Sky Sports absolutely fetishise the money in football. They are the ones wheeling Jim White (possibly football’s biggest prick) out twice a year to celebrate the bi-annual spectacle of clubs putting themselves in financial jeopardy chasing an impossible dream. Every time the transfer record is broken, or a club bets the house on a signing, they crack out the party poppers, and they have never, ever questioned, at any point, the impact of the money being concentrated at the top of the game.
As for Gary Neville, I have three issues with him.
He has little right to moan about money in football, competitiveness, or fair play when he is personally financially doping Salford through the lower leagues. That’s breathtaking hypocrisy.
His (and Sky’s) insistence on gaslighting yesterday’s rioting as ‘peaceful protest’ is not only a complete dereliction of their duty as journalists, it invites and legitimises future similar action, which will provoke a police response, and if anyone else remembers what football was like in the 80s, that should be a concern.
His dogged determination to partly blame Liverpool and FSG for yesterday’s violence. Yesterday was a protest against the Glazers -unrest that has been simmering for 15 years, and the ESL was the trigger that tipped it over again. It had little to do with FSG, and Gary’s insistence that this was a reaction to billionaire owners in general is not only wrong, it’s cowardly, partisan and actually does those United fans who have been protesting for 15 years a huge disservice.
Instead of the mancs continuous no money, no respect for fans from owners, wining on sky and other news channels, and all the other commentators asking when will the game take place…can someone please speak to the other injured party…LFC…has anyone spoke to them, lets see what they suggest…play on our terms now, as for manc fans , the display yesterday justifies no fans from now till next season is over…thugs!!!
To be fair on the first point, he said a couple of times that money alone doesn’t bother him in football and mentioned that he was/is part of it himself, which got him to a place where he is now.
I think we can separate that from the idea of having a closed league with no competitiveness. They tried to mess with maybe 1 single thing that links most football fans in the world, including people like him.
Can I just provide a positive to the postponement? That City haven’t yet won the title and they therefore need to play well against the chavs? I’m counting on them taking 3 points to help our season, and a post-title hangover game against Chelsea would have been disastrous for us.
How much did he care about Salford City fans when he and his other multi-millionaire ex-pros rocked up and bought their club and changed the club colours and badge to suit the branding of the new owners? Did he listen to those fan protests then or did he carry on doing what he wanted with his new play thing with the view to taking them up through the leagues and moulding their image in order to maximise his investment?
Has he asked those fans of a 75 year old, formally amateur community club how they feel about their club being majority owned by an absentee Singaporean billionaire? Or whether they wanted to go professional so him and his mates could play at being owners? Did he put fan representation on the board at his club?
Of course not. He doesn’t actually give a shit beyond the Super League plans that would derail both his punditry career and also have a knock on impact at his club where he’s playing at being the Abramovic of non league/League 2.
On the 50+1 thing, it seems like a complete non starter to me.
What are the anticipated or hoped for steps to get there? Anyone connected to SOS know?
For example, if I own a football club and someone wanted to talk to me about buying part of it, at the very least, in order for me to be willing to listen to what they say, they will have to provide proof of funds to warrant a conversation. That at least shows me they have the means, and assuming my intent as a potential seller, they might be a serious option for me to consider.
Without the funds in place, it’s not a serious thing. It’s akin to looking on RightMove and imagining a lovely 2M home I might want in Caldy or some other nice place. Nice to dream for a moment, but if you don’t have the money, that’s all it is.
“We” managed shit. They drive the club to brink of foreclosure, which took the ownership out of their hands and into the banks’ who made themselves responsible for finding a buyer. Yet the key to the situation was still finding a group who could stump up 300m quid. This happened alongside fan protests, not because of them.
If today we could impose a requirement for FSG to give up 51% of their stake in the company (let’s ignore that it would impossible to impose), where would the 1.5B pounds come from to pay for that?
I don’t know that’s fair. I know people who genuinely walked away from Utd in the 00s because of the glazers and went back to watching non-league football. Beyond that, what options have we had that arent cutting off our noses despite our face? I mean, I know that my friends who started supporting Salford FC are not enjoying their football more than they were before.
