Back in the days before Sky TV and the magabucks which it bought with it, when the fans game actually belonged to the fans, Man United weren’t very good, they knew they weren’t very good and everyone else knew they weren’t very good as well. But one thing that Man United were was a football club, not a very good one but a football club nonetheless. One very striking element of the club was its badge, immediately recognisable by its odd shape and of course the symbol of Satan, the red devil, in the middle. Above Satan were the words ‘Manchester United’ and underneath Beelzebub the words ‘Football Club’. Now of course in 1993 football sold its soul to the highest bidder and satellite TV took over the running of the game, deciding not only when but also who would play on your screens from week to week and in which order. It is no coincidence that this new breed of football, which changed the emphasis of our game from a sport to ‘entertainment’, occurred at exactly the same time that Man United came to the fore. United made an equal number of appearances in the business pages as they did on the back pages of most newspapers and were touted as the world’s richest and first £1BN football club. The money which financed their success on the pitch was down to globalising the Man United brand and nothing emphasises that point more than the club badge. In 1998, five years after their first Premiership title a slight alteration to the club badge was made, just a cosmetic change we were told which just happened to be the removal of the words ‘Football Club’. Maybe the corporate powers that be thought that some future investors would be put off by associating themselves with the common man and the common mans game, one thing is for sure, the fans didn’t give a hoot and so Manchester United Football Club became just Manchester United. Maybe they should have replace the words ‘Football Club’ with ‘Global Brand’ ?
What is it that you hate so much about the current English, World and one time European champions ? Well let's see if we can cover them all here in our inaugural '20 things you hate about' series.
1. The fans
There is always an exception to the rule but in the case of Man U fans they are very few and far between. In many ways it is better never to meet a fan of Manchester United who isn’t one-eyed, that way you can tarnish them all with the same brush and not feel even a slight pang of guilt.
The best way to gauge your average Man U fan is to watch Sky TV coverage of a home match, the bit before the teams come out, when the camera man walks the length of the main stand pointing into the first few rows of seats. One thing that you will notice is that you will never see the same fans at two different games, that is because they are all first time fans who have been given their tickets by the corporate sector. These are the fans who are wearing the Man U scarf, the Man U baseball cap, the Man U club jacket and are clutching their Man U mugs, Man U golfing umbrella and their Man U cameras which they have just purchased from the official club megastore. When they see the Sky camera they go into ‘Man U mode’ they yell, kiss the numerous club badges adorned around their bodies and chant players names. Then when the match kicks off they sit down and eat their hot dogs in silence along with everyone else.
2. The club badge
3. The Theatre of Dreams
Some football grounds over time acquire a nickname, Estadio Alberto J Armando, the home of Argentina’s Boca Juniors is known to as ‘la bombonera’ (the chocolate box) due to its odd shape, Spain’s Athletic Bilbao’s stadium, the San Mames, is also referred to as ‘The Cathedral’ for its religious connotations and then of course there is the ‘Theatre of Dreams’. Legend has it that one day Bobby Charlton was sitting in Old Trafford when he suddenly thought ‘you know what, this stadium is like a theatre of dreams’. He held that thought and it was quite some time later when it slipped out again in conversation, completely by accident, when he just so happened to be being interviewed by a national television station. The nickname spread throughout the Old Trafford faithful and before long it had become part of United folklore. The truth of course is a somewhat different story. One day the corporate wing of Manchester United were having a brain storming meeting in The City trying to come up with more ways to make money from the ever gullible United faithful. ‘Today people’ said a faceless marketing executive ‘we have to come up with another name for Old Trafford something which we can use to make Salford sound more exotic and of course something which, more importantly, we can stick on posters, mugs, key rings etc to grow the corporate brand that is Manchester United’. After about 4 hours they had whittled their list down to three options. ‘The Coliseum of Magnificent Spectacle’, ‘The Temple of Sensational Wonderment’ and ‘The Theatre of Dreams’. After a six week survey in which two thousand United fans were polled the market research dictated that ‘The Theatre of Dreams’ was the biggest money spinner. The final part of the jigsaw was to get United spokesperson Bobby Charlton to ‘spontaneously’ mutter the phrase during a TV interview and Bob was quite literally your Uncle, another United legend was born. Within a month the trade mark was adorning the North Stand in twenty foot high letters, just in case anyone dared to forget it.
4. Injury Time...........
