How Leeds can be to Manchester what Seville is to Barcelona - Brett Jacob

Manchester is the Barcelona of the North. That's it. I've said it. It doesn't sting anymore. The former Mayor of Greater Manchester is now Prime Minister, and half the commentary since has been about ‘Manchesterism’ arriving in Downing Street.

A city's identity is so strong it's producing national success stories now, not just local ones. I want Leeds to have that problem.

Leeds' usual response is to compete anyway. Bigger arena. A city of culture bid. A tram system we've chased since I arrived as a student in 1986. We keep entering a race for a title someone else already holds.

I'm not the right person to be bitter about Manchester - I love it. I moved there in my twenties and spent five years in the Hacienda, chasing what Factory Records was doing to the city. I later chose to come back to Leeds and build a family here. My daughters are the only true Yorkshire people in the family. And they know it.

Spain didn't produce one dominant city and also-rans. It produced Barcelona, Seville, Bilbao and Valencia. Seville went deeper into being unmistakably Andalusian, an identity too specific to copy. Bilbao bet everything on becoming a design and engineering city instead. Neither is second best. Both are best at something else.

The economist Edward Glaeser argued cities thrive not by being generically excellent but by developing sharp specialisms that compound through density. Manchester's compounds because everyone chasing media, football and music gravitates there. Leeds beats that by finding its own gravity well, not by imitating it.

My eldest is doing the same lap I did, 30-odd years later. She's 25, works in PR, and has just moved to Manchester for the right opportunities. I don't blame her; I made the same call at her age. But she's hinted she'll come back to Leeds when it's time to start a family.

Manchester is where you go to be young and switched on. Leeds is where you come home to build something that lasts. That's not a consolation story. That's a strategy, if a city is willing to see it.

Leeds isn't ceding music to Manchester either. Brudenell Social Club thrives. Back to Basics remains one of the country's most respected club nights, three decades on. Yard Act and English Teacher didn't come from nowhere. We don't lack culture. We lack the habit of shouting about it.

Leeds is the largest centre for financial and legal services outside London - built on discretion and compounding trust, not on being photographed. Add health innovation and a digital agency sector grown up quietly alongside it. That's a city competing on substance in a country obsessed with narrative.

I spent years in economic development, and the pattern was always the same. Places that got it wrong asked, ‘what would make us look impressive?’ The ones who got it right asked, ‘What do we already do that nobody else can?’

So - a Seville Strategy for Leeds. Not ‘we accept we're not Manchester, here's some consolation charm’. The opposite. Manchester can have the Barcelona role - the brand, the loud one, the one that gets the biopics. Leeds takes Seville's. An identity too real to imitate.

The uncomfortable part isn't accepting we're not Manchester. It's admitting we've spent a decade trying to be, when the more interesting city was already ours.

Brett Jacob is the founder of Present Works.