BROADHURST PARK – A distant corner on the peripheries of Manchester’s football universe. FC United are playing their final game of the season against promotion-chasing Guiseley, and the sponsor for the day is a businessman from New York.
On the way in, someone nods towards him. “At least there’s one American in Manchester putting money into a club, rather than taking it out.”
We are seven miles from Old Trafford and 20 years on from the Glazer takeover that transformed rumbling fan discontent into a cavern of fury that could no longer be breached. FC United, one of English football’s best-known breakaway clubs, was born.
“We can’t change the world, but we can change our little corner of it,” chair Nick Boom tells The i Paper. But the first thing he points to, aside from any of his own club’s memorabilia, is the flag behind him. “Manchester – we are all immigrants.” To the side, there is another: “Refugees welcome.”
These are the seemingly small details that make up a club’s culture and they are everywhere at “Course You Can Malcolm”, the room turned into a gig venue before every home kick-off.
It is worth reflecting on what happens in that room – named after the Glazer-in-chief who spearheaded the 2005 buyout – because it is just as important as what happens on the pitch. Suddenly there is a shout from the stage and a cheer goes up: “Tariffs on Merseyside!”
If you shut your eyes, you could be transported to a Manchester United match from many years ago. Green-and-gold flags. Photos of George Best, Denis Law, Matt Busby. Keepsakes from an FC friendly against Benfica, United’s final opponents when they first won the European Cup in 1968.
Even half the chants are old Stretford End favourites, with a twist: “I am a Busby boy, and that’s all I’ll ever be. Until some greedy bastard took my club away from me.”
Sky Sports. The Glazers. Everybody knows who the enemies are. Yet FC United has taken on new resonance since Jim Ratcliffe’s acquisition of a minority stake in February 2024. Where the Glazers led, Ineos have followed. Sweeping job cuts; no more free lunches for staff; ticket price hikes; loyal fans moved to accommodate corporate hospitality.
“We’ll speak out,” FC board member Paul Hurst tells The i Paper. “A lot of it has been focused on the Glazers but Jim Ratcliffe is now in a position where this has become his mess.
“It comes down to ‘what is a football club?’ If the football club moves away from you, are you actually giving up on your club? We could see what the Glazers were going to do to that club and 20 years on, I think pretty much everything we predicted has come true. We take absolutely no pleasure in saying that. It’s just the reality.
“All of these decisions [by Ineos], whether you agree with them or not, you can trace every single one of them back to the Glazers. United are paying £100,000 a day just in interest, think what that could pay for.”
Another co-owner, Jonathan Allsopp, makes the same point as he, walks up for a spoken word performance before the game. FC United have a budget of around £1.3m a year. “If we blew all of that on one thing,” Allsopp says… “we could actually afford three weeks of Casemiro!”
That is the crux of the two worlds that collide in Moston, the drily tongue-in-cheek and the deadly serious. “We’re just a pub team in Bury,” they will tell you, a reference to the years spent at Gigg Lane before building their own ground. Don’t believe a word of it – all of it carries meaning. You only have to look from one banner to another. From “Sex, drugs and thermos flasks” to “Not for sale”, “Sticking it to the man since 2005”, “More women at football.”
The result is that in one of the most deprived areas of England, bearing the scars of 40 years of neglect, this is a club that really matters. It is, Boom says, the people’s “church”, its fans “the choir”. Everything has to be organic. The gym built for local youngsters was completed by constructor Charlie Ennis, who also happens to be FC captain.
They cannot afford to stray from their founding principles, which include a board democratically elected by the members and a system of one member, one vote – no matter who they are.
In April, Eric Cantona joined their number. However many goals he scored for Manchester United (82, incidentally), he is still one member, with one vote.
Interspersed with FC’s more familiar chants, against Guiseley Cantona is serenaded with dozens of French tricolore flags. “Ooh ah, Cantona” rings out as a life-size cutout crowd surfs up and down the Main Stand. Cantona concedes that were he to embark on his long love affair with English football today, he would not support an Ineos-run Manchester United.
Next it is on to Sloop John B, the Beach Boys anthem now ubiquitous at grounds up and down the country. FC fans insist it started here.
When Michael Donohue finally equalises, there is a brief celebration before heads turn towards the homemade scoreboard and volunteers replace the wooden 0 with a 1. It has been crafted by Mack, a regular in the Main Stand, who in the second half asks me to sing Fairytale of New York with him. Our rendition is much better than the original. Back on the concourse, another fan tells me FC is just “the best thing that’s happened”.
All have stories of Old Trafford season tickets swapped for seventh-tier football – they started at the 10th level and have been as high as sixth – as friendship groups divided and fellow fans were priced out.
As the season draws to a close at FC, a community day is held offering free tickets to local people. They want to go further – adult education, primary care. During Covid, Malcolm’s was turned into a food bank.
“Over the past two decades,” says Allsopp, “it’s been difficult to imagine a greater contrast between the owners of Manchester’s two red-shirted football clubs who bear the name United.” The title for the book he has written about a year in the life of FC is carefully chosen: This Thing of Ours.
