Loyal to what? FC United's ‘shaping walk’ through football's ‘muck of ages’

Abstract

This paper considers the cultural politics surrounding the formation and development of FC United of Manchester. Established in 2005 by boycotting Manchester United fans following their failed attempt to prevent Malcolm Glazer's takeover, FC United was envisaged as a radical, do-it-yourself version of the football club they wanted Manchester United to be. Driven by an idea that football and its clubs should be run in the interests of community stakeholders rather than financial investors, the supporters rejected what they saw as the more compliant and commodified relationship now demanded by attendance at or consumption of top-level English football. The paper examines how traditional notions of authenticity are articulated and understood by supporters who either embrace or reject the notion of a DIY football club. Political as well as cultural capital is at stake, disrupting traditional values of loyalty. The ambivalence experienced by increasing numbers of contemporary fans means that continuity and change seem never far apart, with football supporter culture facilitating, often simultaneously, both a yearning for what might be along with a fear for what might be lost.

Notes

^1.Hattenstone, ‘Labour Party Returns to Manchester’.

^2.Billig, Banal Nationalism.

^3.Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity; Rowbotham and Beynon, Looking at Class; and Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture.

^4.Blackshaw, Zygmunt Bauman, 104.

^5.Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social.

^6.Redhead, ‘Era of the End’; Haynes, Football Imagination.

^7.King, End of the Terraces; Brown, ‘Manchester is Red?’

^8.United We Stand, ‘We'll Meet Again’, 41.

^9.Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.

^10.Bruner, Making Stories.

^11.Zizek, Sublime Object of Ideology.

^12. Source: Manchester Online (27 July 2005).

^13.Kincheloe and McLaren, ‘Rethinking Critical Theory’.

^14.Thornton, Club Cultures.

^15.Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington, Fandom: Identities and Communities.

^16.Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.

^17. Quote attributed to former Celtic and Scotland manager Jock Stein.

^18. On the night of the Glazer family's first visit to Old Trafford, amongst the heated protests that resulted in the new owners being barricaded inside the ground, and later escorted away from the ground in the back of a police van (see Brown, ‘“Not For Sale”?’), one fan was heard to repeatedly shout ‘You've only bought the bricks and mortar, you'll never buy the club’ (author's field notes, 29 June 2005).

^19.Blackshaw, Zygmunt Bauman.

^20. Ibid.

^21. Quote taken from author's participant observation notes (19 May 2005). The public meetings immediately following the Glazer takeover proved to be vitally important forums for mobilizing collective action.

^22. The independent organization of Manchester United supporters over many years, culminating in the protests against Glazer's 2005 takeover and subsequent formation of FC United of Manchester, was described as ‘our shaping walk’ in long-standing fanzine writer Rob Brady's book ‘An Undividable Glow’ (Brady, Undividable Glow).

^23. This slogan appeared on a banner carried on to the pitch by Manchester United fans during a game between Salford City and FC United in October 2006. A few weeks later, a banner appeared at an FC United match quoting a famous riposte by Bob Dylan to a similar taunt received in Manchester's Free Trade Hall in 1966. The banner read ‘Judas? … I don't believe you’.

^24. Manchester Education Committee (2004), ‘MEC Press Release: Operation Havana’, October 7, 2004, http://libcom.org/news/manchester-education-committee-2004

^25.Blackshaw, Zygmunt Bauman.

^26.Turner, Ritual Process.

^27.Needham, ‘Tied Up in Notts’, 15.

^28.McDougal, ‘Saga of Sven’, 14.

^29.Rojek, ‘Consumerist Syndrome in Contemporary Society’, 301.

^30.Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety.

^31. Source: BBC Online ‘606 Message Board’ (21–22 June 2005).

^32.Poole and Stangerup, Kierkegaard Reader.

^33. Source: BBC Online ‘606 Message Board’ (20–21 June 2005).

^34. Richard Rorty, cited in Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, preface.

^35. The Glazer family's spokesman Bob Leffler: ‘the only reason they hate Glazer – if they hate him – is xenophobia and fear of the unknown. It's not logic’ (Brennan, ‘Own Goal by Glazer's Spin Doctor’).

^36.Merrett, ‘Understanding Local Responses to Globalisation’.

^37.Street, Mass Media, Politics and Democracy.

^38.Bauman, Culture as Praxis, xix.

^39.Williams, Marxism and Literature.

^40. Ibid., 115.

^41. Ibid., 117.

^42. Ibid., 122.

^43. Ibid., 123.

^44. Ibid., 125.

^45. Marx and Engels wrote of a need for ordinary men and women to avoid becoming bogged down in what they called the ‘muck of ages’; those seemingly integral and often appealing affiliations and loyalties that bring with them a stake in holding onto systems, institutions or ideas that serve to maintain the status quo (Barker, ‘Muck of Ages’).

^46.Barker and Cox, ‘“What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?”’13.

^47.Williams, Marxism and Literature.