The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  It was how he did it though that rankled with some of the United faithful and football fans around the world. The Man Utd purchase was funded with money Glazer didn’t have; borrowed from here, there and everywhere at dizzying interest against future profits (‘leveraged’ is how financiers describe this kind of deal). Previously debt free, in fact supremely wealthy, overnight United were in hock for millions. By the end of the brief Moyes era, United had paid out over £680 million in interest fees, bank charges and debt repayment, twice as much as they invested on players.

  Football fans often talk a good fight but, disappointingly in view of the game’s roots in the industrial heart of Britain, they are by and large quiescent and even depoliticised. Compared to Germany, where fans control the clubs and ticket prices are correspondingly low, or even Italy where, for good or ill, teams like Roma and Lazio have deeply entrenched political allegiances on the left and the right, British fans have been a pretty docile lot, saving their anger for other supporters rather than the game’s establishment. When Glazer bought Manchester United with borrowed money and plunged them into debt there was some outcry, but most fans simply rolled their eyes, shrugged and carried on handing him their money. Some fans organised a protest by which they sported yellow and green scarves, the club’s original colours back when they were called Newton Heath. The Supporters Trust chairman explained it thus, ‘We need to embrace 21st Century campaigning techniques and while there is still a place for traditional protests the way to get really large numbers involved is to use the available technology and create a viral campaign which once unleashed becomes unstoppable.’

  All very nice, but none of this affected the Glazers’ bank balance of course. The scarf wearers still handed over their 40 quids, still cheered on the team, however little it belonged to them. High profile but almost entirely ineffectual, it was in some ways the quintessential modern gesture.

  All football fans have at their disposal of course a highly and instantly effective tool with which they could get their own way on just about any matter. They could stay away. A weekend of empty stadiums, seen on TV around the world, slashing profits for owners and ruining the lucrative product for TV companies, could effect any change the fans wanted. This however is seemingly unthinkable in our indulged age. When one brave soul suggested it on a football phone in, Robbie Savage, journeyman player turned abysmal pundit, spluttered, ‘You can’t do that, you can’t do that, it … it’s not fair on the players.’ Au contraire, Robbie. In a free country, you can do what you like and withdrawal of support, like withdrawal of labour, is one of the few weapons working people have against the might of capital. One would have thought even Robbie Savage knew.

  But some United fans were made of sterner, better stuff and they did just that. They went away and stayed away. But they didn’t just turn their back on the club they loved and had had stolen from them. They did something much more positive and idealistic. They built their own club from the bottom up, and in the teeth of ridicule and derision from fans and pundits who lacked their courage and idealism. They are called FC United of Manchester and they are my favourite football team, and, wherever you’re from, whoever you support, they should be one of yours too.

  That probably doesn’t include Sir Alex Ferguson. He dismissed the people behind FC United of Manchester as ‘attention seekers’ when they decided to start their own football club in 2005. Quite what the ennobled, supposedly socialist Scot, thinks of them now is not known. Perhaps he’s too busy with his ambassadorial role at Old Trafford, for which he is said to be paid a hundred thousand pounds a day, a sum that would keep FC United, all its outgoings, all its players and staff, in business for a year. At an away game in the rarefied surrounding of a grassy embankment at Halesowen Town FC an FC United fan told me that they do not by and large hate Manchester United. They don’t hate Sir Alex. In fact they acknowledge the great debt of gratitude they owe him. It’s just that they find disparaging remarks like his a bit rich, which in his case is le mot juste.

  FC United were born of frustration, as Manchester band James once sang, over a bhuna and a tarka dhal in a restaurant on Rusholme’s Curry Mile. In what the Guardian’s Julian Coman described as FC United’s ‘‘Granita’ moment’, a bunch of vocal and aggrieved United fans and fanzine writers, led by Andy Walsh of Red Issue magazine, decided to take what they called ‘the nuclear option’ of starting their own club. At an initial meeting, a breathtaking £100,000 was pledged, and the founders chose the name FC United, later rejected by the FA as ‘too generic’. A later postal and net vote chose Football Club United of Manchester over AFC Manchester 1878, Manchester Central and Newton Heath United.

