An abridged version of this essay first appeared in the online edition of Granta.
Like so many people, the greatest day of my life was May 26, 1999, when Manchester United beat Bayern Munich with two goals in injury time and won the European Champions League for the second time in their history.
I was sixteen at the time and we were midway through the summer term at my boarding school in Northamptonshire. I might have been the only kid from Manchester in the whole place, even if home was a posh suburb rather than anything close to the Gallaghers. At any rate, United were known to be my team, not least because there weren’t all that many serious football fans—I could still tell you who supported Newcastle or Stoke or Derby. Everyone would watch Match of the Day for something to do on a Saturday night, but football was generally regarded as plebeian and those who liked it too much were derided as “Kevins.” That seemed to be the view of the institution too: I remember campaigning for us to be allowed to play football instead of hockey as our sport during the term that came between rugby and cricket. There were already a few alternatives like squash or swimming or badminton, but those apparently posed no threat to the school’s identity or ethos.
I was the kind of smart-aleck scholarship boy who took pleasure in flouting the prevailing culture of Barbour-jacketed rugger-buggery, but I was also the kind of geek for whom any sport can quickly become a rabbit hole. It began with cricket when I was around six or seven, but by the time adolescence hit football had largely taken over. I used to love picturing myself as the manager, filling notebooks with sketches of different formations and lists of players to buy and sell. In the break between morning classes I would slip into the newsagents and brave the owner’s disapproving gaze to scour the tabloids for transfer gossip before emerging at the till with a pack of crisps. Every so often I did actually buy a magazine. Sometimes it was FourFourTwo, where you could read about up-and-coming players from around the world as well as tactical developments such as the German sweeper system or the Italian catenaccio defense, but most often I landed on United’s official club magazine, which contained must-read columns by ex-players George Best and Brian McClair as well as vital information about youth prospects. One day I tried my luck and wrote a letter to the United manager recommending an under-eighteen player called Gareth Fulton from Portadown in Northern Ireland who I’d seen tipped for the top in one of the magazines, and when I didn’t hear anything back I wrote again to make sure the message had been received. (Googling him now, it looks like Fulton lasted one or two seasons in professional football before pursuing a master’s in anthropology at Maynooth University.)
We had classes on Saturday mornings, there being no other way to occupy kids at boarding school, and I remember one early kickoff between United and Arsenal that coincided with a double English lesson. I did everything the teacher required of me in terms of reading aloud, taking notes, answering questions and so forth, all while furtively listening to the radio broadcast, my head tilted to one side and resting against fingers that concealed a single earphone whose wire led through the sleeve of my navy blazer, down my chest and back into the Walkman resting in my trouser pocket. I had agreed to pass reports to an Arsenal-supporting friend, but when Marc Overmars scored them a late winner I instead announced that my battery had run out. It seemed easier than accepting the humiliation head on, except that when my friend finally saw the score he guessed what I had done and confronted me. At that point the only option was to double down, conceding nothing, which I did for something like the next twenty years.
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A quarter of a century later, it’s hard to project myself back into the level of passion that could have ensnared me in a lie like that. Age and kids have made me weary, but I’m not sure even my younger self would care about United as I used to. In fact, I’m not sure anyone cares that much about United any more. The reason is quite simple: we’re shit. We still have the aura of a big club in terms of media interest and the sheer number of supporters, but although we’re capable of winning the occasional cup competition—and we’re in the Europa League final—it’s been twelve years since we last mounted a serious challenge for the league title. That actually makes it sound better than it is. With two games to go in the current season we’re sitting sixteenth, two places above the relegation zone, on course for our second consecutive worst-ever Premier League campaign, having failed to win two games in a row all season, seventeen defeats to our name from 36 matches. Not only is success a distant memory, then, but even the era of false dawns is long gone: we subsist in a dark age of relentless mediocrity in which losing doesn’t even seem to make anything worse. Early in our decline my oldest friends would gloat and goad over WhatsApp; nowadays we can lose to the worst teams in the league without any comment at all. United supporters are the object of pity.
Things couldn’t have been more different in the Nineties—back then you either loved or hated United, and most people hated us. There were specific excuses having to do with alleged bias from the referees, especially over how many penalties or how much injury time we were awarded, but the crux was that we were the biggest club in the country and we had an annoying habit of winning at the last minute. In a culture that valorized plucky underdogs, those who supported United were generally derided as glory hunters, and it was widely claimed that any real Mancunian would support City.
The task of opposing such calumnies was central to my teenage existence and much of my intellectual energy was devoted to it. On the bias claims, for instance, I would point out that the team that attacks the most will typically spend the most time in the opposing penalty area and is therefore likely to win the most penalties. Even if it were true that referees should have given more penalties against United at Old Trafford, meanwhile, that doesn’t mean they were biased: when you have to make split-second judgments it’s hard not to be influenced by the way other people are reacting, and this home-advantage effect was inevitably stronger at the biggest stadium in the country. Something similar went for injury time: it’s much easier to blow the whistle when the game is at a standstill than when an attack is underway, and United always attacked relentlessly in the last few minutes. As for the fanbase, it was true that the proportion who come from Manchester was far lower than the proportion of City fans who came from Manchester. But that was entirely consistent with the proposition that more Mancunians supported United than City. If neither club had any non-Mancunian fans, no one would doubt that United was the bigger club in Manchester: you only needed to look at the shirts as you walked around the city. What confused people was that United had so many fans who came from the rest of the country, not to mention overseas. In any case, to call these non-Mancunians glory hunters was to miss the point. It wasn’t glory they were after, I insisted, but romance.
