Much has been made of the new Manchester United co-owner Jim Ratcliffe’s Failsworth roots but across Manchester hundreds of people have been owning their own football club for years and, in the process, breaking with the tradition that football club ownership should be the preserve of the super-rich.
You can get an interesting insight into how the movers and shakers of late-stage capitalism view the hoi polloi from the advertising boards strewn along main transport arteries. Wandering down London’s swanky King’s Road, for instance, towards Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge stadium the advertising hoardings entice us with an assortment of the familiar status symbols of the wealthy: fast cars, expensive jewellery, designer clothes and hospitality at the rugger at Twickers.
Strolling north from Manchester city centre through the post-industrial landscape of Oldham Road towards Newton Heath the advertising execs instead choose to tempt us with ‘cheeseburger value meals’, fried chicken, stuffed crust pizzas, online gambling, televised football and the latest box-sets on which to gorge ourselves. The implication is clear – load up on saturated fats and sit back and watch the match (maybe with an acca or two) or binge on the latest drama. A life of passive consumption rather than active participation for the proles. But who would have thought that, in the environs of this busy thoroughfare, there are more football club owners than in Chelsea?
The new Manchester United co-owner and multi-billionaire Jim Ratcliffe’s upbringing in Failsworth and his boyhood support for United has attracted much comment but these days, according to his Wikipedia page, he tends to split his time between luxury residences in Hampshire and Monaco. The types of places you’d expect to find football club owners and other ‘high net worth individuals’ doing whatever it is the super-rich do in their spare time aside from avoiding taxation.
If you plotted the residences of the owners of English football clubs on a map the M40 and M9 postcodes in North Manchester probably wouldn’t be where you’d expect to find a dense cluster of football club owners. Indeed you’d need a map of the world and a magnifying glass these days to locate a whole gamut of foreign billionaires, shady off-shore tax havens and state-backed sovereign wealth funds but in England you’d probably expect some of the super-rich enclaves of London or Cheshire to feature prominently. Perhaps SW10, for instance, a slice of Kensington and Chelsea where homes can change hands for tens of millions of pounds and a mere stone’s throw from where Ratcliffe’s INEOS petrochemicals conglomerate is headquartered.
In contrast these two Manchester postcodes – which cover a population of around 80,000 living in Moston, Newton Heath, Collyhurst, Miles Platting, Harpurhey and Blackley – contain some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in England where healthy life expectancy for men is below 50 in some parts. Yet, according to the latest statistics, more than one hundred people in this area own a football club – quite a concentration of powerful people you might think.
And you’d be right, because these people co-own their local football club FC United of Manchester, the largest football club in the country, by number of co-owners, wholly owned by its supporters. And with this co-ownership comes the power to elect the board (and even stand for election to the board), decide on season ticket and admission prices, attend board meetings and shape the club’s future. FC is a democratic football club run on one member, one vote lines. More than six hundred co-owners – a third of eligible members – voted on a range of issues at the club’s Annual General Meeting last November.
Whilst Jim from Failsworth paid more than £1 billion for a minority stake in United which still leaves the Glazer family in overall control, you can become a co-owner of FC United for little more than £2 per month. And co-ownership of FC represents remarkable value for money when you consider the level of transparency about the running of the club that’s available to members. Only last month the regular board meeting ‘summary’ report that documents discussions at each board meeting and is typically emailed to co-owners within a few days of the meeting stretched to nearly eight thousand words. A level of openness that would scare the living daylights out of the likes of the Glazers, Ratcliffe and Sheikh Mansour. Arguably no group of football supporters anywhere in the UK are as well informed about the running of their club.
Being a co-owner of FC United offers an opportunity to break the mould and demonstrate that owning and running a football club isn’t the domain only of fabulously wealthy individuals. We may be swimming against the tide – particularly when you see Wrexham fans ditching supporter ownership in favour of Hollywood investment and Chorley flirting with has-been pop stars – but the club embodies a belief in returning football to the people and that supporters should participate in the running of all football clubs. At FC United we’ve taken that a stage further by insisting on 100% supporter ownership.
So far this season more than 2,300 people have signed up to be co-owners of FC United – we’ve always had more than 2,000 members throughout our eighteen and a half years as a football club – and as many of those people as possible are invited to participate in the running of a football club that strives for on-pitch success and also empowers its community not only in its extensive community work but also through its academy, its role as a local employer and also through the countless volunteering opportunities it offers.
We all have skills, knowledge and experience to offer, whether it’s in laying bricks, crunching numbers, designing websites, writing content, fixing electrics or as a senior executive in a multinational corporation. At FC you’re not treated as a customer dictated to by a distant super-rich owner – instead you are a co-owner of the club who is able to fully participate in its running and has the same voting rights as everyone else at the club. Even if football isn’t really your thing – we’ve got lots of co-owners who join us because they believe in the ethos and vision of the club and want it to succeed. There’s power in a collective.
One strand of the club’s community work has seen staff and volunteers at FC United visiting local schools to talk to pupils about their role at the club as part of an initiative run by the North Manchester Business Network called ‘What’s My Job’ that’s designed, in a fun way, to challenge how children aged 9 to 10 think about the world of work and their future in it. As the programme’s website explains it’s important to do this as early as possible as even at the age of 7 almost half of children base their job aspirations on people they know.
And particularly in parts of North Manchester where young people are too often consigned to the low paid drudgery of working lives spent generating more wealth for the wealthy – serving over-priced coffee, packing boxes in warehouses or stacking shelves in supermarkets. We’re better than that.
In November the club’s Operations Coordinator Nigel Brookes took part in the programme and described the session at a local school as “thoroughly enjoyable” with the kids making some “very funny suggestions” as they attempted to guess his role at FC United. He added that “it was lovely to hear some of them say they recognised me as they come to Broadhurst Park with their families, showing we are becoming further embedded locally”. It’s a wonderful example, on a small scale, of how FC United can do its bit to make the area around us a stronger, healthier and more inclusive place to live, learn and work.
You don’t have to be the mega-rich CEO of a multinational petrochemicals company or a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family to co-own a Manchester football club. And we don’t have to fit the lazy, patronising stereotypes drawn up for us by the rich and powerful. For the price of half a dozen ‘cheeseburger value meals’ you can help shape the future of the largest 100% fan-owned football club in the country.
“Ah, bitter chill it was” wrote Keats in the opening line of his romantic poem about the 20th January. It was called “The Eve of St Agnes” and referred to the tradition of unmarried women performing certain rituals before going to bed on 20th January so that they would dream of their future partner ahead of the feast of St Agnes the following day. One of these rituals was said to involve transferring pins from a pin cushion to a sleeve whilst reciting the Lord’s Prayer. I’m not sure if such practices are still observed on the night of 20th January in the pubs and bars along Deansgate but in his reference to brass monkeys weather conditions Keats could easily have been writing about Manchester a couple of centuries later where the temperature barely got above freezing all last week.
So it wasn’t a great surprise that FC United’s friendly match against Stalybridge Celtic was called off on Saturday morning. Despite the best efforts of ground staff and volunteers – and the frost covers which had been in place throughout the week – the pitch hadn’t been able to thaw properly and was deemed unplayable. As well as the match itself, the latest pre-match Course You Can Malcolm event which was due to feature a Q&A session with manager Neil Reynolds, story telling from Ilaria Passeri (who was also due to appear before the postponed match against Radcliffe on 30th December) and “surf pop” band Precious Metals from Sheffield was also unable to go ahead. Silent were the terraces of Broadhurst Park.
The match had been arranged as a fund-raiser following the resignation of Marske United from the Northern Premier League in the first week of January with FC United due to face Marske at Broadhurst Park yesterday. At this level of football, with no television revenue and much smaller commercial income streams, postponed and cancelled matches have a substantial impact on clubs’ finances and losing this friendly match, along with the home matches against Marine and Radcliffe in December, at which we would have expected bigger-than-average crowds, seriously affects our ability to generate the level of match day revenue that we have budgeted for in our business plan for 2023-24. It’s not quite as bad as the six week period we went without a match, home or away, in the winter of 2009-10 but to lose three Saturday home matches in December and January is a hefty blow.
Last season we didn’t lose any home matches to the weather – although the biggest home match of the season against eventual champions South Shields was postponed in the aftermath of the Queen’s death in September 2022 – but in losing three games so far this season it feels like we’ve either been really unlucky or the pitch requires some attention this summer. This comes less than four years since supporters raised more than £30,000 in sixteen days in a magnificent response to the ‘No Drain No Game’ crowdfunder to fund urgent pitch renovation work – including fixing drainage problems – in the summer of 2020.
