This Murdoch business has made me come over all profound. It's all
this talk of 'buying' Manchester United. How do you buy Manchester
United? What is Manchester United, anyway? The answer to the first
question seems to be that you offer lots of money to people who
possess little pieces of paper called share certificates. And because
most of these people will care little, if at all, for a certain
football club, anyone who offers enough dosh will have a reasonably
good chance of owning more of these shares than anyone else. That
makes him the majority shareholder, as they say, and it gives him
power to decide what to do with the company that controls a football
team. He also gets a nifty car parking space and lots of people keen
to make his acquaintance. It must be rather nice for him. But it
doesn't mean he has bought Manchester United, does it? He hasn't even
bought all its shares - at least not if enough of the little people
tell him to get lost. So what does he own exactly? Just the ability to
generate some profits and reap a decent dividend, maybe.
Proper writers like to use a metaphor, so think of Manchester
United as a tree. A really big one; the biggest in football's jungle.
It was a sapling once, but its roots grew strong, and it's now a
pretty complicated organism. It lives and breathes. It blossoms and it
sleeps. A multitude of living things turn to it for nourishment, for
support, for a place to be, for a home even. But who owns it - the man
who bought the forest, the kids whose swing hangs from its branches or
the squirrels on its bark? Does it belong to the world that provides
its oxygen or to the lumberman with the chainsaw? Does control equate
to ownership?
There's more to a tree than wood, and there's more to Manchester
United than share certificates. Manchester United is in the hearts of
its supporters: from Alex in the dug-out to Joe Bloggs in Row Z to the
exile in Timbuktu with a short wave radio. Manchester United-R-Us.
It feels like one of those defining moments in history. There
haven't been many: the railwaymen of Newton Heath start up a football
club; Davies saves it from oblivion and United is born; Gibson keeps
the Red flag flying in the 1930s; Busby arrives; Munich; and now. For
over 100 years Manchester United existed for the glory of being. Glory
at football was everything, and financial soundness was the foundation
for better football. The flotation of the club changed that: some of
the money went outside the family, but the tills were ringing and
co-existence became the norm. There remained mutual interest in
Manchester United achieving the glory, even if the joy of the
supporters in Rotterdam and the glow of the fund managers after a
rainy night in 1991 were for different reasons.
Now we're not so sure. And even if the new 'owners' give every
assurance in the world one thing seems clear: United won't be a
standalone glory-and-profit machine anymore; it will be a cog in a
corporate wheel, with its own part to play in a grander design. United
won't exist simply to be United; simply to win at football. You've
heard all the arguments, the talk of big business and the lexicon of
finance. To me some things just don't feel right, and I think that is
enough.
The trouble is that this is a runaway train, and if it's not to be
BskyB it is likely to be someone else - or rather something else,
another corporation. United are going to get swallowed up it seems.
The Big Five days are a long way off, a quaint station we passed
through as the train got up some steam. Spurs and Everton were
derailed, Liverpool have chugged along; Arsenal are like the guard's
van trying to hang on to the locomotive from Newton Heath.
I'm not arguing for an eternal status quo, because a body can
change its clothes without losing its heart. We talk about tradition,
and about 100 years of football history, as if this were a long time.
Maybe we should recognise that organised soccer is a recent human
phenomenon, a product of the latter stages of industrialisation. Back
then the trip to an away game at Arsenal was a serious journey,
certainly more of a trek than a flight to Barcelona would be now. So
why the fuss about the Euro-league as a next step? One hundred years
ago the southern amateurs were up in arms when northern industrial
towns started taking the game seriously, and began recruiting
professional players, often Scots. Now those same clubs are unhappy
about United, Juventus, etc going one step further. It's now about
globalisation, and our concern that things are getting out of hand is
natural. We can envisage a Rollerball future when a contrived global
pseudo-sport is presented for the benefit of multimedia
conglomerations. It's scary and it's confusing.
Perhaps we just fall into the trap of believing in the importance
of our own existence at this point in history. It wouldn't matter a
jot to us now what happened to the Roman 'sport' of gladiator
fighting, but at the time there's no doubt that people got quite hot
under the collar about it. There are, for example, recorded instances
of amphitheatres being closed for periods in response to crowd
trouble. And those events took place over a much longer period than
football's short century. No doubt after the first 100 years of
gladiatorial contests people thought the pastime was with us forever.
Will football also be ancient history one day, will the sands of time
literally blow over Old Trafford, and will future generations wonder
what all the fuss was about? To misquote King Eric, we are all just
passing through.
If that reality is startling, then it does not mean we should not
care here and now. When I see the fuzzy photos of United returning to
Manchester with the Cup in 1909 I look into the faces of the crowd
around the team coach. They were as proud and as pleased back then as
we were in Albert Square in our own time, in the days before gathering
in Albert Square became too 'dangerous' to be permitted. Those crowds
didn't care about balance sheets; as long as the club was on a secure
footing the only thing that mattered was the glory. I wonder how proud
those people would be of what their club became, just as I wonder how
proud today's supporters are of Meredith and Turnbull, and of Roberts
and Barson. We should be proud of them because they were Reds, and
they did their bit. Future generations will have the celluloid to
convince them of Eric's genius, but we would hope that whatever
becomes of Manchester United after our time, that future generations
would be proud of him. And we hope they'd be proud of us, 'mere'
supporters, for how we played our part. One day we will be faces in an
old photo, a crowd on a fuzzy, pre-digital film, but we'd hope to be
recognisable as supporters, just as we see our own equivalents in
1909. Our hope is that United will still be recognisable as the club
we followed. Perhaps the crowd scenes over the generations provide the
common thread: as players come and go, as fashions change and as
sponsors grab the spotlight, the fans are the beating heart.
Manchester United is its supporters, and I don't think we are for
sale. We just need a driver we trust at the head of this train.
This article first appeared in "Red News"
© Copyright Tony Smith
