“It’s in the soul of this football club, it’s in the fabric of this football club. They never, ever give in. Against all odds, they keep coming back!”
The club lost its first ever game 6-0 to Bolton Reserves. Suffered relegation multiple times between 1922 and 1940. Eventually when Sir Matt Busby took over United and started rebuilding it from a post-war shell, the team took the title in 1952. Not only did Sir Busby manage to establish the club as a major threat but in doing so, he assembled one of the very best teams known as ‘The Busby Babes’. But on 6th of February, 1958, as the plane took off from Munich, it crash landed, taking the lives of 8 players and the hopes of a million others. Faced with despair, the club fought on. It took 7 years for Manchester United to win the title after the Munich air disaster of ’58. They won it again in ’67 and won the European Cup in ’68. It took them twenty six years to win it again under a certain Scottish manager. And once they did, they never looked back for the next two decades, overtaking Liverpool as the only club in England with 20 league titles and the only English club to ever win a treble.
Throughout the ages, Manchester United football club has been an institution some of us have followed religiously. The Martin Edwards, the David Gills, the Sir Alex Fergusons, we’ve always been looked after by people who genuinely cared about this great football club. Till 2004, the club had no debt. Two years into the Glazer ownership, the net debt was just above £500m. Yet, Sir Alex fought on. Won the league multiple times, won the Champions League, won domestic trophies and did it all with fairly modest transfer budgets and never for once publicly criticized the ownership.
In the last 5 years, a net total of £89m has been taken OUT of the football club. Money, we the fans put into the club, has been used to pay off the dividends to the shareholders. No other club except West Brom has withdrawn any money FROM the club to feed the owners. Chelsea, on the contrary, have had a cash injection of £440m PUT INTO the club. We’ve kept quiet. We’ve watched the empire built by Sir Alex crumble in front of our eyes. We’ve seen the Scousers take the title. Yet, when we finally have a team that has been playing well, we have a manager who knows what this club is about, we are on a trajectory upwards and all we need is a little financial backing to kick on and close the gap on Liverpool, we are let down YET AGAIN.
There’s absolutely no structure and no football knowledge above the manager. The level of incompetence is staggering. Useless fringe players have been put on ridiculously high wages, so much so that they can’t be offloaded. Actual useful players like Ander Herrera have left on a free because their contracts have been run down. We’ve been operating without a naturally right sided player since Fergie signed Wilf Zaha. Still this incompetent board won’t pay up for a talent like Jadon Sancho. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of football can spot a significant lack of pace in the centre-halve pairing, yet that has been left unattended. There is technically no back up for Luke Shaw, yet the left back situation hasn’t been addressed. For the first time in ages we’ve needed to fill a few holes instead of having to do a massive overhaul AND STILL we haven’t received backing. Solskjaer deserves better. The players deserve better. The fans deserve better. Old Trafford deserves better.
I remember when David Beckham visited Old Trafford as an AC Milan player and a green and gold scarf was hurled at him from the Stretford End. He smiled, bent down, picked it up and wrapped it around his neck. Multiple times the anti-Glazers campaign has gathered momentum and subsequently died down. Don’t let it die down this time.
Our history, our culture, our success, our heritage, wasn’t theirs to buy.
SELL THE CLUB.
Into Added Time 