And FC supporters were back in similar fund-raising mode yesterday as, following news of the postponement of the Stalybridge match, they donated what they would have spent on admission, food and drink at Saturday’s match (and considerably more in some cases) both online and in-person. By 4pm 421 virtual match tickets had been purchased online (bringing in nearly £4,000 in revenue) and 869 virtual half-time draw tickets (at £1 per ticket) had also been snapped up. And other donations, both online and in-person, meant that the club had received around £7,500 in revenue less than six hours after the match was called off. By the end of the day total donations had risen to around £8,500.
A similar fund-raising friendly match against Chadderton on a blank Saturday in December 2018 was watched by a crowd of 289 so to sell more than 400 ‘tickets’ for a match that wasn’t even played represents a tremendous effort. In fact, the virtual ‘crowd’ of 421 is higher than the average attendance, so far this season, of four other clubs in the Northern Premier League Premier Division.
Of course, a supporter-owned and run football club is nothing without its supporters and, once again, everyone at the club has been blown away by the generosity of its fans. Time and again over the years we’ve pulled together as a powerful collective and this was another of those occasions. Board member Dave Ashurst tweeted, late on Saturday afternoon, that this “special set of fans continue to amaze” and added that “the impact of so many postponements has been immense but the fans have stepped up again and ensure that we have a sustainable future”.
If you’re reading this and you’d like to purchase a virtual match ticket you can do so by clicking here. Or if you’d like to take part in the virtual half-time draw then you can do that here.
Last week was bitterly cold but what happened at FC United yesterday, despite the setback of losing another match to the weather, was heartwarming. And, whilst clubs at this level of the game are unable to afford undersoil heating, it’s a shame we can’t channel some of this extraordinary warmth under the Broadhurst Park pitch and say goodbye to frozen grass. From sub-zero to supporter heroes on the 20th January. A modern day Keats should pen an ode to this.
(with thanks to regular FC United volunteer photographer Lewis McKenna for the photo above. You can enjoy more of Lewis’s work here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/156862260@N07/albums/)
This is a piece I wrote for FC United’s website following the recent withdrawal of Marske United from the Northern Premier League which provided a reminder of the dangers of football clubs living beyond their means and why adopting a more cautious approach to running football clubs that prioritises their long-term sustainability is the way forward.
Like an unflushable Boxing Day turd, the European Super League surfaced again over the festive period. No surprise that a collection of billionaire football club owners should resist the bog-brush brandished at them by supporters in 2021 and persist in their plans to move the game to another level in terms of extracting the maximum possible value from their global brands.
It’s the logical next step in the annexation of top flight football by the super-rich over the last three decades that has resulted in some clubs becoming “richer than god” whilst scores of lower league clubs fight for survival. Since football was invented in 1992 there have been more than 60 instances of clubs going into administration in the top four divisions whilst further down the pyramid numerous clubs have gone bust.
Only last week there was good and bad news in the seventh tier as Marske United – formed in 1956 and based in the seaside village of Marske-by-the-Sea on the North Yorkshire coast between Redcar and Saltburn – announced that whilst their recent fundraising efforts have ensured that the club will survive they have nevertheless decided to withdraw from the Northern Premier League Premier Division with immediate effect.
A fundraising appeal launched in December had sought to raise £120,000 to see the first team through to the end of the season but instead the £26,000 raised so far and “significant contributions” from new directors will provide the club with a foundation from which to hopefully regain stability further down the football pyramid. But for at least the next few months the seaside village will be without first team football.
Financial impact
The decision by Marske to resign from the league, whilst clearly in their best interests, has a direct financial impact on clubs across the league too. FC United have been fortunate to be able to organise a friendly against Stalybridge Celtic on the day we were due to host Marske at Broadhurst Park on 20th January and this will go some way towards mitigating the loss of the fixture. But we are unlikely to generate the same level of revenue that we would for a league fixture.
And Bamber Bridge were not so lucky. They were due to host Marske on Saturday 6th January, just two days after Marske’s resignation, leaving them with no chance of being able to arrange an alternative fixture. We of course wish Marske well for the future, but nobody should underestimate the ripple effect of their decision and the impact on clubs like ours.
Rising costs
When Marske knocked FC United out of the FA Trophy – whilst still in the division below us – in consecutive seasons in 2020 and 2021 (the photo at the top of this article was taken on our first trip to Marske in November 2021 when we lost 3-2 in the Trophy) they looked, to the casual observer, like an upwardly mobile and well-run club with much to admire.
But in last week’s announcement of its decision to withdraw from the league the club acknowledged that whilst it had “punched above its weight for many years” resulting in a rapid rise through the leagues it had “unfortunately stretched itself too far and lived beyond its means”. The double whammy of rising costs and shrinking revenue streams caused by the present cost of greed crisis had snowballed into an existential threat for Marske.
Of course, they’re not the first Northern Premier League club to over-stretch themselves and, almost certainly, won’t be the last. Promotion chasing Worksop Town resigned from the Northern Premier League in similar circumstances in 2014 amidst a financial crisis precipitated by the club’s owner declaring that he would no longer carry on funding the club. They began the following season in the ninth tier of the pyramid and have subsequently worked their way back to the NPL.
And last Saturday’s opponents Ilkeston Town are a different club to the one that we played the last time we visited the New Manor Ground in 2014 when Che Adams, who went on to play in the Premier League and represent Scotland at international level, scored a terrific solo goal in a 3-1 win for the hosts.
The new club was formed in 2017 and began life in the tenth tier after the town’s previous club, Ilkeston FC had gone bust. And neither was this earlier club the same one that we had played on our first visit to the Erewash valley in 2009 – Ilkeston FC had risen from the ashes of the old Ilkeston Town which had folded, as a Conference North club, in 2010 (keep up at the back please).
Win-at-all-costs
When many of us migrated from Old Trafford’s hostile takeover and sought asylum at FC United in 2005 most of us probably thought we’d be enjoying a purer form of the game free from the increasingly win-at-all-costs nature of big football – not quite ‘jumpers for goalposts’ but a chance to return football to the people.
But just like kids trying to be Messi and Ronaldo in the school playground, it feels like non-league football is increasingly trying to imitate big football with ‘Big Ex-League Teams’ like Notts County, Wrexham and Stockport desperate to return as quickly as possible to what they perceive as their rightful place in the Football League and the ‘fairytale’ successes of the likes of Salford City and Forest Green Rovers garnering media attention. Meanwhile everyone else is compelled to cling on to their coat tails in an often desperate attempt to remain competitive.
If Forest Green, essentially a village team, can make it to the Football League then why not Marske? Although the rise and fall of our old friends North Ferriby United, who folded in 2019 less than five years after winning the FA Trophy and reaching the National League offers a cautionary tale.
When a football club is forced to withdraw from their league or, worse, goes bust inevitably it’s the staff, volunteers and supporters who ultimately lose out. In the worst-case, people end up losing their jobs and the local community and businesses who are reliant on the club also suffer. And supporters are forced to endure an often lengthy period of uncertainty regarding their club’s future.
At FC United we reckon there’s an alternative to this tired old cycle of ‘boom and bust’ that instead prioritises the long-term future of the club and people over profit. And it’s an approach that clubs like the reborn North Ferriby FC, who began life in the Northern Counties East League in 2019, are also adopting. Football clubs that don’t have a wealthy owner prepared to bankroll a promotion push or pump money in when times are hard must adopt a more cautious approach that prioritises long-term sustainability.
Kieran Maguire, a lecturer in football finance at Liverpool University, reckons that supporter-owned football clubs typically end up “operating a more cautious financial strategy as fans don’t have the wealth to underwrite losses”.
Sustainable
And that’s certainly been the case at FC United since 2016 as careful financial stewardship has meant that we’ve been able to remain financially sustainable and also do our bit for our local community whilst weathering a global pandemic and the cost of greed crisis. Without a wealthy backer the club relies on the collective strength of more than two thousand co-owners – an increasingly unfashionable concept in these days of fawning over celebrities and ‘self-made’ millionaires.
When more than seven hundred of FC United’s co-owners participated in a survey in 2021 that asked where we’d like to see the club in five years’ time, the majority of fans not surprisingly, said they’d like to see us promoted. But providing an affordable and sustainable alternative to big football, a vibrant match day atmosphere and doing our bit for our local community were seen as important too.
Which chimes with the views of Exeter City chair, Nick Hawker, who in an interview in the Guardian last year, celebrating 20 years of fan ownership at the Devon club, reckoned that “if all you’re worried about is how you feel at five o’clock on a Saturday then you’re wasting a huge opportunity” and added that the success of a football club can also be measured in terms of “good financial performance, what you do in the community, how you treat your supporters…”
There are plenty of times we’ve been mard at 5pm on a Saturday afternoon over the last few seasons at FC but when you own, as well as support, a football club there’s a bigger picture to see beyond simply what happens on the pitch.