  Open trials produced a squad of 30 with applicants coming from all over the world. The first game, a friendly held at Leigh, drew a crowd of 3,000 and, as one of the founders, journalist Tony Howard, wrote ‘for the first time in football history, a celebratory pitch invasion greeted a 0-0 draw in a friendly.’ Writing about the club’s early matches, like their first ever league game at Leek, he wrote of the novelty too of being ‘greeted with open arms by pub landlords and locals alike – a new experience for those of us used to keeping our heads down on visits to opposition towns because of the hatred the country feels for MUFC.’

  In the beginning, they met with opposition from within the ranks of ‘Big United’s’ support. They were called worse than ‘attention seekers’. They were called ‘traitors’ and ‘splitters’. People squared up to them in Manchester boozers. When they first announced that they were going to start their own team and play matches at Bury’s Gigg Lane, 30 minutes by tram from Old Trafford, there was some hostility. Some said they would stop them. They didn’t succeed. Now I was headed there too.

  I am not the first visitor from Wigan to Gigg Lane, Bury. There was the team from Wigan who came to play Bury FC in the first ever match at the ground in September 1885. We lost. These days the Gigg Lane is actually technically called the JD Stadium after the sportswear firm who sponsor it. Nobody does though, at least none of the people I encounter as I make arrangements for my first trip to see FC United.

  For the first decade of their existence, FC United borrowed or rather rented grounds, primarily this one, Bury’s Gigg Lane for which they pay £5,000 a match. It is a neat little ground with a long history and, like Spotland, one of those grounds whose very name can make football romantics dewy-eyed with nostalgia. One of the very first games ever played under floodlights happened here on Bonfire Night 1889 – when a crowd of 7,000 watched Bury lose 5–4 to Heywood Central under ‘Wells Patent Lights’. This was several years before the FA actually allowed floodlit matches so the ground has a good track record of sticking it to ‘the man’. There is a Manchester Road Stand, a South Stand and, best of all, a Cemetery End.

  The Gigg Lane car park charges three quid to park ten seconds from your seat. My ticket costs £8 and the lady with the metal moneybox has no change for my tenner. I say keep the change because a) it’s a good cause and b) I will never, ever say ‘keep the change’ again at a football turnstile. On research trips for my books, I tend to just turn up at places unannounced and incognito, if not always alone (there’s a word about this at the end of this book). But sometimes it seems right or practical to say I’m coming, thus I’d been put in touch with the people at FC United via Luke, who’d sorted out my trip to the Olympiacos game.

  To my mild embarrassment this means when I arrive at the ground I have been put on some kind of list that I hesitate to call VIP but which has apparently singled me out for some special treatment. I ask if there’s anywhere to get some food and am told there is a burger van outside ‘but’ the nice lady adds with a conspiratorial nod as if to acknowledge my special status ‘you can bring it in and eat it in the lounge where it’s warm’.

  The lounge at Gigg Lane is light and airy, and sits at low touchline level with large windows overlooking the pitch. It’s nicely busy half an hour before kick off, but I find a table and mull the programme
over my burger, chips and pint of Lager. FC United have had a busy and successful first ten years. They entered the North West Counties Division Two in 2005, winning the league in their inaugural season. In their second season, they walked off with the Division One title which saw them promoted to the Northern Premier League North. 2007–08 saw them promoted again, and since then they have played in the Northern Premier League (sponsored by Evo-Stik). Tonight’s opponents are Chorley, who I would regularly see against Wigan when we were in this league in the mid-1970s. Chorley are still there but doing well, and tonight is a top of the table clash that will have a definite bearing on the title and promotion races. A ‘six pointer’ as the modern football cliché has it.

  The game gets under way. The pitch is muddy and threadbare which doesn’t help the overall standard of play early on. There are lots of hopeful balls that plop pointlessly in no man’s land, much one-footedness and many speculative passes hit high into the air. Slowly though it becomes more coherent. Chorley look tough and well-organised and FC United are far from having it their own way, even though they are, theoretically at least, at home. After 12 minutes Chorley go ahead to a very dubious penalty while United are denied what seems a clear cut one.