Founded in 1878 as the Newton Heath railway workers’ team before being reborn as Manchester United in 1902, the club’s story had captivated millions around the world. Central to it was the Munich disaster of February 1958. In brief: Over the course of the 1950s a legendary manager from Scotland named Matt Busby had built up a young but all-conquering team known as the Busby Babes, and they had gone to Yugoslavia to play in the quarter-final of the European Cup. On the way back from the game the plane had to refuel in Munich and in attempting to take off again during a snowstorm it hit a bank of slush at the end of the runway and crashed. Among the 23 fatalities were eight players, including the 21-year old Duncan Edwards, who many said was the greatest player England ever produced. Rather than halting everything as we now would, United continued to fulfill their fixtures for the rest of the season, despite the manager being in hospital and only two of the existing squad being fit enough to take part, and although they only won one of the remaining league games they still managed to reach the FA Cup final. The next season Busby returned, along with several of the crash survivors, to form a new team around the energy of youth, and this second iteration of the Busby Babes eventually grew strong enough to recapture the league title in 1965 and 1967 and then fulfill the promise of the 1958 team by finally lifting the European Cup in 1968.
It was and is an extremely powerful narrative, and it bound people to United—you could begin as a glory hunter and then develop a genuine love as you came to understand the history. As a child I was dimly aware of the Munich disaster through snippets of adult conversation—the death of those boys still hung over the city, and my first-ever flight was to Munich—but my first firm memory of supporting United has to do with them winning a trophy. I was seven years old and the primary school playground was abuzz with excitement because United were about to play in the 1990 FA Cup final. Nobody explained that you had a choice of team. I remember some kids mockingly singing “Man United are short-sighted, tra-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la—they wear stickers on their knickers, tra-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la,” but even they seemed to assume that football meant United.
A lot can change between seven and sixteen, and by the time of the 1999 Champions League final I certainly knew my history. The glorious revival under Matt Busby in the late Sixties had been followed by an extended period of misery during which United were relegated and then recovered to become a so-called cup team, too inconsistent to build anything lasting but capable of the occasional brilliance required to win knockout tournaments. That all changed with the arrival of another Scottish manager, Alex Ferguson, in 1986. After a long period rebuilding the club, Ferguson finally brought the league title back to United in 1993, 26 years after Busby had last won it. That set off a period of sustained success, and by 1999 the one mountain that remained for Ferguson to climb was the European Cup, by then known as the Champions League, which Busby had won in 1968. To even play in the Champions League was a rarity in those days, since you had to have won your domestic league the previous year, and as with all cup competitions there were huge amounts of luck involved in progressing through the knockout stages to the final. But there we were in Barcelona, having already won the league and the FA Cup that year, ready to restore the club to its rightful place in world football by securing an unprecedented Treble.
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I say we were there in Barcelona, but strictly speaking I was standing against the wall of a crowded games room on the top floor of my boarding house in the East Midlands. It had been fifteen years since a British team had been in a Champions League final and for some reason that I’ve never quite understood everyone was taken to be under a patriotic duty to support whichever British team was playing in Europe, regardless of how much they hated them the rest of the time. There must have been about fifty boys in there and somebody had lifted the TV onto the massive wooden cover that protected the pool table when it wasn’t being used. The upper years were in the ringside seats and the rest of us found our niches here and there, some seated, others standing.
The match itself was famously dire. We were without our two best midfielders and seemed frozen by the pressure of the massive stadium. Easy passes were going astray and nothing seemed to be coming off. When Bayern scored from a deflected free kick the whole room fell silent except for two exchange students from Germany whose existence I hadn’t previously been aware of. We all bit our nails as Bayern missed chance after chance and then finally, in the first two minutes of injury time, as their ribbons were already being placed on the cup behind closed doors, came the passage of play that may now have eclipsed the Munich disaster as the defining image of Manchester United’s history. Out of pure desperation our massive Danish goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel went forward for a corner and in the mayhem that resulted from his hulking polar-bear presence the ball pinballed around the penalty area and substitute Teddy Sheringham somehow squeezed the ball into the net. Less than thirty seconds later we forced another corner, and the rest, as they say, is cliché: “You have to feel this is their year. … Is this their moment? Beckham, into Sheringham—and Solskjær has won it! Manchester United have reached the promised land!”
Nothing has ever matched the ecstasy of that moment, which was at once individual and collective, joyful and spiteful. As the Bayern players held their heads and fell to the ground crying, transfixed in horror, requiring the bald Italian referee to pull them up one by one so the match could resume for the last thirty seconds, we cackled and guffawed and then we turned as one to the German exchange students, baying at them like wolves, their moist eyes and red faces only inciting us more, until a big blond Derby fan jumped onto the pool table and started a seemingly endless chant of “Who Let the Dogs Out?”