The focus of our business plan and vision, approved by us as co-owners, is on ensuring that we’re able to grow our football club sustainably through increased attendances and non-match day activities so that it’s around for generations to come.
‘Boom and bust’ isn’t for us. We’ve spent nearly two decades building and nurturing this thing of ours into something special – risking it being flushed down the toilet of football history isn’t an option.
It was national Volunteers’ Week in early June – an annual celebration of the fantastic contribution that volunteers make to communities and organisations across the UK – and during the week FC United profiled some of the many volunteer roles at the football club. In the first ten months of 2022-23 nearly two hundred volunteers worked a total of 11,086 hours across a host of match day and non-match day roles and, in the process, it’s estimated that this tremendous collective effort saved FC United more than £223,000. Much of this volunteering effort taking place quietly behind the scenes with little or no fanfare.
I started to scribble a few words about my own role as part of the volunteer-run communications team but, typically, FC United comms stuff got in the way so I’ve only just got round to finishing it now, over a month later.
What is your role at FC?
I’m a communications business partner for the board and Chief Executive Officer – which is a rather fancy title for someone who essentially assists and advises the board and CEO regarding its communications. This covers a multitude of different forms of communication including board reports, blogposts, press releases, Q&A documents, statements to co-owners on the members’ forum and articles for the club’s website and matchday programme.
I’m also a member of the Communications Committee which was formed, along with five other committees, over a year ago to support the board and management team.
How long have you been volunteering for?
I joined the communications team in 2016 after some mithering from Paul Haworth about helping out with the club’s communications – particularly in writing stuff for the website. I’d been blogging about FC for several years by that point and it was around the time that a new board was elected in the aftermath of our annus horribilis and there was a call to arms when it came to the day to day running of the club.
A few weeks later Adrian Seddon, one of the newly elected board members, mentioned that the new board was looking to improve transparency around its decision making by issuing a report to co-owners within a few days of each board meeting that would summarise that meeting’s discussions (something that the Dons’ Trust at AFC Wimbledon had already been doing for several years) and he asked if there was anyone in the communications team who fancied being the board summariser.
I hesitantly offered to give it a go – but only if no one else was interested – and with some trepidation as I was living in London at the time and wasn’t quite sure how travelling up to Manchester once a month for a midweek board meeting would work out. But here I am seven years later having attended around eighty board meetings, travelled a few thousand miles and scribbled several hundred thousand words.
As a qualified accountant, I’d offered to help the club out with its financial management back in the early days but never heard anything back so the invitation to get involved eleven years later was exciting.
So you’re the one who does the board meeting minutes then?
Haha. No. It does my head in when people say this as the minutes are a crucial part of the club’s record keeping and minute taking is an under-appreciated skill. The minutes of the board meetings are taken by another volunteer – Lynette Cawthra – with experience in this area. In my role as summariser I’m essentially attempting to sum up, for co-owners, the key points discussed (and decisions taken) in the meeting rather than providing a full record of the meeting.
What experience and qualifications do you have for doing this role?
I’m an NHS finance manager in my day job, having worked in various finance roles in the health service for more than thirty years and become a qualified accountant in the mid-nineties, so it feels a little odd that I find myself assisting the club in an area in which I can’t claim to have any professional expertise. Whilst many of the around sixty members of the club’s various committees are experts in the areas in which they volunteer, I’m very much a novice when it comes to working in comms and I’m learning all the time.
However when I began volunteering as part of the communications team in 2016 I had been writing about FC United, on my own blog, for A Fine Lung and also in the match day programme, for several years so my volunteering grew from that. And it also stemmed in part from my belief, after years of reading often staggeringly badly written NHS communications (littered with jargon, acronyms and buzzwords), that all official communications – whether you’re a football club, a government department or a huge multinational corporation – should be written in plain English and avoid unnecessary jargon and management-speak.
What do you do in your role as ‘communications business partner’?
My role encompasses a number of key tasks. The one I’m probably most associated with is the monthly board ‘summary’ report but there’s much more to the comms business partner role than that.
Writing the monthly board summary report generally takes around 15 to 20 hours to complete and involves me taking a day off work so that I can get stuck into it without being interrupted. Until I moved to Manchester three years ago it also involved me getting trains to and from London to Manchester and an overnight hotel stay (all out of my own pocket) in order to attend midweek board meetings – something which feels a bit daft now in hindsight as only a few weeks after I moved up north Covid rocked up and board meetings ended up being held online. Most reports tend to be somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 words in length and the checking and re-checking involved in finalising the report before it’s shared with members can be laborious. I’ve not missed a board meeting since November 2019.
It’s still a source of pride, after seven years of scribbling this report, that we almost always share it with co-owners within three or four working days of the board meeting happening. Last year we also began emailing the report to co-owners so that they can access it through their inbox via a single click rather than having to log-in to the members’ forum (something which some co-owners find problematic). I don’t think there are any other football supporters in the country who are as well informed about the running of their football club. Although we nicked the idea for the board summary reports from the Dons’ Trust at AFC Wimbledon their reports tend to be a genuine summary rather than something as detailed as ours.
And what else do you do apart from the board report?
One of the big changes over the last year has been the introduction of ‘The Red Thread’ board blog – a new initiative which was heralded in last year’s business plan and aims to provide co-owners with an insight into the board’s thinking on the key issues of the moment. We’ve published three blogposts so far with each post being emailed directly to co-owners upon publication.
Each blogpost is drafted by me, after the board have outlined the topic(s) they wish to cover in the latest issue, and then subsequently reviewed by all board members (and the management team when appropriate) and added to or amended as they see fit – typically it involves several iterations before we settle on the final version. The board clearly has enough on its plate right now to spend time writing blogs – so hence my involvement in its drafting and editing. That the board is able to call on others to help with tasks such as this is one of the benefits of the committee structure.
The last blogpost, published in April and designed to set the scene ahead of May’s General Meeting, was nearly 7,000 words long and took nearly three weeks from its initial drafting to its eventual publication.
The last year or so has seen a substantial growth in FC United’s commercial income and new deals announced with the likes of Pretty Little Thing and I also assist our Commercial Manager with the press releases and explanatory Q&A documents (where necessary) when any significant new deals are announced. Writing press releases wasn’t something I’d got any experience of prior to volunteering at FC but it’s something I’ve learnt as I’ve gone along – working in tandem with an experienced comms professional like fellow volunteer Helen Goldsmith has been a big help in this regard.
The announcement of the deal with PLT, the single largest sponsorship deal in the club’s history, required a substantial amount of background work and due diligence due to the company’s controversial recent history – we knew that co-owners would have questions about this deal so it was important to be as prepared as we possibly could be in advance of the announcement.
As a result I spent about a couple of weeks doing what felt like little else in my spare time apart from digesting the mumbo jumbo of countless corporate reports, trying to understand the carefully crafted legal-ese of the Levitt and Leveson reviews and browsing through a whole stack of news articles about PLT (and its parent company Boohoo) none of which appeared to be complimentary. I also wandered down to the Labour Behind the Label protest outside PLT’s HQ on Dale Street in the centre of Manchester at the end of November just to see exactly what they were protesting about – the protest was covered on BBC North West that night so there was always a good chance that a co-owner would ask about this.
All in all, it’s probably the toughest piece of work I’ve been involved in since joining the comms team seven years ago and, at times, I felt really exposed as it’s not too difficult to imagine the fall-out and twenty-page forum threads if we had got the comms wrong on this. In the end, the detailed Q&A document for the PLT deal stretched to nearly 3,000 words. And given that this approach worked well – and was largely well received by co-owners – we’ve now adopted this template for announcing any deals (or difficult decisions) such as this.
There are lots of ad-hoc pieces of work too including drafting statements for co-owners regarding staff resignations. It’s never easy penning statements such as these – maintaining a balance between the interests of the club (and its co-owners) and also recognising the feelings of the individuals involved.
What’s it like being a volunteer at FC?
Fellow volunteer Des Gallagher, who helps out in the office at Broadhurst Park, recently described how FC United had given him some great memories and he felt that, as a result, he “needed to repay the club for that” and added that “to own your own football club and volunteer for it is tremendously rewarding”. And I can’t put it any better than that.
I’d also add that it can be bloody hard work as well – so far this year I’ve worked an average of around 60 to 70 hours per month on comms stuff at FC and it can often feel like having two full-time jobs at the same time. But don’t let that put you off if you’re thinking about volunteering for FC as you can flex your hours according to the time that you have available.
And one of the often overlooked bonuses of volunteering is that you get a chance to learn new skills and gain fresh insights too – which when you’re a set-in-his-ways, fifty-something bean counter like me feels energising. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve learnt loads about how to write formal communications and press releases. And, as someone who has very much been an NHS ‘lifer’, working with people whose background is in the commercial sector – often at a very high level – is a real eye opener and has provided an insight into different thought processes and ways of working that I’ve often taken back into my day job. It can be an immensely enriching experience. And there have some smaller practical things too such as learning how to use the Microsoft Publisher software to assist with the presentation of the board blog.