  The real revelation though is the support. FC United’s fans start singing before kick off and quite literally do not stop for the duration of the match. It becomes quickly apparent that this is more than just the usual ingrained tribal support for one’s club. There is a zeal about this that’s almost evangelical. This is a mission. There’s much talk around FC United of this being Punk Football, a DIY alternative to the slick, expensive mainstream stuff. So it’s apt that one of FC’s top songs is a reworking of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ as manifesto: ‘I am an FC fan/I am Mancunian/I know what I want/ And I know how to get it/I want to destroy Glazer and Sky/Cos I wanna be at FC’. Other big numbers in the repertoire are a version of Cornershop’s ‘Brimful of Asha’ adapted as a paean to former skipper David Chadwick:

  He’s big, and he’s Chaddy, and he’s 31,

  He’s big, and he’s Chaddy, and he’s 31,

  Everyone needs a nutter in the middle,

  Everyone needs a nutter.

  There is also a fairly straight love song rendition of The Carpenters’ ‘Top of the World’, born of a night high up in a deserted Hamburg stadium where the club had gone to play a friendly with kindred German spirits, the fan owned, cult club St Pauli. This team, maverick, leftist and defiantly ‘other’ are seen as a kind of template for FC United, and the teams that will hopefully come in their wake.

  Most of the chants though are derogatory to one degree or another to either Sky or the Glazer family, though not to ‘Big United’ itself. Andy Walsh, now general manager of FC United has said:

  I was born a Manchester United fan and I’ll die a Manchester United fan … My father took me to my first game when I was five and I took my own children at the same age. Deciding to withdraw my season ticket application was one of the most painful decisions of my life, but I just couldn’t afford to take my family to matches. The Glazers have shown they’re not interested in fans like us. All they’re interested in is people with big wallets.

  I’m seated next to three guys with varying degrees of visual impairment excitedly following the game through miniature telescopes and relaying the action to each other fluently and at speed. When a controversial sending off occurs they see the incident far better than me, and describe it to me in detail and, it later turns out, absolutely accurately. It would be naive to say that FC United are anything as anodyne as politically correct; the language used about Glazer, Sky and Manchester City is salty and robust enough to disabuse anyone of this notion. But there’s certainly an ethos at work here – egalitarian, socialistic, progressive, call it what you will – that you don’t feel at other clubs big or small.

  It’s one–nil to Chorley at half time and I pop back into the bar where a friendly chatty guy called Mike brings round the raffle tickets. I buy a tenners’ worth and he seems genuinely chuffed and grateful for the support from a neutral. He shares my love of northern soul and he tells me of his youth when the mere rumour that someone had a copy of Frank Wilson’s ‘Do I Love You’ would send you driving for miles, in those pre-CD, pre-internet days before everything was available instantly. Over a pint, Mike explains the real appeal of FC United and what underpins his support for the club:

  I don’t care if we go up or not really. I just want the thrill of owning my club, of paying twenty quid to go on the coach to the north-east with like minded people to play Blyth Spartans. We don’t have a fat cat owner. We have a board and they make the day-to-day decisions. They’re not always the right decisions and they can take forever but you are bound to get dissent and argument in a democracy. Three thousand people own this club and they are all fairly left wing. That can make things quite lively …

  Via Mike I’m introduced to FC’s press officer Adrian. (The ‘press room’ at Gigg Lane seemed rammed with blokes drinking and shouting so I doubt any one was filing elegant profiles for the New Yorker from there.) Adrian’s from Middlesbrough but his wife is a lifelong ‘Big United’ fan so he has never had any real antipathy or resentment for the larger club. He reckons that support for FC United is fairly evenly split between old United fans who still watch both, real refuseniks who will never set foot in Old Trafford again, and people who simply think this is how a football club should be run and that FC are a good, even romantic, cause worth supporting. The category I seem to have fallen into in fact.

