I live a stone’s throw from Old Trafford. So lately in my neighborhood there has been a lot of talk about the imminent sale of Manchester United football club.
The American Glazer family, major shareholder since 2005, hopes to get about 6.5 billion euros for it. For the time being, the battle seems to be between Sheikh Jassim Bin Hamad Al Thani from Qatar and British Ineos billionaire Jim Ratcliffe.
Both men are big fans of the club. That makes fans happy. The Glazers saw Manchester United mainly as an investment from which they wanted to make money. A football-crazy Qatari or British sugar daddy, who wants to invest a lot of money in the club, is more useful to you as a supporter.
Yet I personally feel more at home in the small stadium of FC United or Manchester, Broadhurst Park, than around the huge Old Trafford. I visited FC United last year for a report. About a thousand supporters came to watch a rather mediocre football match. FC United comes out at the seventh English league level. And in such a low class, the game can usually be summarized old-fashioned with: long strokes, home quickly.
Investors without a football heart
The club was formed in 2005 when a section of Manchester United fans turned their backs on Old Trafford following its takeover by the Glazers. They felt that their club was hijacked by foreign investors with no football heart. They started a new, semi-professional club, in which they, as supporters, would be in charge. The democratic club structure allows fans to participate in everything from the budget for the squad to the design of the shirts.
One of those fans is Vinny Thompson. I met him in the catacombs under the grandstand: 65 years old, bald head, glasses on. He was standing behind a mobile bar, tapping beer. Above him hung a flag with the logo of FC United and the text: Fan-owned football, bloody hell!
When the home side scored, Vinny only noticed it through the noise in the concrete stands above his head. “I never see the home games,” he said. And with a smile: ,,But that doesn’t matter, you know. The level is anyway shit. It wasn’t about the game for him. “People forget these days that being a supporter is more than just staring at a pitch for 90 minutes,” he explained. In his eyes, Saturday should be a full day out: meeting your friends in the pub before the game and hanging around endlessly after the game. And he did.
“The best thing about FC United”, he said, “is that you are here in terms of feeling back in the 70s and 80s: beer in hand, standing in the stadium, screaming and singing yourself deaf.” He made a dismissive gesture. “The Premier League stadiums are much too quiet these days.”
Hooligans dominated the atmosphere
Vinny proved: The British are a people with a strong penchant for the past. Often even a slightly too strong hang. But when it comes to football, I share their nostalgia. Because even my best stadium memories are not in the modern Euroborg in Groningen, but in the long-demolished Oosterpark. As a boy I went to matches like FC Groningen-FC Twente and FC Groningen-PSV. I saw Romario there. Hans Westerhof and René Eijkelkamp still had a beautiful 1980s mustache. Milko Djurovski was simply made for such an old folk stadium.
Still, Vinny shouldn’t romanticize English football in the 70s and 80s, of course. Hooligans dominated the atmosphere at the time. The low point was the riots around the European Cup I final in 1985 between fans of Liverpool and Juventus, the Heysel disaster in Brussels, in which 39 people died and more than 400 supporters were injured. All English clubs were then banned from international competition for five years.
Premier League became TV competition
English football fell into a deep crisis. That only changed with the formation of the Premier League in 1992. Suddenly football became popular again and it was no longer slightly shameful to openly associate yourself with an English club as a respectable member of the British middle class. But that positive turnaround came with a price: the Premier League took an extremely commercial path and became a TV competition: one with an unlikely number of new and young fans, but supporters who often never set foot in the very expensive stadiums of their favorite club. to make.
Yet it is precisely the youngest generation that does not seem to mind. Their club love expresses itself differently. Generation Z is used to only seeing clubs like Manchester United play on a screen. And football teams in the hands of sheikhs from the Middle East, they hardly know any better in that respect either.
Vinny, and me too – we’re just getting old.
Our V/M
Niels Posthumus (Zuidhorn, 3 February 1981) studied political science at VU University Amsterdam and journalism at Erasmus University Rotterdam, worked for the free newspaper DAG, The Star in Johannesburg and as a correspondent in South Africa for Trouw and Het Financieele Dagblad. He is now a UK correspondent for Trouw, among others, and lives in Manchester.