And what does the future hold?
I was only half joking when I said on the members’ forum recently that I reckon ChatGPT or some other AI chatbot will be writing the board reports soon. Artificial Intelligence is coming at us fast and I read an article recently that reckoned, of all occupations, writing is likely to be the one that will be most affected by the introduction of AI. Hopefully the club can use this to its advantage as, in recent times, we’ve really struggled to find good writers so the robots might be able to help us out.
Heard the one about the football club from Manchester who beat a team from Milan in the latter stages of a European competition only a couple of days before the recent Manchester-Milan Champions League final in Istanbul? Nah, probably not, but for several hundred FC United supporters who made the trip to Milan last week for the 2023 Fenix Trophy ‘Final 4’ watching their team beat local side Brera in the San Siro last Thursday was a memorable occasion.
The night before our San Siro adventure we’d been at the Arena Civica in Milan’s Brera district which was the venue for the two semi-finals in this year’s Fenix Trophy, the tournament for European non-league football clubs that began last year, with the three group winners – FC United, BK Skjold from Denmark, and the Czech side Prague Raptors – joined by Brera, Milan’s third team and the hosts of this year’s finals, who were the best of the three group runners-up.
It was a ground that most of FC’s travelling support was already familiar with having watched FC play Brera there last April in the group stage of last year’s Fenix Trophy and it’s an idyllic spot to watch football on a sultry summer evening – about as far as it’s possible to get from a trip to Atherton Collieries’ Skuna Stadium on a drizzly November afternoon without actually leaving the planet (and I’ve nothing against Atherton, so please don’t write in Colls fans). We’d strolled, in the early evening sunshine, from the Castello Sforzesco through the beautiful Parco Sempione to get there – amidst music, picknickers, runners, cyclists and sun-bathing turtles – the sort of large accessible green lung that central Manchester sadly lacks.
FC played BK Skjold in the first semi-final and it was clear to see quite early on in the game that the team from Copenhagen were the best team that FC had played in the first two years of the Fenix Trophy – like FC they’d won all four of their group games. The Danes took an early lead and eventually ran out 3-2 winners in an absorbing contest that perhaps ought to have been the final. Boldklubben Skjold currently play in the fifth tier of Denmark’s football pyramid – the Denmark Series – and were in the final stages of their season coming into this match whereas FC United played their last league match of the 2022-23 season more than six weeks ago. And this difference in footballing calendars showed in the comparative sharpness of the two sides – it’s something for the tournament organisers to mull over when it comes to the timing of future finals.
Whilst the defeat was disappointing from a purely FC perspective – our first ever in the tournament – it was undoubtedly good for the competition as a whole that FC didn’t romp to a second Fenix Trophy win in its first two years. Last year FC United were head and shoulders above any other side in the tournament – such is the strength in depth of the English football pyramid which is unparalleled in Europe – but this wasn’t the case this time round. KSK Beveren, who sadly missed out on the Final 4 on goal difference gave FC two excellent matches in the group stage.
Prague Raptors, last season’s beaten finalists, beat Brera in the other semi-final which meant that FC would kick-off proceedings the following day in the San Siro in the play-off match for third place against Brera. Having waited nearly an hour to be allowed into the ground through gate number 9 – fans, players, coaching staff and officials all queuing patiently to get in – the match eventually kicked off shortly after midday.
The San Siro is one of the world’s most iconic sporting venues and a place that many older FC supporters had visited before with Manchester United in 1999 and/or 2005. Indeed there’s even an intriguing little bit of FC United history connected to the San Siro. Those supporters with a penchant for banners and flags will no doubt recall the ‘We’re Too Sexy for Milan’ flag at the Champions League quarter final second leg against Inter in ’99 but adjacent to it in the San Siro that evening was a flag that’s been a familiar presence at FC United – the ‘Colwyn Bay Red Army’ flag which has adorned the walls of Course You Can Malcolm at Bury and Broadhurst Park for many years. And it was lovely to see it there again at the San Siro twenty four years later, maintaining that important historical red thread to the club that many of us grew up supporting.
Even more than three decades on from its renovation for the 1990 World Cup – when it hosted the opening match in which Cameroon caused a huge shock by beating World Cup holders Argentina – the San Siro remains an awesome sight, looming ahead like a giant space station as you emerge from the nearby metro station. But once inside the arena I think it actually feels smaller than it appears from outside – perhaps because it lacks a perimeter running track which is familiar to many Italian stadia so supporters feel closer to the action.
The third place play-off match was limited to thirty five minutes per half as Inter Milan required access to the pitch later in the day to prepare for a big screen showing of the Champions League final inside the stadium on Saturday evening. It wasn’t ideal but in terms of actual playing time it’s probably not far shy of what we’ve grown accustomed to at Broadhurst Park in the Northern Premier League over the last couple of seasons given the time-wasting antics of many visiting teams. There were some gripes too, quite rightly, about the state of the women’s toilets (as there had been the previous night at the Arena Civica), the queues for drinks, and some killjoy stewarding. But overall it didn’t deter from the enjoyment of the occasion by fans and players alike (and those on the stadium tours that continued to funnel through whilst both matches were played out).
Some scoffed at the idea of playing matches that would be watched by no more than a few hundred spectators in such a vast arena – and in my default ‘glass half empty’ mode I’d doubted the wisdom of it too – after all, it’s fans, not ground-breaking architecture, that create atmosphere. But in reality a large stadium with five hundred or so supporters making a right racket was probably not much less atmospheric than one packed to the rafters with day trippers preoccupied with their phones rather than the match.
After missing numerous chances to take the lead in a match that they dominated the substitute Matt Van Wyk eventually headed a late winner for FC United. Matt had originally been due to sit a college exam on the day of the match but had decided to postpone it to later in the year so that he didn’t miss this once in a lifetime opportunity to play in the San Siro. A lovely story. And it was great too to see and hear the support for Sandro da Costa, a product of FC’s Academy who’s beginning to find his feet in the first team and looks a real prospect for the future.
BK Skjold comfortably defeated Prague Raptors in the final, which followed immediately after the conclusion of the third place play-off, to become the second team to win the Fenix Trophy and worthy winners. Already there’s talk of potentially expanding the tournament to twelve teams next season – nine entered this year and there were eight in the first year – but, as agreed at last month’s board meeting, FC United will be conducting a full review into the club’s future participation in the tournament – not only to assess the financial impact but also from a footballing perspective (the tournament finals are currently perched awkwardly for FC in the no man’s land between two seasons) and also gauge the views of supporters. It’s a sensible approach.
But for now our thanks must go to Brera for hosting and organising this year’s finals and, closer to home, Adrian Seddon who, over the past couple of years has worked tirelessly as FC United’s representative on the competition’s organising committee. To give part-time footballers and supporters the chance to play and watch their team in one of the world’s great stadiums – providing memories to cherish forever – was no mean feat. Here’s hoping the Fenix Trophy goes from strength to strength over the next few years.
The Abu Dhabi project’s Champions League win – and treble – a couple of days later in Istanbul has inevitably dominated the British footballing headlines of the last few days but it’s heavily stained by the 115 charges for financial irregularities levelled at it by the Premier League – a footballing empire that increasingly looks like it’s built on lies and deception. Meanwhile a few miles up the road, FC United, wholly owned by more than 2,700 members, has striven for the last eighteen years to prove that there is a different and better way of running football clubs sustainably that puts fans at the heart of decision making. It’s been a rocky road at times and like most non-league football clubs we rely heavily on the hard graft of dozens of volunteers to keep things ticking over but moments like those last Thursday when we were watching our side play in the San Siro make it all worthwhile.
Even more than a week on I still can’t quite believe I’ve seen FC play in the San Siro. Back in the club’s early days, having swapped flights to glamorous European ties with Manchester United for bus rides to the mill towns of the North West Counties League, some fans jokingly referred to our temporary home in Bury as the ‘Stadio del Gigg’, complete with its very own Curva Sud. At the time we had no idea that this football club we’d assembled from scratch might one day be playing in a European competition in the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza – better known as the San Siro – in Milan. Not bad for a football club that some doubted would last beyond its first Christmas. Forza FC United.
I heard KD Lang and Roy Orbison duetting on their version of ‘Crying’ recently and it immediately transported me back to half-time of the Manchester United v Leeds fixture in August 1992. United were 2-0 up against the reigning champions and it felt like the whole of Old Trafford belted out the chorus that day – a cathartic experience after the pain of losing out in the title race to Leeds only a few months earlier.