By the time our collective mania had eventually subsided, its delirious and delicious schadenfreude was replaced, for me at least, with the warm glow of public triumph. This was my team, and their victory was my victory. Did anyone want to accuse the referee of bias this time? The fact was that we were known for our comebacks, we were known for our late goals, and we had done it yet again, this time on the most important stage of all, twice, against all the odds, with the whole country watching, 31 years after we had last won it under Matt Busby, captained on that occasion by the legendary Bobby Charlton, England’s and United’s all-time top scorer, the man who had survived the Munich crash only because he had agreed to swap places with a panicked teammate who felt he would be safer at the back of the plane, Charlton who was there too that night in Barcelona, looking on as he did at every match until dementia took him from us, and who later looked back on Solskjær’s goal as follows: “As the ball hits the net, for me it was as though the world stood still—I thought, this is what paradise is all about … suddenly the world was great again and I thought, well, there is nothing ever going to be better than this.”
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These days my relationship to football is hard to separate from my other forms of internet addiction. Living in America I watch most games on the computer, either alone in my office if it’s a weeknight fixture (given the time difference) or with a child climbing over me at the weekend. But the matches themselves are just the tip of the iceberg, since much of my personal time—the time I have to myself, I mean, once work and home and sleep have been subtracted—is devoted to thinking about United. It fluctuates, but at its worst I’ll be awake in the night, rerunning games in my head, picking the team for the weekend or plotting future transfers. At a minimum I’ll read the BBC, the Times, the Guardian and the Athletic before I go to bed, as soon as I wake up and when I’m sitting on the toilet. I’m a college professor now, so my days are fairly unstructured and the only consistent accountability mechanism is guilt. After a sustained period of concentration I’ll generally reward myself by scanning online forums like Reddit and RedCafe, where similarly solitary fans debrief after games or argue over tweets and transfers; but more often I take the reward in advance of the work that’s meant to justify it. From the point of view of the Manchester United business corporation, registered in the Cayman Islands and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, I must surely count as a hyper-engaged fan. But following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.
Cry me a river, I know. Given the unequal distribution of resources, most football fans don’t expect to win on a regular basis. They know their club’s general position within the pyramid and the joy comes from defying that, whether by getting promoted or qualifying for Europe or just beating one of the big teams. But the fact that I was four when Alex Ferguson took over and 29 when he retired, thirteen Premier League titles later, means that my formative experiences of football inevitably centered around competing at the very top. We didn’t win the league every year, and even when we did the margin usually wasn’t massive. But you always felt we were the team to beat and a couple of lean years would be followed by a successful rebuild. Being a United fan was therefore a pillar of self-esteem as I found my way in the world: I was part of something that other people envied. When you told foreigners you were from Manchester they would ask you about United. With Brits you’d be more reticent, but only in the way that Harvard alums say they studied in the Boston area.
Now that City are the dominant team in Manchester, pumped up with oil money from Abu Dhabi, telling people you support United can give you an air of old-timey authenticity. For as you may have gathered by now, the one thing we’re still reliably good at is nostalgia: 1999 and all that. We’re like aristocrats exiled after a revolution, melancholy at the loss of a birthright we never deserved, happiest roaming the mansions of our minds. Documentaries and podcasts allow us to curl up and relive old triumphs; online forums debate the relative merits of ex-players; stadium crowds distract themselves with hymns to heroes past. Whether we’re winning or losing, at least once every game the camera turns to Ferguson high up in the stands and the commentator asks if he would be happy with what he’s seeing.
I understand the deificatory impulse, since Ferguson has played a role in my life that I can’t quite grasp. As a manager he had something of the mafia boss about him: extraordinarily generous to the loyal, callous to those who crossed him, ruthless in the pursuit of victory, he accumulated power through a combination of kindness and intimidation until he came to rule not only United but also, to a large degree, the whole Premier League. I can see why so many people resented him. To me, though, he was a kind of ethical guide: I still think back to his press conferences and interviews, as well as stories from ex-players alongside his various autobiographies, when going about my own business. Ferguson may not have been a god, but he was certainly a father figure—not only to the players but also to fans like me who hung on his word. When he retired in 2013, out of consideration for his wife after her sister died, it wasn’t just that our football team stopped winning. We also lost a source of authority and order in our lives.
It’s no coincidence, then, that the only time I’ve truly been excited about United since 2013 was when we turned to Ole Gunnar Solskjær as manager just before Christmas in 2018. Solskjær was the one who scored the winning goal in the Champions League final in 1999, and his intelligence and willingness to sacrifice himself to the team meant that he embodied the Ferguson era. It’s hard to write about his period as manager because it still feels sore to me. I could and would defend him for hours, but the fact is that he never won a major trophy and in the end it all fell apart quite badly. What is also true, though, is that having him in charge made it feel like we were United again. I found myself watching his press conferences before and after every game just as I used to do with Ferguson.
“I’d rather be an optimist and be wrong than a pessimist and be right,” Solskjær used to say, and I think I agree. What his time in charge really showed me, though, was something different: that I’d rather we remain United and lose than become a different club and win.
