It is usual, in days of disillusion and crisis at a football club, when results are bad and the league position is heading south fast, for the manager to be the lightning conductor for dissent and anger. It is he who takes the brickbats and suffers the abuse and listens to the chants demanding that he give up the fight.
‘We hope you die soon,’ the front cover of a Southampton fanzine shouted at the club’s then manager, Ian Branfoot, in 1993. And if that is extreme, the sight of planes flying above grounds with a banner proclaiming ‘WengerOut’, or similar, has long become part of the supporters’ armoury of resistance.
Not on Sunday. Not at Old Trafford. After Manchester United lost 3-0 at home to Bournemouth and sank to 16th in the Premier League table, the home fans did not turn on Michael Carrick. They turned on the players but most of all, they turned on the club’s hated owners, the Glazers and Sir Jim Ratcliffe.
They turned on them because they know that the owners, much more than Carrick, are responsible for the depths to which a once great club has sunk, both on and off the pitch. They turned on them because the debt they saddled the club with when they bought it in 2005 has now grown to over £1.15bn.
They turned on them because that debt has cost United £852m in interest payments. In the last financial year, the interest payment was £37m, an increase from £34m the previous year. They turned on them because the club has declared war on its own season ticket holders in its bid to increase the number of tourists and day-trippers spending money at Old Trafford.
At various points during the match, fans were given updates about the plans for a new stadium but those were met with derision, too. Many loyal United fans think the new stadium, and the prices they will be asked to pay to sit in it, are just another way of driving them out of the club so they can be replaced by shinier, happier people with bigger wallets.
On Sunday, the Manchester United fans turned on the players but most of all, they turned on the club’s hated owners, the Glazers, including Avram (left), and Sir Jim Ratcliffe
The fans detest the owners because they know that they are responsible for the depths to which a once great club has sunk, both on and off the pitch
United fans see their owners for what they are. They see their greed and their acquisitiveness. They see through the homilies about how much the fans mean to the club.
We know what you are, they have been saying to them for many years. They have said it with protests and with banners. They said it on Sunday with chants and anger.
These are dark days for Manchesterism in football. If United fans have seen through their owners, City fans, who are trying to come to terms with the fact that their owners have been found guilty of cheating on an industrial scale between 2009 and 2018, are not quite there yet. Maybe one day, when the legal process has played out fully, they will feel it, too.
Many are still in denial about what the emirate of Abu Dhabi has done to their club. That is understandable. Abu Dhabi has pumped money into City, not taken it out.
Abu Dhabi has overseen an incredible period of success in east Manchester, winning the league title an unprecedented four times in succession, compared to United’s failures.
But the reality for both sets of supporters is stark. United have been hijacked by corporate leeches whose model is said by financial experts to be the ‘aggressive utilisation of debt financing secured against high-value, cash-generative assets to fund acquisition and expansion.’ United are the Glazers’ cash-cow.
City have become a plaything for a petro-state. They have become one of the world’s most high-profile sportswashing projects and one of the most effective, as Abu Dhabi has sought to sluice away the reputation of its repressive regime with the beautiful football of Pep Guardiola and the series of golden triumphs he delivered.
For now, Abu Dhabi briefs about ‘irrefutable evidence’ it possesses in its pursuit for justice from the Premier League. They are said to be ‘bullish’ about their chances of success in their appeal.
If United fans have seen through their owners, City fans, who are trying to come to terms with the fact that their owners have been found guilty of cheating on an industrial scale between 2009 and 2018, are not quite there yet
Manchester City have become a plaything for a petro-state. They have become one of the world’s most high-profile sportswashing projects as Abu Dhabi attempts to clean its reputation with the help of City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak
The UAE wields immense wealth, power and influence. No one can be sure of what the appeal findings will be. But let’s get something straight here: don’t let City’s owners and the aggressive public relations campaign they have mounted fool you into thinking that they are the good guys in any of this.
The idea, propagated brilliantly by some Abu Dhabi acolytes, that the modern City are somehow a champion of the oppressed in the Premier League, fighting against the tyranny of some imagined ‘red cartel’, might be a clever ruse but it is also laughably ridiculous.
Abu Dhabi’s defenders want to couch this battle as Harry Potter versus the Dark Lord but even a fool can see it’s not like that. City want dominance. They are not here for altruism.
They are not here to spread the love. And they have achieved dominance. Their four successive titles earlier in this decade was a level of rule that no club has ever achieved in the long history of the English game.
What do you think would happen if the Premier League got rid of the Squad Cost Ratio controls that some present as the yoke of the dictator, designed to keep smaller clubs in their place? Do you really think Aston Villa would have a chance of winning the league in seasons to come? Or Everton? Or Spurs? No chance of that. None at all.
The imagined ‘red cartel’ would be replaced by a very real nation state cartel. Abu Dhabi (Manchester City) or Saudi Arabia (Newcastle United) would win the Premier League every season. No one else could get remotely close to the level of spending facilitated by their public investment funds. The Premier League would be finished as a spectacle.
City wanted to join the European Super League, don’t forget. City, under Abu Dhabi, are not anti-establishment. They are the Establishment. They have stripped ambitious, proud mid-table clubs like Everton and Villa of their best players time and again over the last 20 years. Red cartel? Please. Do me a favour.
City’s owners have cost the club its reputation for a very, very long time to come. Other fans do not forget. The stain of ‘cheats’ is not an easy thing to wash away
Manchester United has been twisted out of shape until it is unrecognisable
And City have been found guilty of doing all that by cheating. By being, according to some metrics, the biggest cheats in the history of English football. Abu Dhabi are only custodians of Manchester City and they have cost the club its most valuable asset.
They have cost it its reputation for a very, very long time to come. Other fans do not forget. The stain of ‘cheats’ is not an easy thing to wash away.
This is English football now. This is what we are. This is what the modern game has done to football’s idea of Manchesterism.
It has taken Manchester United and Manchester City and it has given it owners that have twisted those clubs and tortured them out of shape until their fans stare at them long and hard and do not recognise what their clubs have become.