And it also reminded me of the euphoria of that 1992-93 season and United finally clinching the league title for the first time in twenty-six years. Made all the sweeter, of course, by what had happened the year before when I’d sat on a train on the way back from Liverpool and proclaimed that, in all honesty, I didn’t think I’d ever see United win the league. It was our big chance and somehow we’d blown it. I was crestfallen and didn’t go near a newspaper for several weeks.
The years ending in three have been kind to United fans down the years – certainly since I started watching United in the late seventies and it’s happened again in ’23 with United, just like in ’83, winning silverware for the first time in six years. Both 2003 and 2013 saw us reclaiming titles after missing out the year before but 1992-93 was special and it remains my favourite football season. Lest we forget it was the first season of the Premier League – and the beginning of football! – and I can still recall it, match by match, from late November when we signed Eric Cantona – and were eighth in the table – to that glorious early May bank holiday Monday night when we were finally crowned champions of England, like it was yesterday rather than three decades ago.
But it wasn’t all about the Frenchman. A sequence of five consecutive wins in early autumn beginning with a late Dion Dublin winner on a Monday night at Southamption – after picking up only one point from the opening three matches – was crucial come the end of the season and the run also included that avenging 2-0 win at home to Leeds.
If the opening day defeat at Bramall Lane wasn’t necessarily a jolt to the system (it had been a summer of low expectations) then turning up at Old Trafford for the first home game against Everton the following Wednesday night to see a huge gap where the Stretford End used to be certainly was. Up until then the Stretford End had been my matchday home – either stood on the terrace or sat in those wooden seats at the back so it was a shock to take up my seat in K Stand for the first time and see my old much-loved vantage point reduced to a building site. Old Trafford’s capacity was much lower as a result and there were less than 32,000 of us in attendance for that first home match of the 1992-93 season.
Top flight football and all seater stadia go hand in hand now but back then, as a young fan, sitting to watch a football match took some getting used to – a transition of sorts from being an active supporter to becoming a more passive spectator. And whilst in some ways the time gap of thirty years elicits surprise (where have all those years gone?), in other ways 1993 feels like a completely different football supporting era altogether – a more innocent one perhaps where you discovered that your club had signed a star player on teletext; no one went into meltdown on social media after losing to Oldham; big football was still affordable to most and getting to games didn’t involve weeks of planning; and you enjoyed the simple pleasure of being in a packed stadium roaring your team on in a crucial match, living every kick of the ball and going ballistic when they scored rather than feeling the need to record every sodding moment on an electronic device.
I was in my early twenties and living in Cambridge at the time working for the local health authority and studying for my accountancy exams which meant that I got time off work to go to college which came in handy too for getting to matches. Remarkably, despite living more than a hundred and eighty miles from Old Trafford I only missed three league matches that season, regularly travelling with the East Anglian branch of the United supporters’ club and arriving home around 3.30am after a midweek home match before getting a few hours kip and heading into the office.
The branch was a curious mix of Mancunian exiles and out-of-towners and with my flat vowels and fondness for chip shop mushy peas I nestled somewhere in between. It offered a reminder that United’s support was (and still is) wonderfully diverse. The looks of horror on the faces of some as the coach pulled into Moss Side ahead of the lunchtime derby that season were a picture – the back-to-back terraces of inner-city Manchester were a world away from Suffolk’s chocolate box villages. Meanwhile the owner of the ‘Clacton Reds’ flag that regularly adorned the back window of our coach (and no doubt provoked more than a few eye-rolls up and down the motorways of England) was a time-served Salford Red who’d migrated to Essex a few years before. They were a decent bunch and we had some memorable days out.
One near perfect day that season saw a group of us trekking across London to see Morrissey at Alexandra Palace after watching Eric score his first goal for United – an equaliser in a 1-1 draw at a very wet Stamford Bridge the week before Christmas. Morrissey’s ‘Your Arsenal’ album was one of my soundtracks to the 92-93 season – one of the albums I’d taped so that I could listen to it on my Walkman on the way to matches. Before the match, a few of us were interviewed by 90 Minutes magazine about the proposals for a European super league that were being touted at the time. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
A week later on Boxing Day the Frenchman was at it again bagging a scruffy equaliser in a rollicking 3-3 draw at Hillsborough – United fighting back from three down midway through the second half with one of those thrilling comebacks that became a hallmark of nineties United. It felt more like a win. And the performances that followed at home to Coventry and Spurs and then away to QPR were majestic and by mid-January we were top of the league. United’s football – with Cantona pulling the strings and Giggs and Kanchelskis like bolts of lightning – was electrifying. The 4-1 win against Spurs was particularly memorable for a sublime Cantona assist for Denis Irwin to score the second goal with the Frenchman chipping it into the path of Irwin – like a sand wedge from a bunker – for Denis to finish with aplomb. The goal of the season right there.
Despite hitting the top of the table the test of United’s title winning mettle was always going to be the three away games at our greatest rivals – Liverpool, City and Leeds – within the space of a few weeks of each other in February and March. Trips to Elland Road were always lively but with the return of Eric Cantona thrown into the mix the midweek match there in early February 1993 was a powder keg. The Leeds fans hadn’t taken kindly to losing their talisman to their bitter rivals and their team had rapidly become one-season wonders. The match was goalless and the walk back to the away coaches afterwards was, erm, interesting to say the least. Bruises to my face and cuts and grazes on my hands took some explaining at work the following day. “I didn’t have you down as one of those football hooligans, Jonathan” remarked my boss at the time. Truth was I couldn’t fight my way out of a paper bag but I milked my new-found tough guy status for a few weeks.
Then came a tremendous 2-1 win at Anfield at the start of March – so sweet after what had happened there the year before – but then worryingly we didn’t win again that month. A run that included a defeat at Oldham and a draw at home to title rivals Aston Villa. Next was City at Maine Road and forged City membership cards facilitated our entry onto the Kippax and a small pocket of us stood quietly amongst the bluenoses, but inwardly cartwheeling, as Eric equalised with an imperious header from a Lee Sharpe cross mid-way through the second half. Then came a nervy midweek goalless draw at home to Arsenal, in which they hit the woodwork late on, and by now we were third in the table with seven matches remaining and a trip to Norwich next up.
That Monday night trip to Carrow Road remains one of my favourite away matches of all time as United were rampant in the first half as Giggs and Kanchelskis tore Norwich apart and United were unbelievably 3-0 up, away at one of their title rivals, after barely twenty minutes. The second goal, scored by the Ukrainian, with its one touch football from one end of the pitch to the other was a thrilling glimpse of the sort of football we’d become used to the following season. We’d won at Carrow Road almost exactly a year before but this was different – United looked like a team that believed in itself.
And then came the Easter weekend and first up Sheffield Wednesday at home on the Saturday on an almost unbearably tense afternoon in which we were a goal down with barely five minutes left. Unbelievably Steve Bruce proceeded to score twice – the second one in the ninety-sixth minute – and Old Trafford erupted with Fergie and Brian Kidd racing onto the pitch and the latter falling to his knees in celebration. I now live about ten minutes’ walk from the ‘Brian Kidd recreational facility’ in Miles Platting – a play area for kids on the local estate – that offers scant recognition of the European Cup winner’s role in bringing joy to United fans again through the nineties.
The post-match scenes on the Old Trafford forecourt – with fans spilling out of the ground, hugging each other, barely able to process what they’d just witnessed – were joyous. We were back on top of the table, as Villa were held to a goalless draw by Coventry, and there was a delicious tale of a Villa fan hurling a transistor radio to the ground in disgust as he left Villa Park as he learned that United had nicked a late, late winner. ‘Fergie time’ was invented and would go on to ruin lives up and down the country for another couple of decades.
What a time to be a young, match-going Red. The football was breathtaking and we were daring to dream. And music was changing too. Suddenly the NME and Melody Maker were hailing Suede as “the best new band in Britain” as their eponymous debut album hit the airwaves that spring and Brett Anderson was everywhere. I loved that album and it accompanied the journeys to and from matches during that title run-in. The Auteur’s ‘New Wave’ too. It was Britpop before we even knew what Britpop was. And the acoustic loveliness of The Lemonheads’ ‘It’s A Shame About Ray’ was another personal favourite from that time. Seeing them live at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge on a glorious evening later in the year – still basking in the afterglow of United’s title win – was one of those blissful “does life get any better than this?” moments.
Coventry was next on Easter Monday and Highfield Road was full of Reds as Denis Irwin scored the only goal just before half-time. And then came a comfortable 3-0 home win against Chelsea before we headed to Selhurst Park for a Wednesday night clash with Crystal Palace. Inevitably there were still nerves prior to kick-off but as news filtered through that Villa were already losing at Blackburn we knew that if United could win tonight it would pretty much all be over. Eventually Mark Hughes broke the deadlock in the second half and when Paul Ince sealed a 2-0 win in the last minute the away end finally broke into a chorus of “we’re gonna win the league” for what felt like the first time that season. We were nearly there. It was a magical night and the first time I left a football ground knowing that my beloved Manchester United were soon to become champions of England. I floated back into central London that night and then caught the train home.