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My wife, by contrast, says I should just switch to City. I know she’s taking the piss, but why exactly is the idea so insane? If you watch football for pleasure, and your pleasure is greater when your team wins, perhaps you should support the team that’s likeliest to win. Young kids tend to follow that reasoning, sometimes even shifting allegiance within the same match. Once you get to a certain age, though, pleasure and pain become a function of attachment rather than the other way around. Although I am indeed happier when my team wins, it does have to be my team. And any pleasure I take is more closely related to a release of anger than anything that could be described as fun.
Even if changing allegiance is unthinkable, what my wife is really getting at, I think, is that no one forces you to actively follow your team, and that you should bear that in mind when you’re manipulating your family into spending a Saturday morning at home just so you can watch a match or when you catch yourself being tetchy or mopey with your kids after you lose. I must know this myself insofar as I happily tune into and out of English cricket depending on who they’re playing and whether I have time, and I almost never check up on my first sporting love, Lancashire County Cricket Club, whose players’ signatures I once displayed proudly on my bedroom wall. It’s not that I no longer enjoy cricket—I still think it’s a better sport than football, fundamentally, capable of producing higher and richer drama—but I’m now capable of slotting it into a utilitarian calculus that reveals I have better things to do.
Even with football I find I can switch off for the sake of my mood when it’s other teams playing. I discovered this strategy when Liverpool played Milan in the 2005 Champions League final. I couldn’t bear to watch for fear they’d win, so I just ignored it. I am aware they pulled off an astonishing comeback victory that day, one that objectively speaking rivals what United did in 1999, but since I’ve never watched the game, even in highlight form, it has never felt fully real to me—it’s as it if happened in someone else’s computer game. And that has essentially been my survival strategy for the last ten years: I read about the dominance of the other teams, but I dull the pain by refusing to experience it directly. City’s success feels fake anyway, given the oil-state cheat code, but even when Liverpool won the league fairly and squarely in 2020 (and again this year) the pain was dulled by the fact that I only had to envy their relentlessly attacking football twice a season when we played them.
So why can’t I withdraw from United? Lately I have had some success with the online aspect thanks to an app that blocks specific websites: I no longer waste time on Tribal Football, for example, which copies and pastes literally every story they can find about your team from any news source in the world—for scientific purposes I can report that there have been twenty United stories posted in the last hour—and I’ve had stretches where I’ve managed to keep off RedCafe that way too. But these are only marginal gains, to use the lingo of our new owners, INEOS; the fundamental attachment remains in place.
Sometimes I’ve wondered whether following a team substitutes for other forms of collective belonging like nationhood and religion. It certainly makes you part of a group, a “we” that transcends the “I,” whose achievements bring you pride or shame, which is important in a society that is generally atomized. But the difference relative to a nation is that there’s no official record of your identification with a team. There’s nothing stopping you saying “they” rather than “we,” and after a really bad defeat you sometimes find yourself doing just that.
In that sense being a fan is more like being part of a community of the faithful than being part of a nation. Your membership lends rhythm to your weeks and years, confers a feeling of belonging, and gives you a narrative within which to locate your daily experience. When a charismatic and wise leader is in place, all of this comes together into a seamless unity. When the leadership is poor, by contrast—picture a dull-witted preacher whose sermons are trite or illogical, or for that matter a stubborn manager who insists on combining a high press and a deep backline—you start to feel ashamed of yourself for being duped. But then you remind yourself that the wilderness years are just a test, that optimism is its own reward, and you say to yourself, Here I stand, I can do no other.
The thing about believers like Martin Luther, though, is that they think their belief gives them the correct view about the basic structure of reality. Following a team feels much more contingent than that. Even during my most fervent phase, when I tried to rebut what I thought were unjustified attacks against United, I never thought I could convert anyone into becoming a supporter. A better comparison might be polytheistic religion, where everyone worships their local gods and expects others to do likewise. But in the case of sport it’s simply not true that everyone worships their local gods. The connection we have to our teams is plainly a function of our individual temperaments and histories.
I think it’s fair to describe what happened to me as a teenager with United as falling in love: I was besotted and infatuated to the point where I was utterly incapable of impartiality. My current relationship to the team reflects those origins. Love has never been an exercise in maximizing. You don’t need to believe that your loved one is the prettiest or wittiest or kindest of all, or that you’re getting the best bang for your buck relative to your own qualities. You just have to believe that they’re the one for you. And that is a function of the life you have lived together just as much as any kind of utilitarian calculus—which is why nostalgia for the early days of passion and possibility plays an active part in any healthy relationship.
Following United during the last decade has been a grim experience. There are many ways in which club has lost the soul that men like Busby, Charlton and Ferguson gave it, and over the last two seasons the rhythm of defeats has been so regular, the football so dull, the management so poor, that I generally find myself relieved when competing obligations restrict me to watching the highlights. But every so often there still arrives a moment, usually as we’re pushing for a goal and the opposition defenders’ clearances begin to land at our midfielders’ feet, the crowd throbbing with each new wave of attack, when I start to feel the oxygen tickling the embers and the flame flickering back to life, and amid the ashes of time I catch a glimpse of my old team and my old self shining forth: “U-N-I-T-E-D, United are the team for me, with a knick-knack paddywhack, give a dog a bone, why don’t City fuck off home?”
