The Manchester United fans streamed onto the pitch from the far corner of the ground, fanning out on the turf, bellowing their war cry: "We want the Glazers out, say we want the Glazers out!"
Faced with the unprecedented, Sky Sports touchline reporter Geoff Shreeves reached for the familiar: "This is obviously NOT what we want to see, and the security here at Old Trafford . . . has failed."
Shreeves’ instincts were sound. Commentators always say “this is not what we want to see” at exactly those moments when everybody’s eyes are out on stalks, straining to absorb every detail. Social media quickly filled with images of the triumphant United fans, flooding through the barriers, past the hopelessly outnumbered yellow jackets, through the dark stadium corridors and out onto the glorious sunlit green of the pitch.
The general roar of online commentary about the invasion was missing one familiar register: many of the football media’s most prominent voices were absent, having joined in with the Premier League-led protest against online abuse by boycotting social media from Friday to Monday. The well-intentioned boycott rested on the unspoken assumption that this would be a typical weekend where nothing much happened, and unfortunately the world had failed to play along. Journalists were now struggling with the question of whether tweeting about the sensation that was unfolding at Old Trafford would constitute another insult to the victims of online abuse.
Thankfully Sky Sports faced no such quandary, and the two-and-a-half largely unscripted hours that followed were among the most remarkable in the channel's history, far more exciting than any recent United-Liverpool match. We could have guessed that the revolution would be televised, but to have Graeme Souness on doing live analysis was an unexpected bonus.
‘Honourable thing to do’
Gary Neville continued to revel in his role as tribune of the people, telling the Glazer family: "The fans are saying that their time is up . . . they're going to make a fortune if they sell the club and if they were to put it up for sale now I think the time would be right, and it would be the honourable thing to do." Neville's offer to the Glazers was essentially the Bull McCabe's: be a good Yank, turn around, and go home.
With Jamie Carragher and Roy Keane both agreeing that the protest was the fans’ way of saying “enough is enough”, it fell to Souness to put the case for the billionaires, but the way he made that case suggested a certain lack of familiarity with the detail.
“They’ve had to put collateral in, you don’t just go to the bank and say I want to buy Manchester United, I’ll need £500million or however much it costs to buy, without committing some sort of collateral,” Souness said, apparently unaware that the collateral the Glazers put up to borrow the funds to buy Manchester United was . . . Manchester United itself.
“They’ve risked things to buy Manchester United. Since then, they’ve given successive managers fortunes to spend,” he continued, in a speech that seemed perfectly if inadvertently calibrated to push all the angriest buttons of United supporters who have been raging against the Glazers since 2005.
How is it possible that, nearly 16 years after the takeover that introduced millions of football fans to the concept of the leveraged buyout, one of English football’s most prestigious pundits still seemed to understand so little about it?
The reality is that the Glazer ownership has cost United more than a billion pounds. The club has received nothing from the arrangement other than the dubious pleasure of being owned by the Glazers. The idea that the Glazers have “given successive managers fortunes to spend” is nonsensical. All the signings were made with money that was generated by the club, not given by the owners. United under the Glazer ownership are a race car dragging a parachute which some people seem to have mistaken for the engine.
How widespread are these delusions?
You’re left to wonder: how widespread are these delusions, and how necessary are they to the continued functioning of the system? How many people simply assume that, because the Glazers seem to be successful business people, the crazy arrangements they have put in place at Manchester United must make some kind of sense? How many of the unjust structures of our world are bolted in place with rivets of sheer apathy, inertia, and cluelessness? And what happens when a critical mass of people wake up?
It was obvious in 2005 that the leveraged buyout [LBO] was terrible news for United – good for nobody except the former owners who were cashing out, and the new owners who were cashing in. But nobody did anything to change the rules. Two years later the same thing happened to Liverpool, whose LBO ended with the club almost going bankrupt. Still nobody did anything to change the rules – because even though LBOs are demonstrably terrible for clubs, the rules are made by the owners, and they only make rules that benefit owners. If they banned LBOs, then none of the owners could cash in by having their club taken over in an LBO. So, as recently as January, Burnley became the most recent club taken over in an LBO.
Government intervention offers one route to reform, but England’s fake-populist government is better at exploiting grievances than actually addressing them. Yes to Union Jack lapel pins when they go on TV; No to clipping the wings of the powerful billionaires who own the country’s biggest football clubs.
And yet the spectacular upheaval of the last two weeks, from the instant collapse of the Super League, to the abandonment of English football's biggest fixture, have shown us something profound. The "owners" are not owners in the way they thought they were. They believed ownership conferred the power to do whatever they wanted with 'their' clubs. Instead it turns out that other people have a say, that ownership means little without the fans' consent – and that fans are finally figuring out how to say no.