But the following day, barely a few miles across south-east London from Selhurst Park, a tragic incident that has cast a dark shadow over the subsequent thirty years occurred as a football-mad teenager called Stephen Lawrence – also a United fan – was murdered at a bus stop by a gang of racist thugs. The Metropolitan police unforgivably botched the subsequent investigation and three decades on it remains, according to a recent report, “guilty of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia”. Sadly, racist abuse also continues to blight English football. And it also feels like we’re at the same depressing point in the political cycle as we were back in 1993 – a failed Tory government desperately clinging onto power, with a new leader distancing himself from the old leader, and a Labour party lurching to the right.
I was at the cinema on the Sunday afternoon, a week and a half later, when Oldham won at Villa and emerged from watching Al Pacino in ‘Scent of a Woman’ to discover that United were champions. And so it was on to Old Trafford the day after for the party of all parties as United beat Blackburn 3-1 and were presented with the title at the end. What a night. I can still hear the songs of celebration including a raucous half-time ‘seventeen years and they’ve won fuck all’ knees-up on the concourse below K Stand. Fittingly Bryan Robson joined captain Steve Bruce to receive the first ever Premier League trophy – at last some reward for Robbo who, it felt like at times, had carried United almost single handedly through the mostly lean years of the eighties.
And it was great to see Robson score the final goal of the season the following Sunday at a packed Selhurst Park again – this time against Wimbledon. Bizarrely after barely missing a game all season I ended up having to pay a tout for a ticket as the demand to see the champions was extraordinary. It was a sign of things to come and possibly, when I look back, the start of a chain of events that led me to FC United a dozen years later. But at that moment nothing, absolutely nothing, could tarnish the joy of being able to watch Manchester United play away from home as champions of England for the very first time.
“We love what the kit represents – it’s all about empowering women” declared FC United of Manchester’s women’s team captain Kirsty Chambers at the launch on International Women’s Day of the team’s special new kit in purple, green and white colours which were chosen to recognise Manchester’s historical connection with the suffragette movement. It also features a striking sash design based on the sashes worn at parades and rallies by supporters of women’s suffrage. This year marks 120 years since the Women’s Social & Political Union (WSPU) was formed in Manchester in 1903 and began its campaign to get women the vote with the motto ‘deeds not words’.
The kit will be the women’s team’s away kit for the 2023-24 season only (the club’s usual kit rotation cycle is two years) and will be the first time that the club’s women’s team has played in its own kit. Speaking on behalf of the women’s team Kirsty said that they were “thrilled to be wearing our own kit” next season. She was a founder member of the women’s team when it was formed in 2012 and is FC United’s longest serving player from either its men’s or women’s teams so is well aware of the struggles with kit that the team has had down the years – it was reliant on hand-me-downs from the men’s team in the past.
With its manifesto commitment “to be accessible to all, discriminating against none” and a successful women’s team, which plays its home matches, whenever possible, in the club’s Broadhurst Park stadium and, off the pitch, a strong female-fronted leadership team FC United is a club that’s proud to champion women’s equality and a world free of stereotypes and discrimination – the themes of this year’s International Women’s Day.
Natalie Atkinson, the club’s Chief Executive Officer, said that she was “delighted” to launch FC United’s special women’s team kit on International Women’s Day and added that “it feels even more special that the kit’s design recognises the contributions and success of women in sport and wider society over the last century”. Natalie is also an advisor to Her Game Too, a voluntary organisation formed by female football fans in 2021 with the aim of fostering an ethos in football in which women are welcomed and respected equally. FC United became a Her Game Too partner last year.
At a time when, like most football clubs, FC United’s costs and revenue streams have been hit by the impact of the cost of living crisis and the mismanagement of the economy by a failing government, Atkinson along with Commercial Manager Frances Fielding and Events and Hospitality Manager Rachel Hughes and numerous volunteers, have transformed, in a matter of months, the club’s commercial, merchandise and events offerings to the extent that the club’s sponsorship and advertising income in 2022-23 is already higher than it’s ever been with a quarter of the financial year still to go.
This upturn in commercial activity was epitomised by the Manchester-based online fashion retailer Pretty Little Thing becoming the club’s women’s and girl’s football partner for 2023 in a deal announced in January that is the single biggest sponsorship deal in FC United’s history. It was interesting to note that one of the things that attracted the retailer to FC United was not only its ethos as a supporter-owned football club that’s rooted in its community but also its high performing, predominantly female senior leadership team – unusual for any football club let alone one in English football’s seventh tier. Pretty Little Thing’s community programme sees it supporting charities such as The Girls’ Network which seeks to “support and empower girls from the least advantaged communities by connecting them with a mentor and a network of professional female role models” and FC fits that bill.
Pretty Little Thing facilitated the photo-shoot to accompany the launch of the new women’s kit (including the photo above taken in Manchester’s St Peter’s Square) and it attracted a smattering of interest on the internet with Matt Slater, football reporter at The Athletic, describing the kit as “an instant classic”. Women in Football reckoned it was “stunning” and the BBC even took a break from dealing with the fall-out from a tweet by Gary Lineker to share it on Instagram. The timing of the launch on International Women’s Day certainly helped bring it to the notice of football supporters well beyond Manchester and hopefully it will prove to be a decent seller for the club and a reward for its innovation and the bright idea of one of its supporters.
But it wasn’t all about clicks and pound signs as the club announced that it would be donating a portion of any profits from the sale of the shirt to Manchester Women’s Aid, a charity that helps local women and children affected by domestic and sexual abuse including one to one support from specialist workers and safe temporary housing for women and their children.
This being FC United though, where it can often feel like we’re forever on the verge of another online ruckus, there were some co-owners who were unhappy that the Board had decided that this particular shirt design would not be voted on by the club’s co-owners. The supporter-owned club’s rules stipulate that at each Annual General Meeting the Board “will propose to co-owners (in accordance with the established home and away kit rotation) whether or not they wish to have a new kit produced for the following season(s)” with a vote in favour enabling co-owners to subsequently vote to choose the design from a shortlist of four kit designs. But the Board felt that this new women’s team shirt “sits outside of the process for regular home and away kit rotation” as it’s for one season only.
Meanwhile across town the Abu Dhabi-based owners of Manchester City continue to shamelessly sportswash the image of their oppressive regime with the club’s recent unveiling of a special limited edition shirt for their women’s team – also in purple, green and white colours – which claims to celebrate Manchester-born Emmeline Pankhurst’s “overriding vision for female equality”. I may be biased but the design, which bears all the hallmarks of Pep-style over-thinking, is not a patch on the FC shirt.
It represents more breathtaking effrontery from a club whose owners govern a country where women are anything but equal and according to Human Rights Watch “there is substantial discrimination against women” with women’s rights often dependent on the formal approval of a male ‘guardian’. A country too where a woman needs the permission of a male guardian to get married and where domestic violence against women, in some instances, remains lawful.
It’s the very antithesis of the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day – which invites us to “imagine a world free of bias, stereotypes and discrimination” and proclaims that “together we can forge women’s equality” – and I’d venture that if the WSPU was around these days that, far from lapping up this blatant hypocrisy like much of our local and national media, it would be actively campaigning against the presence of such an oppressive regime in the city of its origin.
The WPSU was a radical organisation that led a campaign of civil disobedience – including attacks on public buildings – until the protests stopped at the outbreak of the First World War when most of the suffragettes agreed a truce to support the war effort. So it’s perhaps apt that FC United, a football club with a radical tradition which was born, eighteen years ago, out of protest against the hostile takeover of a Mancunian sporting institution, should choose to honour the true spirit of the Manchester-born WPSU all those years ago.
As the Old Trafford born feminist and socialist Sylvia Pankhurst – who broke with the suffragette leadership of her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel to form the Workers’ Suffrage Federation in 1914 – might have said, had she been around for this kit launch, “up the breakaway Reds”.
FC United will kick off its 2022-23 Fenix Trophy campaign under the lights at Broadhurst Park on Tuesday 15th November as the club begins its defence of the trophy by taking on fellow fan-owned side KSK Beveren from Belgium in the first match in Group A.
The Belgian author Georges Simenon reckoned that “the smell of a freshly opened bottle of beer is the smell of my country” so a bottle or two of Two Hoots golden ale under the St Mary’s Road End terrace should be the perfect way to welcome our fellow supporter-owners to Moston for their Fenix Trophy debut.