An abridged version of this essay first appeared in the online edition of Granta.
Like so many people, the greatest day of my life was May 26, 1999, when Manchester United beat Bayern Munich with two goals in injury time and won the European Champions League for the second time in their history.
I was sixteen at the time and we were midway through the summer term at my boarding school in Northamptonshire. I might have been the only kid from Manchester in the whole place, even if home was a posh suburb rather than anything close to the Gallaghers. At any rate, United were known to be my team, not least because there weren’t all that many serious football fans—I could still tell you who supported Newcastle or Stoke or Derby. Everyone would watch Match of the Day for something to do on a Saturday night, but football was generally regarded as plebeian and those who liked it too much were derided as “Kevins.” That seemed to be the view of the institution too: I remember campaigning for us to be allowed to play football instead of hockey as our sport during the term that came between rugby and cricket. There were already a few alternatives like squash or swimming or badminton, but those apparently posed no threat to the school’s identity or ethos.
I was the kind of smart-aleck scholarship boy who took pleasure in flouting the prevailing culture of Barbour-jacketed rugger-buggery, but I was also the kind of geek for whom any sport can quickly become a rabbit hole. It began with cricket when I was around six or seven, but by the time adolescence hit football had largely taken over. I used to love picturing myself as the manager, filling notebooks with sketches of different formations and lists of players to buy and sell. In the break between morning classes I would slip into the newsagents and brave the owner’s disapproving gaze to scour the tabloids for transfer gossip before emerging at the till with a pack of crisps. Every so often I did actually buy a magazine. Sometimes it was FourFourTwo, where you could read about up-and-coming players from around the world as well as tactical developments such as the German sweeper system or the Italian catenaccio defense, but most often I landed on United’s official club magazine, which contained must-read columns by ex-players George Best and Brian McClair as well as vital information about youth prospects. One day I tried my luck and wrote a letter to the United manager recommending an under-eighteen player called Gareth Fulton from Portadown in Northern Ireland who I’d seen tipped for the top in one of the magazines, and when I didn’t hear anything back I wrote again to make sure the message had been received. (Googling him now, it looks like Fulton lasted one or two seasons in professional football before pursuing a master’s in anthropology at Maynooth University.)
We had classes on Saturday mornings, there being no other way to occupy kids at boarding school, and I remember one early kickoff between United and Arsenal that coincided with a double English lesson. I did everything the teacher required of me in terms of reading aloud, taking notes, answering questions and so forth, all while furtively listening to the radio broadcast, my head tilted to one side and resting against fingers that concealed a single earphone whose wire led through the sleeve of my navy blazer, down my chest and back into the Walkman resting in my trouser pocket. I had agreed to pass reports to an Arsenal-supporting friend, but when Marc Overmars scored them a late winner I instead announced that my battery had run out. It seemed easier than accepting the humiliation head on, except that when my friend finally saw the score he guessed what I had done and confronted me. At that point the only option was to double down, conceding nothing, which I did for something like the next twenty years.
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A quarter of a century later, it’s hard to project myself back into the level of passion that could have ensnared me in a lie like that. Age and kids have made me weary, but I’m not sure even my younger self would care about United as I used to. In fact, I’m not sure anyone cares that much about United any more. The reason is quite simple: we’re shit. We still have the aura of a big club in terms of media interest and the sheer number of supporters, but although we’re capable of winning the occasional cup competition—and we’re in the Europa League final—it’s been twelve years since we last mounted a serious challenge for the league title. That actually makes it sound better than it is. With two games to go in the current season we’re sitting sixteenth, two places above the relegation zone, on course for our second consecutive worst-ever Premier League campaign, having failed to win two games in a row all season, seventeen defeats to our name from 36 matches. Not only is success a distant memory, then, but even the era of false dawns is long gone: we subsist in a dark age of relentless mediocrity in which losing doesn’t even seem to make anything worse. Early in our decline my oldest friends would gloat and goad over WhatsApp; nowadays we can lose to the worst teams in the league without any comment at all. United supporters are the object of pity.
Things couldn’t have been more different in the Nineties—back then you either loved or hated United, and most people hated us. There were specific excuses having to do with alleged bias from the referees, especially over how many penalties or how much injury time we were awarded, but the crux was that we were the biggest club in the country and we had an annoying habit of winning at the last minute. In a culture that valorized plucky underdogs, those who supported United were generally derided as glory hunters, and it was widely claimed that any real Mancunian would support City.
The task of opposing such calumnies was central to my teenage existence and much of my intellectual energy was devoted to it. On the bias claims, for instance, I would point out that the team that attacks the most will typically spend the most time in the opposing penalty area and is therefore likely to win the most penalties. Even if it were true that referees should have given more penalties against United at Old Trafford, meanwhile, that doesn’t mean they were biased: when you have to make split-second judgments it’s hard not to be influenced by the way other people are reacting, and this home-advantage effect was inevitably stronger at the biggest stadium in the country. Something similar went for injury time: it’s much easier to blow the whistle when the game is at a standstill than when an attack is underway, and United always attacked relentlessly in the last few minutes. As for the fanbase, it was true that the proportion who come from Manchester was far lower than the proportion of City fans who came from Manchester. But that was entirely consistent with the proposition that more Mancunians supported United than City. If neither club had any non-Mancunian fans, no one would doubt that United was the bigger club in Manchester: you only needed to look at the shirts as you walked around the city. What confused people was that United had so many fans who came from the rest of the country, not to mention overseas. In any case, to call these non-Mancunians glory hunters was to miss the point. It wasn’t glory they were after, I insisted, but romance.
