IT WAS like Christmas, your birthday and Michael Portillo losing his parliamentary seat all rolled into one. Manchester United dumped out of the European Champions League by Pierre Foreigner and absolutely nothing Alex Ferguson or his stop-watch could do about it.
A lot of the glee which accompanied their exit can be put down to the ABU (Anyone But United) disease jealousy based on the fact that for much of the 90s, everybody else has been forced to eat Man U s dust.
Their legions of armchair supporters would doubtless like the matter to be full-stopped there but, as two new books argue, there s more to the club s demonisation than straightforward envy.
Whilst acknowledging that not all of football s ills are attributable to what goes on in the Old Trafford boardroom, Ed Horton s Moving The Goalposts and David Conn s The Football Business both finger Martin Edwards & Co for their excessive devotion to plc and profit.
All the greed, all the arrogance, all the desperation to rip football away from its roots, are summed up in Manchester United, charges the lifelong Oxford supporter. They have been the best team in the country over the last decade but they are also far ahead of everybody else in marketing and trivialising football, in shaping football for the benefit of the stock market, in squeezing every last penny of their pocket money from the nation s children.
Aware that such rhetoric needs to be backed up, Horton details just one of the ways the club are exploiting their fans loyalty.
Your chances of getting into Old Trafford without a season ticket are extremely slim, he continues. There are 40,000 season ticket holders, and only 10,000 seats reserved for members, of which there are 100,000. Neither seat tickets nor season tickets are among the most expensive in the Premiership, but Old Trafford may be the only ground in the country where it is actually expensive not to go. To become a member, to give yourself that 10% chance of buying a ticket, will cost you a tenner. Old Trafford bank a million pounds a year before they ve even sold a ticket.
Of course, anyone who thinks that Everton, Wimbledon or, indeed, Oxford United would act any differently if they had the same surfeit of fans, is living in Graham Taylor-land.
Starved of the league title for over 25 years, the Man U hardcore were prepared to accept the official club line that commercialisation was the key to winning trophies. If the odd tradition had to be shed in the process, so be it. It s only now, with more silverware than they know how to celebrate, that they re beginning to examine the price tag.
We re not Luddites, Andy Walsh of the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association tells David Conn in The Football Business. We understand the club has to make money and we want it to be commercially successful so it can pay players wages. But there have to be safeguards for poorer fans who have grown up supporting United, so that they do not get priced out, and so that they are treated with some respect when they come in.
The respect issue has become paramount in recent seasons with the club accused of operating an over-zealous stewarding policy. In light of this, it seems rather unfortunate that the man they ve brought in to enforce their absolutely no standing rule has an SAS background.
But this is all rough stuff and sentiment to the people who run Manchester United plc, Conn reasons. Look at the figures: turnover #53m, profit #11m, the company valued at #460m. The team is winning, the ground is packed, new tier, boxes and all. The City fund managers are thrilled, and they are the people who matter now, not the ones hurrying along on a cold night in Stretford, with chips and gravy, a season ticket quadrupled in price and a copy of United We Stand.
While unaware of the drama that was to unfold after he put his book to bed last summer, Conn is one of the first people to suggest that it could be the pressure of the plc, rather than the job, which eventually causes Alex Ferguson to quit the dug-out. There s certainly a case to be argued that had he been given the #12m he wanted to buy a world-class striker (probably Chile s Marcelo Salas), United would still be in the Champions League rather than mourning the #20m which was instantly wiped off their share price when they were knocked out.
There are those at St. James Park who wouldn t be surprised if Fergie is part of a managerial walk-out double; Kenny Dalglish is still smarting from the stock market-appeasing sale of Les Ferdinand which effectively ended Newcastle s season before it had begun. One also suspects that he wouldn t have been quite so hard on lowly Stevenage Borough if he hadn t had the money men breathing down his sheepskin.
While Conn concentrates on the club s wooing of the financial markets, it s Horton who nails down the reasons why opposition supporters hate United with the venom they do.
This is a club which blamed a loss at Southampton on the confusion caused by the colour of the shirts they were wearing, he reflects. A club whose manager complained that it was unfair that he had to play Liverpool the Saturday before a midweek European game.
Nothing is more indicative of their arrogance than their contempt for the League Cup in which they refuse to put out anything more than a token reserve side. If they ever wonder why they re resented by supporters, while the great Liverpool sides were mostly admired, they might remember that in 1984, when Liverpool won the Championship and the European Cup, they won the League Cup into the bargain. They played to win, like professionals.
As painful as it is for an Everton fan such as myself to admit, he has a point. n
Ed Horton s Moving The Goalposts and David Conn s The Football Business are both published by Mainstream price #14.99