The town of Beveren lies in the Dutch speaking area of Flanders that’s better known for its bone-shaking cobbled classic cycle races – and for producing some of the world’s finest road cyclists like their latest lycra-clad superstar Wout Van Aert – than it is for football. Although FC United did once have its very own Belgian footballing superstar, of course, in the form of Tunde Owolabi who was born just up the road from Beveren in Antwerp. And Koninklijke Sportkring Beveren (Royal Sporting Club of Beveren) boasts a fine footballing pedigree.
The club enjoyed its most successful period in the late seventies and early eighties when it was twice Belgian champions and also won two Belgian Cups. It also has a rich European tradition having beaten Inter Milan in the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1979 before eventually losing to Barcelona in the semi-finals.
Perhaps their most famous ex-player is Jean-Marie Pfaff who was Belgium’s goalkeeper during the 1982 and 1986 World Cups and made more than three hundred appearances for Beveren before joining Bayern Munich. And ex-Liverpool ‘supersub’ David Fairclough spent three seasons at Beveren in the late eighties.
More recently the club was also home to a talented generation of players from the Ivory Coast including Yaya Touré, Emmanuel Eboué and Gervinho and this multicultural team even managed to qualify for the group stages of the Europa League in 2004 – KSK Beveren’s last European campaign until now.
Since those ‘golden years’ the club’s history has seen more plot twists than one of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels and its ultimately led to the formation of the supporter-owned club that has now entered the Fenix Trophy.
KSK Beveren experienced financial problems in the late nineties and almost went bankrupt in 2010 and, as a result, it chose not apply for a professional license for the 2010-11 season, instead opting for automatic relegation to the Belgian third division. The club was taken over by nearby Red Star Waasland and became Waasland-Beveren but continued to play its matches at the Freethiel Stadion in Beveren.
Hundreds of supporters boycotted Waasland-Beveren and instead decided to establish a new club in Belgium’s lowest division called YB SK Beveren – “Yellow Blue SupportersKring Beveren” – the first and still the only supporter-owned club in Belgium. The yellow and blue name referred to the colours of KSK Beveren and the phoenix club was viewed by its founders as the resurrection of KSK Beveren from its ashes. They had taken inspiration from the likes of AFC Wimbledon, Enfield Town and FC United – indeed some FC fans may remember board members and supporters of Beveren visiting Gigg Lane in April 2011 and again in March 2012 for our home match against Stocksbridge Park Steels.
The club is democratically run, like FC United, on a “one member, one vote” basis with anyone able to become a co-owner at a cost of 35 euros per season. And, as at FC, members are actively involved in taking the most important decisions about the future of their football club and are able to stand for the board and elect board members.
The new club played its first friendly match in March 2011 and secured registration from the Belgian Football Association to begin playing football in the 2011-12 season. Unfortunately the municipality of Beveren announced that there was no place for the new club in its home town so it was forced to play matches in its first season in the neighbouring town of Sint-Niklaas. But in 2012 YB SK Beveren began playing its home games on a former training ground of KSK Beveren near the Freethiel Stadion.
In June this year an historic agreement was reached with Waasland-Beveren for YB SK Beveren to take over the league registration of KSK Beveren and for Waasland-Beveren to be renamed SK Beveren and share the original club badge of KSK with the supporter-owned club. This move marked the end of a decade long cold war between the two clubs and also recognised the importance of fan ownership in football. And, finally, the fan-owned club was able return to its original home – the beloved Freethiel Stadion in September this year – a hugely significant moment for the club that sees itself as the rightful heirs of the original KSK Beveren.
The club currently play in the first division of the East Flanders provincial league (Eerste Provinciale Oost-Vlaanderen) – an amateur league at the sixth tier of the Belgian football pyramid – and are now very much looking forward to making their debut in the Fenix Trophy in Manchester.
The format of the tournament has changed slightly this season with nine teams competing in three groups of three with each team playing the two other teams in their group home and away. The third team in FC United’s group is Cuenca-Mestallistes from Valencia. The top team from each group, together with the best placed runner-up, will then compete in a finals weekend next June – with semi-finals and a final to decide the 2023 winner of the Fenix Trophy. The dates of FC’s other three group matches and also the venue for the semi-finals and final will be announced in due course.
So get yourself down to Broadhurst Park on Tuesday 15th November for the start of this season’s Fenix Trophy campaign – it’s a 7.45pm kick off. In a new initiative this year, anyone under the age of 18 who is accompanied by an adult will be able to gain free admission to our Fenix Trophy home matches. The Real Madrid president Florentino Perez recently claimed that “young people are no longer interested in football” – we beg to differ and we’d like to give as many youngsters as possible the opportunity to experience live European football.
Bring a mate or family member – perhaps even someone who hasn’t been to FC before. The Premier League will have shut down for the World Cup but you can still come and watch two supporter-owned clubs battle it out in European competition in Manchester. A European night under the lights is always special.
A few months after the publication of ‘The Red Thread’ in 2020 a Dutch postgraduate student got in touch with me – he’d been researching FC United as part of a masters thesis he was writing at the Radboud University in Nijmegen and was interested in finding out more about the club. So on a grey locked down Saturday in December 2020 at that time of day when I’d usually be on a train to an away match or enjoying the latest pre-match Course You Can Malcolm we chatted on the phone and one of the dozens of things he asked me about, during a lengthy discussion, was whether I thought a separate ‘rebel’ league comprised only of fan-owned football clubs would ever happen.
Back in 2005 when FC United were formed I was convinced that other supporters might follow our example – particularly Liverpool fans, politicised by years of fighting for justice for victims of the Hillsborough disaster and maybe Newcastle. And, who knows, if enough clubs followed there might be a chance of forming a parallel football universe where only clubs that are owned and run by supporters compete.
So it wasn’t really a surprise to learn three years later that a group of Liverpool supporters had decided to form their own club, AFC Liverpool, and I went along to their first league match in August 2008 – the week before FC United kicked off in the top division of the Northern Premier League for the first time – curious to find out more about the club. Like FC they had been invited to join the North West Counties League Division One.
AFC Liverpool began life playing their home matches at Prescot Cables’ Valerie Park. It was only a fiver to get in and, just as at FC, you could stand anywhere with your mates. On the pitch the team looked very good, easily thumping Darwen 5-0 and I couldn’t help thinking that they looked far too good for this level of football. But the actual match day experience was largely underwhelming and I left a little deflated by it all – there was little of the joi de vivre of our first league match at Leek only three years earlier. There were nearly five hundred people in attendance – a tremendous crowd for a tenth tier fixture – but there was little atmosphere.
The matchday programme was a decent read and its editorial outlined the club’s aim “to provide an affordable match day experience, with a real sense of belonging” – an alternative to Big Football – a fan-owned club offering football for a fiver to those who couldn’t afford to go along to Anfield anymore but still fancied watching a team in red called Liverpool play. But it was made very clear that the club had not been established in opposition to the ownership and running of Liverpool – instead it was hoped that it “could become a little brother to Liverpool FC”. They left supporter groups like the Spirit of Shankly to fight the ownership of Gillett and Hicks who were running Liverpool into the ground at the time.
Rick Parry, the then chief executive of Liverpool, wrote to the club in the summer of its formation to offer his backing. “There is every reason to believe we can co-exist and co-operate” he said and he wished the club “the best of luck”. Likewise the Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez said he was “pleased with the idea” of AFC Liverpool and wished them “all the best” and added that “it will be fantastic for us”. Quite a contrast with the Govan trade unionist’s opinion of FC United.
An article in the programme also looked at “the rise of fan owned clubs in English football” and described how as a not-for-profit organisation with a democratic “one member, one vote” structure AFC Liverpool was similar to FC United but noted that the club “has sought to distance itself from much of the anti-capitalist rhetoric of FC United and AFC Wimbledon”. Whilst another piece, like one of those overly verbose banners that the Kopites love, spoke of how the club’s momentum “will gather pace until it becomes an unstoppable force. With the Liverpool spirit as our bond we have no option but to succeed. Somehow I know Shanks, Bob and Joe, all men of the people, will be smiling down upon us.”
A decade and a half on AFC Liverpool are still in the North West Counties League although they have at least made it to its Premier Division. But crowds have never reached FC United levels – the average attendance in that first season was 316 and they’ve struggled to get anywhere near that since as gates have typically been in the 100-150 range and they’re yet to find a home of their own. In 2011 the chairman Chris Stirrup had spoken of the club’s desire to “become the biggest non-League club on Merseyside over the next ten years” but a further decade on the likes of Marine and Southport remain bigger draws and supporter-owned City of Liverpool FC, formed in 2015, have already enjoyed greater success on and off the pitch. AFC Liverpool have possibly been a bit too wishy washy for supporters who have serious beefs with modern football.