Founded in 1878 as the Newton Heath railway workers’ team before being reborn as Manchester United in 1902, the club’s story had captivated millions around the world. Central to it was the Munich disaster of February 1958. In brief: Over the course of the 1950s a legendary manager from Scotland named Matt Busby had built up a young but all-conquering team known as the Busby Babes, and they had gone to Yugoslavia to play in the quarter-final of the European Cup. On the way back from the game the plane had to refuel in Munich and in attempting to take off again during a snowstorm it hit a bank of slush at the end of the runway and crashed. Among the 23 fatalities were eight players, including the 21-year old Duncan Edwards, who many said was the greatest player England ever produced. Rather than halting everything as we now would, United continued to fulfill their fixtures for the rest of the season, despite the manager being in hospital and only two of the existing squad being fit enough to take part, and although they only won one of the remaining league games they still managed to reach the FA Cup final. The next season Busby returned, along with several of the crash survivors, to form a new team around the energy of youth, and this second iteration of the Busby Babes eventually grew strong enough to recapture the league title in 1965 and 1967 and then fulfill the promise of the 1958 team by finally lifting the European Cup in 1968.
It was and is an extremely powerful narrative, and it bound people to United—you could begin as a glory hunter and then develop a genuine love as you came to understand the history. As a child I was dimly aware of the Munich disaster through snippets of adult conversation—the death of those boys still hung over the city, and my first-ever flight was to Munich—but my first firm memory of supporting United has to do with them winning a trophy. I was seven years old and the primary school playground was abuzz with excitement because United were about to play in the 1990 FA Cup final. Nobody explained that you had a choice of team. I remember some kids mockingly singing “Man United are short-sighted, tra-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la—they wear stickers on their knickers, tra-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la,” but even they seemed to assume that football meant United.
A lot can change between seven and sixteen, and by the time of the 1999 Champions League final I certainly knew my history. The glorious revival under Matt Busby in the late Sixties had been followed by an extended period of misery during which United were relegated and then recovered to become a so-called cup team, too inconsistent to build anything lasting but capable of the occasional brilliance required to win knockout tournaments. That all changed with the arrival of another Scottish manager, Alex Ferguson, in 1986. After a long period rebuilding the club, Ferguson finally brought the league title back to United in 1993, 26 years after Busby had last won it. That set off a period of sustained success, and by 1999 the one mountain that remained for Ferguson to climb was the European Cup, by then known as the Champions League, which Busby had won in 1968. To even play in the Champions League was a rarity in those days, since you had to have won your domestic league the previous year, and as with all cup competitions there were huge amounts of luck involved in progressing through the knockout stages to the final. But there we were in Barcelona, having already won the league and the FA Cup that year, ready to restore the club to its rightful place in world football by securing an unprecedented Treble.
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I say we were there in Barcelona, but strictly speaking I was standing against the wall of a crowded games room on the top floor of my boarding house in the East Midlands. It had been fifteen years since a British team had been in a Champions League final and for some reason that I’ve never quite understood everyone was taken to be under a patriotic duty to support whichever British team was playing in Europe, regardless of how much they hated them the rest of the time. There must have been about fifty boys in there and somebody had lifted the TV onto the massive wooden cover that protected the pool table when it wasn’t being used. The upper years were in the ringside seats and the rest of us found our niches here and there, some seated, others standing.
The match itself was famously dire. We were without our two best midfielders and seemed frozen by the pressure of the massive stadium. Easy passes were going astray and nothing seemed to be coming off. When Bayern scored from a deflected free kick the whole room fell silent except for two exchange students from Germany whose existence I hadn’t previously been aware of. We all bit our nails as Bayern missed chance after chance and then finally, in the first two minutes of injury time, as their ribbons were already being placed on the cup behind closed doors, came the passage of play that may now have eclipsed the Munich disaster as the defining image of Manchester United’s history. Out of pure desperation our massive Danish goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel went forward for a corner and in the mayhem that resulted from his hulking polar-bear presence the ball pinballed around the penalty area and substitute Teddy Sheringham somehow squeezed the ball into the net. Less than thirty seconds later we forced another corner, and the rest, as they say, is cliché: “You have to feel this is their year. … Is this their moment? Beckham, into Sheringham—and Solskjær has won it! Manchester United have reached the promised land!”
Nothing has ever matched the ecstasy of that moment, which was at once individual and collective, joyful and spiteful. As the Bayern players held their heads and fell to the ground crying, transfixed in horror, requiring the bald Italian referee to pull them up one by one so the match could resume for the last thirty seconds, we cackled and guffawed and then we turned as one to the German exchange students, baying at them like wolves, their moist eyes and red faces only inciting us more, until a big blond Derby fan jumped onto the pool table and started a seemingly endless chant of “Who Let the Dogs Out?”
