as the game's next great coach, Mauricio Pochettino.
This tie was supposed to be the road bump on the way to a City coronation. Instead, it was an annihilation. Spurs attempted to cleat their way through City's billion-dollar roster. City slipped by and through them, ran them ragged and by the end had embarrassed Tottenham 4-1.
Led by the former coach of Barcelona, Pep Guardiola, City combines the best attributes of that Spanish side – skill, selflessness and relentless ball possession – with a tough-minded English sensibility.
Guardiola's Barcelona was a Ferrari. His City side is more a tank built for speed. That know-how comes at a cost. Guardiola is reportedly paid more than any player in the Premier League.
The EPL season has five months to run, but one bookmaker has reduced the odds on City winning it to 1 to 100. That is, you must bet a hundred dollars to win one.
This former charity case can now lay credible claim to being the best team on the planet, and certainly its deepest.
In the midst of the match, they ran a scrawl through the Etihad Stadium – "Manchester thanks you, Sheikh Mansour."
Sheik Mansour is City's habitually absent owner. A prince of the United Arab Emirates, he's shown little interest in watching his most expensive toy live.
In the past decade, some very rich people with time on their hands have lavishly financed soccer clubs as vanity projects. Several of them are Middle Eastern oil barons. Paris Saint-Germain, a functional possession of the Qatari government, recently agreed to pay $600-million for just two players – Neymar and Kylian Mbappé.
This sort of human arms race is not new, but Mansour's approach to it is. He's not just building a superclub. He's creating a network of interconnected organizations that might one day dominate soccer on several continents. City is the tip of that spear.
Mansour's overarching entity is called City Football Group. It wholly or partly owns six clubs on four continents, including Major League Soccer's New York City FC. It plans to purchase many more.
Beyond buying a knockoff shirt, the most committed Barcelona or Bayern fan in Malaysia or South Africa may never put a nickel in the team's accounts. In financial terms, all that global support for the world's biggest teams is a wasted opportunity.
CFG is an attempt to capitalize on City's growing renown by placing franchises in places where people can spend money.
Each dollar given to CFG's other holdings – Girona in Spain, Melbourne City in Australia, et al. – feeds the larger entity. The hope is that as City becomes more popular, its subsidiaries will also reap the benefit.
That fiscal focus is also potentially good for soccer. The world's largest clubs have always acted as hubs. The grade-school and teenage talent is expected to come to them and train at their academies. There is only one place they can graduate, or must otherwise be sold on.
CFG is instead going to the world. A player might be discovered in Chile, funnelled through the team in Uruguay and, if he's good enough, sent on to Manchester City. If not, he can still serve a purpose within the group.
It's a revolutionary way of doing business for two reasons.
First, it's enormously expensive. Even the wealthiest people don't generally spend billions on one club and then say to themselves, "You know what I need now? More of these." Mansour is one of the very, very few who has that sort of disposable income. CFG is nowhere close to turning a profit, and may never be.
More notably, Mansour and CFG see sport in truly global terms.
For the first half of the 20th century, a sports team was a business, run as rationally as a widget factory.
In the second half of the century, it became a bauble coveted by the wealthy because it's sexier than widgets.
In the past 20 years, it's grown corporate.
The most popular teams have started to think of themselves as worldwide concerns. Some owners have collected more than one team, but they are not intertwined. Instead, they have a multisport portfolio.
In all cases, the focus was and still is local. That's where the team plays, is feted, makes most of its money and has its origin story.
Mansour's potential insight is that the glamour of a great club can be spread like a contagion to anoint a family of teams, rather than just garlanding one.
That's why CFG is buying into little-known clubs such as Torque in Uruguay and Yokohama F. Marinos in Japan.
Like City, they are largely featureless. They don't have to wrestle with history. Instead, they may come to be defined interchangeably only by winning. It's pyramid power for the soccer fan.
Winning at the very highest level is the hard part of the equation, and it takes something more than investment. There is a large function of luck, timing and hoping nobody closes a car door on Kevin De Bruyne's ankle.
But 130-odd years after Anna Connell went door to door, City is intriguingly on its way to becoming something far different than whatever she dreamed of it.
Not a salutary distraction, but a sports colonial enterprise.
Cathal Kelly