  The second half is much more eventful. As well as my burgeoning affection for United, I also nurture a petty local grievance against Chorley since the small borough is a near neighbour of Wigan, and I become more partisan as the game wears on. In fairness to Chorley, though, their support too is extraordinary. They’ve brought about a thousand fans and they sing their hearts out throughout. Against this comes the constant barrage of noise and movement from the FC United ‘Ultras’ behind the goal, who sporadically set off crimson and scarlet flares. It looks fun.

  When I was a Wigan Athletic season ticket holder, I would sit in the fairly demure West Stand at home games, but I would sometimes feel a pang of desire to be with the 200 or so nutcases who would butt right up against the huge blocks of support that the big teams would bring with them and taunt them, good naturedly and sometimes not. It was nothing to do with hooliganism, just an acknowledgment of what I think is a fundamental truth and allure of football, maybe the one Rodney Marsh was hinting at; the desire to support a cause wholly and a little irrationally in the face of all odds and as an escape from the tame logic and order of the everyday.

  Those FC Ultras go berserk when United player Charlie Raglan hits a sweet volley home from the edge of the box and it is mayhem when, in the last two minutes, they equalise and then have another player sent off. It’s a ludicrously exciting end to the game and an FC banner reading ‘Children of the Revolution’ swirls through clouds of smoke and light. Most FC United songs are lusty and galvanising, but one is poignancy itself; their version of Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’. It’s a song about Salford that becomes a melancholy but defiant pledge about home and hope:

  This is our club, belongs to you and me

  We’re United, United FC

  We may never go home

  But we’ll never feel down

  When we build our own ground

  And now they have. In late May 2015, I went to my first match at Broadhurst Park, a 5,000 capacity stadium in Moston, a beautiful edifice in steel, concrete and wood in the style of railway sleepers, a tribute to the railway men of Newton Heath which begat Manchester United. That first match was against Portuguese champions Benfica. This too was a nod to Manchester United’s past, as they beat Benfica in the 1968 European Cup final; a totemic game from the era of Best, Law and Charlton. Tonight FC United lose by a single goal scored by Diogo Gonzales, ‘who clearly hasn’t read the script’ as the announcer hilariously put it.
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  Broadhurst Park stands on the site of the old Ronald Johnson Playing Fields, Moston, and paid for (with a little help from the council) by the dreamers of FC United at a cost of some £6 million. The name was voted for by FC’s fans. One of the narrowly rejected proposed names, using an acronymic of FC United of Manchester, but with a cheeky twinkle, was FCUM Hall.

  I was told this by Dave, project manager for the new stadium, at the Halesowen Town away game. Yes, soon after my first time, I went back to see FC play, in Halesowen on a tiny patch of grass in the middle of a housing estate in the West Midlands. I soon became addicted to what some wags call ‘the crystal meth of football’. Since that first game and before the opening of Broadhurst Park, I travelled to see FC play at their borrowed homes, Gigg Lane of course, the Tameside Stadium in Ashton-under-Lyne and, most evocatively, Bower Fold, Stalybridge (Stalyvegas), for a night game in the hills. That night, seven balls were lost by being kicked out of the ground into the depths of the adjoining woodlands, and a horse and rider made their way across a ridge in the hills behind the stand, in the moonlight, as if King Arthur were an FC fan who’d popped down for the second half. By the time I was getting a cab across the Midlands on a bitter, bleak Saturday to watch them play in Halesowen, I had to acknowledge that I had a problem. But I can handle it.

  What gets in the blood about FC if you love football is the sense that there is an alternative. An alternative to what football has become and how it has been wrested away from the people who made it and who loved it, taken out of their towns and control, and handed to a self-serving elite of plutocrats. Tony Howard, who still does the excellent match day programme, sees much about FC United’s raison d’être as explicitly political. He is a committed trade unionist and, for him, these values underpin the club, enshrined in ideas like a ‘pay what you can afford’ season ticket, for which some chose to still fork out the 600 quid they had at Big United.