By the time our collective mania had eventually subsided, its delirious and delicious schadenfreude was replaced, for me at least, with the warm glow of public triumph. This was my team, and their victory was my victory. Did anyone want to accuse the referee of bias this time? The fact was that we were known for our comebacks, we were known for our late goals, and we had done it yet again, this time on the most important stage of all, twice, against all the odds, with the whole country watching, 31 years after we had last won it under Matt Busby, captained on that occasion by the legendary Bobby Charlton, England’s and United’s all-time top scorer, the man who had survived the Munich crash only because he had agreed to swap places with a panicked teammate who felt he would be safer at the back of the plane, Charlton who was there too that night in Barcelona, looking on as he did at every match until dementia took him from us, and who later looked back on Solskjær’s goal as follows: “As the ball hits the net, for me it was as though the world stood still—I thought, this is what paradise is all about … suddenly the world was great again and I thought, well, there is nothing ever going to be better than this.”
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These days my relationship to football is hard to separate from my other forms of internet addiction. Living in America I watch most games on the computer, either alone in my office if it’s a weeknight fixture (given the time difference) or with a child climbing over me at the weekend. But the matches themselves are just the tip of the iceberg, since much of my personal time—the time I have to myself, I mean, once work and home and sleep have been subtracted—is devoted to thinking about United. It fluctuates, but at its worst I’ll be awake in the night, rerunning games in my head, picking the team for the weekend or plotting future transfers. At a minimum I’ll read the BBC, the Times, the Guardian and the Athletic before I go to bed, as soon as I wake up and when I’m sitting on the toilet. I’m a college professor now, so my days are fairly unstructured and the only consistent accountability mechanism is guilt. After a sustained period of concentration I’ll generally reward myself by scanning online forums like Reddit and RedCafe, where similarly solitary fans debrief after games or argue over tweets and transfers; but more often I take the reward in advance of the work that’s meant to justify it. From the point of view of the Manchester United business corporation, registered in the Cayman Islands and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, I must surely count as a hyper-engaged fan. But following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.
Cry me a river, I know. Given the unequal distribution of resources, most football fans don’t expect to win on a regular basis. They know their club’s general position within the pyramid and the joy comes from defying that, whether by getting promoted or qualifying for Europe or just beating one of the big teams. But the fact that I was four when Alex Ferguson took over and 29 when he retired, thirteen Premier League titles later, means that my formative experiences of football inevitably centered around competing at the very top. We didn’t win the league every year, and even when we did the margin usually wasn’t massive. But you always felt we were the team to beat and a couple of lean years would be followed by a successful rebuild. Being a United fan was therefore a pillar of self-esteem as I found my way in the world: I was part of something that other people envied. When you told foreigners you were from Manchester they would ask you about United. With Brits you’d be more reticent, but only in the way that Harvard alums say they studied in the Boston area.
Now that City are the dominant team in Manchester, pumped up with oil money from Abu Dhabi, telling people you support United can give you an air of old-timey authenticity. For as you may have gathered by now, the one thing we’re still reliably good at is nostalgia: 1999 and all that. We’re like aristocrats exiled after a revolution, melancholy at the loss of a birthright we never deserved, happiest roaming the mansions of our minds. Documentaries and podcasts allow us to curl up and relive old triumphs; online forums debate the relative merits of ex-players; stadium crowds distract themselves with hymns to heroes past. Whether we’re winning or losing, at least once every game the camera turns to Ferguson high up in the stands and the commentator asks if he would be happy with what he’s seeing.
I understand the deificatory impulse, since Ferguson has played a role in my life that I can’t quite grasp. As a manager he had something of the mafia boss about him: extraordinarily generous to the loyal, callous to those who crossed him, ruthless in the pursuit of victory, he accumulated power through a combination of kindness and intimidation until he came to rule not only United but also, to a large degree, the whole Premier League. I can see why so many people resented him. To me, though, he was a kind of ethical guide: I still think back to his press conferences and interviews, as well as stories from ex-players alongside his various autobiographies, when going about my own business. Ferguson may not have been a god, but he was certainly a father figure—not only to the players but also to fans like me who hung on his word. When he retired in 2013, out of consideration for his wife after her sister died, it wasn’t just that our football team stopped winning. We also lost a source of authority and order in our lives.
It’s no coincidence, then, that the only time I’ve truly been excited about United since 2013 was when we turned to Ole Gunnar Solskjær as manager just before Christmas in 2018. Solskjær was the one who scored the winning goal in the Champions League final in 1999, and his intelligence and willingness to sacrifice himself to the team meant that he embodied the Ferguson era. It’s hard to write about his period as manager because it still feels sore to me. I could and would defend him for hours, but the fact is that he never won a major trophy and in the end it all fell apart quite badly. What is also true, though, is that having him in charge made it feel like we were United again. I found myself watching his press conferences before and after every game just as I used to do with Ferguson.
“I’d rather be an optimist and be wrong than a pessimist and be right,” Solskjær used to say, and I think I agree. What his time in charge really showed me, though, was something different: that I’d rather we remain United and lose than become a different club and win.