Meanwhile next Tuesday FC United will travel to Merseyside to play the admirable City of Liverpool in a match billed, on the Purps website, as a “pre-season friendly between the North West’s two biggest supporter owned clubs”. Off the pitch the match will also see the coming together of the Liverpool and Manchester branches of the RMT trade union as a show of support for the RMT who, as the Purps’ match day preview states, “have taken the fight to the Tories and stood up for the working class”. Indeed the preview goes on to highlight how both cities have “a radical tradition and in this case the resonance of the history of the Newton Heath rail workers to the formation of Manchester United and therefore FC United of Manchester”. A lovely touch and one that’s worthy of our support.
Fair play to the scousers for at least having a go at sticking it to the man as, further north, despite years of trying to rid the club of Mike Ashley and occasional talk of a breakaway club the takeover of Newcastle United by a Saudi-led consortium – funded by a human rights abusing regime – late last year, another example of blatant sportswashing akin to that in east Manchester, was greeted with scenes of joy amongst the Toon Army with the Newcastle United Supporters’ Trust welcoming the takeover.
And so a rebel league looks further away then ever. Did it have any legs to begin with? Who would be prepared to sever links with the football pyramid and go it alone? As we’ve seen during the pandemic being part of that pyramid enabled clubs to access funding – some if it even trickling down from the much-maligned Premier League – that was a lifeline at a time when traditional sources of income had dried up. Would a rebel league have survived such an existential threat? Who would be prepared to sponsor it? And isn’t there a risk that it ends up as some sort of low budget ESL with the same clubs playing each other year after year with no relegation or promotion?
Still at least there’s the Brian Lomax Cup, an annual invitational competition which celebrates the role of supporter owned clubs. Brian Lomax was widely acknowledged to be the founding father of the supporters’ trust movement, having established the very first supporters’ trust at Northampton Town in 1992, and he later became the first managing director of Supporters Direct, the body set up in 2000 to provide assistance to supporters’ trusts across Britain. FC United first competed for the cup in that giddy summer of 2005 when we joined the supporter ownership movement and trekked down to London to take on AFC Wimbledon in only our second ever match. And we’re the current cup holders after beating Enfield Town, who competed in the first ever final in 2002, 3-1 at Broadhurst Park last summer.
This season’s final will again take place at Broadhurst Park on Saturday 30th July when FC United take on Banbury United. The Puritans thrashed FC 5-2 in a pre-season friendly last summer and went on to become champions of the Southern League Premier Division Central and will play in the National League North next season – the highest level they’ve ever played at in their ninety-one year history. Meanwhile FC United head into the match not only as the only English team to win a European trophy in 2022 but also as the winners of last week’s inaugural Jersey Bulls Cup. Long live supporter ownership.
Some flew to Bologna and got the rattler to Rimini. A few headed straight to Rimini and some opted to fly to Ancona and get a train or bus up the sun-drenched Adriatic coast. Others flew to Milan and munched on focaccia and sipped fizzy wine as the Frecciarossa sped through the flatlands of Emilia Romagna with its beautiful walled villages and vineyards. Whilst those who couldn’t make it to Italy, or like one board member stayed behind to prepare a set of slides for the forthcoming General Meeting (oh the glamour of life on FC United’s board), tuned into Fenix Trophy TV or FCUM radio for live coverage of FC United’s first appearance in a European final.
Wherever you watched or listened to the match, Saturday 11th June 2022 will go down as a landmark in FC United’s history as, ten months after kicking off the 2021-22 season with a 2-0 defeat on a damp day in Warrington we concluded it with an accomplished 2-0 win over Prague Raptors under cloudless skies in Rimini to collect our first ever European trophy. And, at the same time, for those of us of a certain vintage, brought to two the list of cities beginning with the letter ‘R’ in which we’d seen our red shirted heroes win a European pot.
With delicious irony, of course, FC had sealed their place in the final on the same night as Real Madrid knocked city out of the Champions League – no matter how much oil money they chuck at it the Abu Dhabi project still haven’t managed to buy a European trophy. And as both Rangers and Liverpool flopped in the Europa League and Champions League finals it was left to FC to bring a European trophy back across the Channel.
Picture the scene. A pub, somewhere in England, on a Sunday evening in October 2032. There’s a quiz on and they’re half-way through the sports round. “Which football club from the north-west was the only English team to win a European trophy in 2022?”.
After going two-up in the first half, with goals from Ali Waddecar and Joe Duckworth, FC rarely looked like conceding and, despite not playing a competitive match since beating Brera 2-1 in our final Fenix group match more than five weeks earlier, looked much sharper than the Czech side with Michael Potts particularly impressive in midfield in his final appearance for FC. But it wasn’t difficult to see why the side from Prague finished top of their group and for a team that plays, for now, at an amateur level they made the semi-professionals of FC work hard for their victory.
Indeed there were some pessimists prior to the match who felt that the Raptors might come into the final with a slight advantage in terms of match fitness as their league season was still being played out – they entered this match second in the league on goal difference with two games left to play – whilst FC’s last league match, seven weeks earlier, seemed like a distant memory. Perhaps just as well as I’m not sure any of us wish to recall the gory details of that match against Hyde.
There’s much to admire in the diversity of the Czech club, the youngest club in the competition – formed in 2017 by a Leeds businessman who’d moved to Prague – with the hundred or so players that make up their men’s, women’s and academy teams drawn from more than forty different nationalities including the likes of Bolivia, Nepal and Zimbabwe. And it’s clear that they are hugely ambitious too and are looking to climb the Czech leagues as quickly as possible and they secured another promotion only days after playing in the Fenix Trophy final.
The seaside resort of Rimini, basking in some typically Mancunian summer weather, provided a near-perfect venue for the finals weekend – its dozens of hotels, bars and cafes on the beachfront offered fertile territory for those intent on getting Aperol Spritzed in the sunshine – and it was where the FC players celebrated post-match – whilst the lovely old town and the nearby fishing village of Borgo San Giuliano, with its cobbled squares, shaded back streets and colourful mosaics paying tribute to local lad Federico Fellini were ideal for those of us intent on grabbing an alfresco espresso and poring over the Gazetta dello Sport like a latter day James Richardson on Football Italia.
The finals weekend was very much a celebration of the first edition of the Fenix Trophy with all eight teams coming together, including AFC DWS from Amsterdam who’d withdrawn from the group phase, and Saturday evening’s final was preceded by the play-off for fifth place which saw AKS Zly beat HFC Falke in a penalty shoot-out. Prior to that, in the midday heat, DWS had won 4-2 in their first match in the tournament and, in the end, it was notable that all the teams in FC United’s group triumphed in their play-off matches as Brera secured third place in the competition by beating Lodigiani in the all-Italian clash on Friday evening.
Gazing round the Stadio Romeo Neri on the Saturday evening I couldn’t help thinking that the finals weekend might have struggled a bit without FC’s participation given that we had, by far, the most fans in Rimini, with around four hundred supporters making the trip and, unsurprisingly, making the most noise – although the fans of HFC Falke and our friends AKS Zly also helped to create an atmosphere worthy of the occasion.
However FC’s significant numerical advantage in terms of travelling support certainly wasn’t reflected in the media coverage of the tournament. Whilst there was some welcome coverage on BBC North West (and the Manchester Evening News took a rare break from churning out clickbait to give us a mention, The Meteor ran a feature-length article and I also successfully mithered the Manchester Mill to write a piece on us) it was miniscule compared to the coverage that some of the major broadcasters and newspapers in other countries gave the event.
Maybe as the Trophy holders we’ll get a bit more recognition next season, who knows. But at least we now know that we will be defending the trophy as the board decided, at June’s board meeting, to enter next season’s competition which looks like it will be expanded to twelve teams – comprising four groups of three – with the winners of each group going through to the semi-finals which, along with the final, are likely to be played in Rimini again. A detailed financial analysis of our participation in this season’s tournament showed that we more or less broke even financially if we factor in the revenue generated from the sales of merchandise in Rimini.
When we entered the tournament last summer it was expected that the cost of trips to the likes of Warsaw and Milan would be covered by the revenue earned from the respective home matches and that’s pretty much been the case despite Covid causing complications and significantly bumping up the costs of our trip to Warsaw last October. There are plenty of lessons to be learned for next season and we could certainly do a lot better, for instance, in finding sponsors for our matches in the competition – having generated less than £2,000 of sponsorship income from the Fenix Trophy this season. The television coverage of the final alone has received more than eight thousand views on YouTube – there aren’t many clubs below the National League that can offer match day audiences of that size for potential sponsors.
But for now let’s put the financials to one side and celebrate a first ever European trophy for FC United and a weekend on Italy’s Adriatic coast that will live long in the memory – there are some things you simply can’t quantify on a spreadsheet. Congratulazioni ai Ribelli Rossi, the only English team to win a European trophy in 2022.
jonathanallsopp
nowt much to say 