Does it matter who buys Manchester United? Does it make a difference what I think of the sale? Is it worth expending the energy supporting a position in the affair – what with the salad shortage and the gas price and the whole post-Millenial spiral of shitflation the world seems to be sucked down?
Oh, for the good old days when everything was honest muck. Oh, for Louis Edwards sending his ‘right hand men’ out in a butcher’s van back and forth across the city, snaffling up every last pensioner’s share so the benevolent ‘Mister Louis’ could take control of the club on the sly while his fellow directors slept.
‘Twas ever thus, the dirty business of football ownership.
Louis may not be fondly remembered for his custodianship of the club but let’s give the man his due: his lackeys stroked the cats of little old ladies in front parlours from Heywood to
Heald Green; he took care of the leftovers at Manchester Abbatoir and paid off the council in British brown envelopes so local schoolchildren could be fed; and when it came on top for him he got a Burnage business guru to dream up a million new shares so pensioners could once more have the chance to buy a stake in his dream.
Next to the Qatari state authority, he’s family.
There were times last week, watching this supposedly strong but strangely narrativeless Manchester United side getting flogged over a gym horse at Anfield, when you might have thought there was no history to the club at all. That what you were watching was some kind of corporate spectacle devised around an imaginary game called ‘football’ – rather less like the famous wall game in The Cliff car park said to be the playing field on which the United empire was built; more like how the pilot to It’s a Knockout must have looked in 1966 to innocent eyes.
As the sale of the club today moves to its next phase – in which Old Trafford opens its books to the two declared bidders – it’s between Britain’s richest tax exile and Qatar’s least plausible private citizen at the moment – Mancunians should not overlook what a debacle the ownership of United has been over the years.
That the fate of our fanciest crown jewel should have hinged so squeakily on a row about a horse two decades ago seems to say a lot about our historical Manchester School of economics. In fact, it says: we spaffed it on a horse.
Rock of Gibraltar begat the Glazers begat the present petro cracker-pulling – lest we require one day to tell our grandchildren who gave us the magic beans.
It leaves the Glazers to choose between two bidders who don’t yet meet their valuation.
Should the Qatari bid be successful – and the six Glazer siblings, who are split over the sale, may decide yet merely to groom and water their trusty cash cow before returning it to its stall – then the word ‘Manchester’ on the club badge may begin to drain of its significance.
If Monaco resident Jim Ratcliffe prevails, on the other hand – he’s proposing to stump up a figure similar to the amount he denies the British exchequer, annually, and bring in cycling’s former Team Sky performance director Dave Brailsford – then God only knows the chaos that will evenetuate if anybody so much as tests positive for Lucozade.
Never mind that the club held high the name of the city across the globe amid dark days of the Twentieth Century, when all else associated with Manchester spoke of decline.
The story of the club which rose from the ashes of the Munich air disaster is one of the foundation myths in sport. It’s part of world heritage. There are other models of ownership we could try, of course…but no, that won’t be happening, will it?
Does it matter who buys Manchester United? For generations Mancunians have known that if they break down in the Andes in a clapped-out Morris Minor they can secure the help of a passing farm hand simply by uttering the words ‘Bobby Charlton’.
We wouldn’t want to lose that, now, would we?
The Faux Rogan Experience
What it must be like to be Austin Collings – scribbler of small press genius, expectorator of spoken word sound-mash, purveyor of the suspiciously meaningless but strangely ominous-sounding pun – is a question we lesser mortals can only sigh over in the spate of our envy.
The Radcliffe-born writer must have thought all his Hexmasses had come at once when The White Hotel fell into his lap as a playpen for his uniquely chippy interrogations of the zeitgeist. Whether it’s restaging the funeral of Princess Diana; celebrating the art of the Daily Star or interviewing some sunlight-starved Gordon Burn type author about his unhealthy back list, TWH’s artistic director can familiarly be relied upon to split the difference between pushing the envelope and failing to conceal the fact that the whole thing has been dreamed up on the back of one – not so much a legend as an alternative Manchester International Festival in his own underpants.
As word comes in that Collings’s recent play The Podcast Wars may be set to tour, this seems like news
worth passing on. It’s overdue that a figure so against the rub of the city should break out and try to do some damage further afield. Let’s see how the Edinburgh Festival or Eistedfodd like it.
It’s well-timed, of course, with that whole DIY scene once again at the centre of a big ‘Manchester music renaissance’ feature in this week’s press – it being The Guardian’s turn to weigh the legacy of the Stone Roses and the potential of Loose Articles in one finely calibrated set of hand-scales.
If last month’s one-night-only performance passed you by, then – it’s a Method-soaked solo two-hander starring Hamish Rush as competing Youtubers in masculine crisis, still a little bit anchored to the page – there may be further chances down the line.
“An incredible night, sold out, the response from the audience was fantastic and we’ve had agents and promoters taking an interest, hence the tour” said Collings, clearly not fucking about with a journalist at the other end of a phone line, when reached for comment. “We’ll let you know the dates as soon as we have them.”
@dannyxmoran