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My wife, by contrast, says I should just switch to City. I know she’s taking the piss, but why exactly is the idea so insane? If you watch football for pleasure, and your pleasure is greater when your team wins, perhaps you should support the team that’s likeliest to win. Young kids tend to follow that reasoning, sometimes even shifting allegiance within the same match. Once you get to a certain age, though, pleasure and pain become a function of attachment rather than the other way around. Although I am indeed happier when my team wins, it does have to be my team. And any pleasure I take is more closely related to a release of anger than anything that could be described as fun.
Even if changing allegiance is unthinkable, what my wife is really getting at, I think, is that no one forces you to actively follow your team, and that you should bear that in mind when you’re manipulating your family into spending a Saturday morning at home just so you can watch a match or when you catch yourself being tetchy or mopey with your kids after you lose. I must know this myself insofar as I happily tune into and out of English cricket depending on who they’re playing and whether I have time, and I almost never check up on my first sporting love, Lancashire County Cricket Club, whose players’ signatures I once displayed proudly on my bedroom wall. It’s not that I no longer enjoy cricket—I still think it’s a better sport than football, fundamentally, capable of producing higher and richer drama—but I’m now capable of slotting it into a utilitarian calculus that reveals I have better things to do.
Even with football I find I can switch off for the sake of my mood when it’s other teams playing. I discovered this strategy when Liverpool played Milan in the 2005 Champions League final. I couldn’t bear to watch for fear they’d win, so I just ignored it. I am aware they pulled off an astonishing comeback victory that day, one that objectively speaking rivals what United did in 1999, but since I’ve never watched the game, even in highlight form, it has never felt fully real to me—it’s as it if happened in someone else’s computer game. And that has essentially been my survival strategy for the last ten years: I read about the dominance of the other teams, but I dull the pain by refusing to experience it directly. City’s success feels fake anyway, given the oil-state cheat code, but even when Liverpool won the league fairly and squarely in 2020 (and again this year) the pain was dulled by the fact that I only had to envy their relentlessly attacking football twice a season when we played them.
So why can’t I withdraw from United? Lately I have had some success with the online aspect thanks to an app that blocks specific websites: I no longer waste time on Tribal Football, for example, which copies and pastes literally every story they can find about your team from any news source in the world—for scientific purposes I can report that there have been twenty United stories posted in the last hour—and I’ve had stretches where I’ve managed to keep off RedCafe that way too. But these are only marginal gains, to use the lingo of our new owners, INEOS; the fundamental attachment remains in place.
Sometimes I’ve wondered whether following a team substitutes for other forms of collective belonging like nationhood and religion. It certainly makes you part of a group, a “we” that transcends the “I,” whose achievements bring you pride or shame, which is important in a society that is generally atomized. But the difference relative to a nation is that there’s no official record of your identification with a team. There’s nothing stopping you saying “they” rather than “we,” and after a really bad defeat you sometimes find yourself doing just that.
In that sense being a fan is more like being part of a community of the faithful than being part of a nation. Your membership lends rhythm to your weeks and years, confers a feeling of belonging, and gives you a narrative within which to locate your daily experience. When a charismatic and wise leader is in place, all of this comes together into a seamless unity. When the leadership is poor, by contrast—picture a dull-witted preacher whose sermons are trite or illogical, or for that matter a stubborn manager who insists on combining a high press and a deep backline—you start to feel ashamed of yourself for being duped. But then you remind yourself that the wilderness years are just a test, that optimism is its own reward, and you say to yourself, Here I stand, I can do no other.
The thing about believers like Martin Luther, though, is that they think their belief gives them the correct view about the basic structure of reality. Following a team feels much more contingent than that. Even during my most fervent phase, when I tried to rebut what I thought were unjustified attacks against United, I never thought I could convert anyone into becoming a supporter. A better comparison might be polytheistic religion, where everyone worships their local gods and expects others to do likewise. But in the case of sport it’s simply not true that everyone worships their local gods. The connection we have to our teams is plainly a function of our individual temperaments and histories.
I think it’s fair to describe what happened to me as a teenager with United as falling in love: I was besotted and infatuated to the point where I was utterly incapable of impartiality. My current relationship to the team reflects those origins. Love has never been an exercise in maximizing. You don’t need to believe that your loved one is the prettiest or wittiest or kindest of all, or that you’re getting the best bang for your buck relative to your own qualities. You just have to believe that they’re the one for you. And that is a function of the life you have lived together just as much as any kind of utilitarian calculus—which is why nostalgia for the early days of passion and possibility plays an active part in any healthy relationship.
Following United during the last decade has been a grim experience. There are many ways in which club has lost the soul that men like Busby, Charlton and Ferguson gave it, and over the last two seasons the rhythm of defeats has been so regular, the football so dull, the management so poor, that I generally find myself relieved when competing obligations restrict me to watching the highlights. But every so often there still arrives a moment, usually as we’re pushing for a goal and the opposition defenders’ clearances begin to land at our midfielders’ feet, the crowd throbbing with each new wave of attack, when I start to feel the oxygen tickling the embers and the flame flickering back to life, and amid the ashes of time I catch a glimpse of my old team and my old self shining forth: “U-N-I-T-E-D, United are the team for me, with a knick-knack paddywhack, give a dog a bone, why don’t City fuck off home?”
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.