THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF MANCHESTER UNITED
Sometimes to say it like it is, to show things as they really are, ordinary language and the kind of thinking it limits us to won’t work. We need special language that exposes things, penetrates the fog. We need metaphor.
So here’s a metaphor for all those devastated United fans out there: slavery. Being a United fan is a kind of slavery.
When the Glazer family leveraged debt to purchase the club using the club itself as collateral, it was not just the players, the coaches, the stadium staff, the stadium itself and the brand name that got purchased. We got purchased too. We got bought and sold too. Like enslaved people throughout history we had no choice in the matter. Oh we could have said to ourselves, we don’t like this deal, we are going to walk away from it, it doesn’t touch us, we are free to take our support elsewhere: across the road to City, over the Pennines to Leeds United, down the Manchester Ship Canal to Liverpool, across the sea to Real Madrid. Yes, we were all free to make that move, maybe some of us actually did it. I discovered one United supporter who started supporting United 40 years ago and sick of the pain of supporting this club confessed to moving to City. But such cases are an impossibly small number. The overwhelming majority of United fans are stuck. In it for life, in it to the end, even if it means a truly disastrous 2026-2027 season, even if the club becomes a middle tier fallen giant for the rest of its history. The lesser second club in Manchester by far: Manchester’s Espanyol to City’s Barcelona.
We suffer. We suffer. We are slaves to the support we give, to the love that we have for this club, slaves to the way the owners treat us, the spin they sell us, the outright lies they tell us. If I offered you a Devil’s deal: a life lived in abject poverty as the price for United becoming the best team in the world, with its greatest players, mesmerizing everybody every week and winning everything, is this an offer you would reject out of hand? Slave’s rations. Isn’t that what we are getting as supporters every week?
The social media verdict on our transfer business going into this season was that it was the 15th best, in other words the 6th worst, in the Premier League. And that was before the calamities started to happen. The transfer business was believed by fans to be something truly special, transformative in midfield, plugging gaps and providing key backups to allow United to compete across all competitions. We had finished third. The incoming players would help us to challenge for the league title, progress in the Champions League and maybe win the Carabao or FA Cup. Well we seem to be heading into the relegation zone and we are out of the Carabao Cup already by virtue of a diabolical performance that actually shattered a long-standing record which had been a matter of huge pride. Losing at home after leading 2-0 for the first time in 50 years.
Which raises the issue of the perhaps total mismatch between supporter dreams, hopes and expectations and what the owners are prepared to allow. It may sound crazy to you for me to express it this way, but bear with me. Back to the slave metaphor. Keeping people in bondage means controlling expectations. Meeting expectations costs money and leads, quite naturally, to greater expectations. Winning the league provides financial rewards but it also needs huge investment even to become a possibility. So the investment could be made with the absolute aim of winning the league and yet prove to be unsuccessful. I am not certain of this but I suspect that in that season where United overhauled the lead Newcastle had established over them in the last few games to win the title, the season of Kevin Keegan’s famous outburst, was a season where they had invested more in order to win the title than we had, and we simply found an extra gear, swallowed their lead and beat them to it. There are no certainties in football. Except maybe that winning the domestic league immediately raises the expectation that the team can compete in the Champions League, maybe win it, wiping out Europe’s finest in the process. But this is a huge step up. It requires further investment.
United, it is now painfully clear, cannot make the kind of investment necessary to win, or seriously try to win, the Premier League, let alone the Champions League. Realistically all we can do is to get as close as we possibly can, given our financial limitations, which keeps us in the spotlight at least, helping to sustain the brand’s financial operations, and maintaining or increasing profit levels across the board. It is all about managing and controlling expectations within tight economic constraints.
Last season actually spelt out our ceiling: third, behind two of the rest of the big six, in the case of last season Arsenal and Manchester City. Great for supporters who at one stage feared missing out on entry into the Champions League, but maybe a little too high for our owners since fourth would have sufficed. Worse still, in securing third spot we narrowed the gap between ourselves and the runners up to a mere six points. And the runners up were Manchester City. For a whole decade we had finished lower than City and the gap had been in double digits. Suddenly we found ourselves breathing down their necks, and in our home game against them we had not just won but played them off the park. To United fans this was not just a sign that the team, if not the club entirely, could “be back”, but gave them the tantalizing hope against hope that the eternal order of Nature, the Universe, the Premier League, and football power in the city of Manchester could be restored: the law which asserts red will always have supremacy over sky blue.
If United fans had misgivings about whether the ownership could have recognized and set out to seize this historic moment, the sign that they had would have been to break the bank to sign Elliot Anderson and Aurelien Tchouameni, which they did not do, a wave of unexpected optimism broke out after football columnist Andy Mitten was permitted to interview United CEO Omar Berrada. Berrada spoke with what certainly seemed and felt at the time to be sincerity and conviction, revealing the owners’ project to transform the club positively, taking it into what began to sound like a new golden era.
I think that given where we actually find ourselves right now, it is difficult to take what Berrada told Mitten at all seriously. Were we being played? Certainly the mismatch between Berrada’s words and how the owners appear to be managing things could hardly be more starkly different.
Are we just stupid fans, easy to dupe, easy to control, easy to exploit because we can be bought and sold, slaves to our passion for and love of this club, a club clearly in serious decline and ever more shameless in the way it treats us.
That is the question at the heart of the People’s Republic of Manchester United. The republic still exists. It has no shares, no board seat, no vote. It lives in Old Trafford and in every living room where a man still checks the score at midnight. The politburo that owns it does not need it to win. It only needs it to keep hoping.
—
poems 2 die for 