Where Utd fans do have to look inward though (at least those who are old enough) are those who spent the 90s and early 200s crowing over how smart they were to go public and celebrating the financial power that gave them. It is lost in the current transfer fees, but their transfer of Rio was a mind-bending purchase at the time. Often times record breaking transfers beget new records (see Maguire for Virgil), but occasionally you see one so out of wack with that everyone is willing and able to do that it doesnt really move the market. That was how the market responded to Rio’s move.
Whilst what you say is partly correct, it was the fan protests which lead to the banks stepping in. Every time H&G tried to nogotiate someone to lend from they would get bombarded with emails and phone calls of complaint - several of them had their servers shut down such was the number of emails they were getting. We managed to leave those 2 shysters so isolated that no lenders were willing to deal with them.
They were the note holder of what had become a distressed asset, had little additional capital of their own to secure new financing and had a bad track record. All this at a time when the banking industry was itself distressed. They were simply a terrible investment for the banks. The fan sentiment could have been viewed as giving them cover to make a bold move they might have otherwise been weary of making (if the owners were popular) but the move to remove them and recoup what they could of their now distressed investment was 100% financial.
Anyway, as for the rescheduling, it wouldn’t surprise me if they tried to leave it to after the regular end of the season in the hope that all other CL related issues are already resolved.
If I’m being honest, I don’t care that people see it as undermining or shitting on the efforts of fellow supporters.
What I’m more concerned with is achieving effective change. If we delude ourselves as to how effective those efforts were, then we would overestimate our ability to get the changes we want. Overplaying our hand can be a huge risk here.
Also, Spirit of Shankly, as far as I can tell, have been utter shite at achieving real change too. Points for getting supporter involvement, but as far as it goes with representing my views as a fan (perhaps I don’t count since I’m not local), or even getting their stated goals, it seems that they have shot themselves in their feet at every single opportunity. If they spent about as much time reflecting on their work and improving their negotiation skills or even just thought processes as they have on crowing on social media about what they’ve supposedly done, they could probably be a lot more successful.
On to the match, which is really the main topic here, as far as I’m concerned, they ought to forfeit the match and hand the 3 points to us. It doesn’t seem logistically possible to hold the match before the end of the season, and certainly if it were Fulham or even West Brom who had this disruption, it would definitely have been the case. But apparently it’s a Manchester team so we must therefore be absolutely deferential to their desires.
Apparently there is an explicit clause in the PL handbook that states that a match will not be forfeited if the cancellation was related to police involvement. Where the line of a policing failure and a club failure lies I’m not sure, but as the clubs pay the police for stadium security I think it likely lies more on the police than the club.
You’re right, it isn’t all of us but the majority for sure.
Would be interesting to know what type of owners would entice those people back to supporting United or whether the top level just isn’t of interest to them any more.
I think there is a wider malaise setting in with what the billionaires would call legacy fans. My brother works as a photographer for Leicester City but prefers watching the women’s team because it doesn’t come with all the trappings the men’s game does. My 70 something next-door neighbour has been a season ticket holder at Leicester for years and years but has lost interest recently as he’s realised the match day crowds pay more than a TV viewer and yet there’s no consideration with changing kick-off times, you get ripped off for food and drinks and now VAR is in place you don’t even know exactly what is going on in the ground anymore.
But most of us have been complicit in football getting to this stage. We pay the TV subscriptions, we clamour for signings and we’re pleased when we get a new shirt sponsor or manufacturer because it means more money so we can compete more heavily.
I think for the ones I know it was a reflection of growing concern over the cost of being a football fan, something that had already been escalating by the mid 00s. You’ve got these memories of being a kid and being able to buy a ticket in the kid’s pen with money you earned, and now as an adult he’s a well to do professional and is met by eye watering costs of trying to take his kid to a Saturday game. The increase in cost of being a match day fan has continued and so I dont think anyone could bring those fans back. And worse, is that once you sever the relationship between the historical match going fan and the club, they in time lose interest in football all together.
I think most of the lads Im thinking of now have more interest in rugby league now.
I’m not sure I totally agree with this. The fan protests definitely played their parts. The club was definitely a distressed asset, but a lot of that distress was the fans creating a toxic atmosphere around investing in the club.
Brian Reade’s book is good on this, but there were a few institutions who did admit that the fan actions put them off investing. Not saying that the weakness of H&Gs proposition wasn’t a big thing as well, but I think given we were still a club with huge potential and lots of assets to secure the loan against, they would have got the financing they needed to soldier on.