The club’s birth, he says, was a “two-fingered salute to the excess and greed that culminated in the Glazer takeover. We didn’t have to meekly accept it. There was a better way for football – our club, our rules.”
Ratcliffe’s arrival was supposed to dilute that sense of distortion. The United-supporter-done-good returning to invest in his boyhood team. “More than 800 people with a Manchester postcode co-own a local football club and they’ve been doing so for years,” Allsopp points out. “Petro-Jim’s hardly a trend-setter.”
There was an appetite among some United fans to give the Glazers a period of grace before drawing conclusions. Under Ineos, nobody has the time nor the inclination – and Ratcliffe, as a consequence, faces “a huge amount of unanswered questions”.
“He was going in there supposedly to take on sporting operations, but what he’s become is a lightning rod for the Glazers,” Hurst says.
“When you dig into what he says, it doesn’t make sense. When he said Manchester United’s going to run out of money by December – if they’re that close to insolvency, why did you pay the Glazers a premium on the shares that you’ve bought? Sheikh Jassim from Qatar, Ratcliffe’s cast doubt on whether he actually exists.
“So you weren’t bidding against anyone and you’re saying the club was in that much crisis, presumably you could have let it get to the wire and bought the shares for pennies. There’s a lot of what he says, the more you think about and the more that goes on, that doesn’t stack up.”
He hopes that by contrast, FC have become a bellwether for the fans who are turning away. “As well as being here for the local community, it’s somewhere – whether you can’t afford to go to United anymore or you don’t want to, or don’t think it’s right for you – you can come and watch live football.
“I gave up my season ticket in 2005. I’ve been here since the start – I had friends I fell out with over it. It’s not the same for people as more and more people stop going. Why am I paying this much money to fund the Glazers getting rich? The only people who have done well out of Manchester United in the last 20 years are the Glazers.”
The alternative – fan ownership – was once unthinkable, not least because of attitudes towards matchgoing supporters dating back to the most unedifying episodes of 1980s hooliganism.
“A [1980s] Sunday Times editorial referred to football as a slum sport, increasingly watched by slum people,” Allsopp recalls. Even by the early 2000s, notions of fan ownership were not universally dismissed, but few believed it could really last.
Upon entry to Broadhurst Park there is a shirt immediately visible on the staircase: “It’ll all be over by Christmas”. It is a reminder of the disparaging comments made by Manchester United player turned pundit Alan Gowling in 2005. FC’s end-of-year parties are now called “It’ll all be over by Christmas”.
Perceptions are changing. Manchester United fan group The 1958 recently attended a “United United” match as a symbol of anti-Glazer resistance. On unfamiliar territory, amongst a fanbase often stereotyped as “United haters”, they were surprised at what they found.
“At the start, a lot of the stuff about FC was ‘they’ve given up on United’ – it couldn’t be further from the truth,” says Hurst. He points to a clock stopped at 3.04pm on 6 February 1958, the time of the Munich Air Disaster.
“This is a shrine to Manchester United. We’re quite proud of that. It’s our identity: we’re two separate clubs, but we’ve got a shared history and a shared culture. We believe it is down to us to speak out.”
It is impossible to overstate the dedication of those involved in the founding of FC who felt that duty to protest. Boom insists they are now a “campaigning club” who started out as a “protest club”. Several people tell me Boom – “though he won’t tell you himself” – travels all the way from Leeds, multiple times a week, to volunteer.
Two decades ago, Russell Delaney was living in the south-east, driving up to Manchester regularly to help with FC’s formation, despite being seriously ill with pulmonary sarcoidosis. He died in November 2005.
“That’s the kind of resolve these people have got,” Hurst says. “When you’re around the club, you realise the people involved and the drive and the passion they have, there was no way we were going to let it fizzle away.” At the end of each season, the standout player still receives a Russell Delaney award.
The board has not always been a cohesive unit. In 2016, tensions came to a head over the running of the club. Now the divides are more light-hearted, between the SMRE (South Manchester Redevelopment Enterprise) Stand and the Main Stand, between youngsters and “boomers”.
Your next read
Even so, a group of the former from behind the goal recently raised funds for a zimmer-frame for a fan who now finds it difficult to stand.
None of this is just about FC, or even Manchester United, but about a game that has changed beyond recognition. For their part, FC have never put up ticket prices for U18s, who can buy a season ticket for the equivalent of £1 a game. Members receive a full report on what has been discussed at board meetings.
It is in those gestures that the soul of Mancunian football lives on. Much of it would be unthinkable at Old Trafford, where too many fans increasingly feel: “This isn’t mine anymore.”
The further from their core support Manchester United travel, the more likely they are to be pushed into the arms of FC, who did not disappear by Christmas 2005. Instead they celebrate another happy, 20th year: “We’re FC United, and we’re still f—ing here.”
from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/gwey4DR
Post a Comment
EmoticonClick to see the code!
To insert emoticon you must added at least one space before the code.