Penalties from Javier Hernandez and Dimitar Berbatov either side of half time on transfer deadline day lead Manchester United on their way to 3 points as Manchester City were being beat at Everton thanks to a strike from former Red Devil Darron Gibson.  Chelsea had some fortune in scrapping a stoppage time equaliser at Swansea City.

Chelsea head into this fixture on the back of two draws in the league, without regular first teamers John Terry, Ashley Cole, Ramires.  Frank Lampard remains a doubt.

In 39 previous Premier League meetings, Chelsea lead the head-to-head record with 13 victories to Manchester United’s 12 (with 14 draws).  In fact, you have to go back to April 2002 when Sir Alex Ferguson’s side last won at Stamford Bridge in the Premier League.

Paul Scholes, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored the goals that day, in a pre-Roman Abramovich era match against Chelsea.  Both John Terry and Frank Lampard played 90 minutes for the Blues that day, managed by Claudio Ranieri.

Earlier this season, Manchester United tore Chelsea apart in the opening 45 minutes as they cruised into a 3-0 half time lead.  Chelsea improved in the second half and would have been back in the game but a miss of the season candidate from Fernando Torres.  The 3-1 victory was Andre Villas-Boas’ first defeat as Chelsea manager following his move from FC Porto.

Including last season’s Champions League quarter final meetings, Manchester United have won the last 4 meetings with Chelsea.

Sir Alex Ferguson has the tough choice of choosing between Wayne Rooney, Javier Hernandez, Dimitar Berbatov and Danny Welbeck to play up front on Sunday.  The latter 3 strikers have found the back of the net in 2012, whilst Rooney is without a goal since December 21 in the 5-0 thrashing of Fulham at Craven Cottage.

Manchester United are averaging 2.43 goals per game through 23 games, compared to Chelsea’s 1.78.  United have conceded just 7 goals on their travels this season; a league low at this point.  To give you an idea how well the 4 strikers are playing this season, no Liverpool player has scored more goals in the league so far this season.

Antonio Valencia has been a star player for Manchester United during the recent run of form.  The Ecuadorian winger unselfishly setup Danny Welbeck’s winner at the Emirates a fortnight ago and then won the second penalty against Stoke midweek.  The ex-Wigan star won’t be facing Chelsea’s first choice left full back on Sunday as Ashley Cole misses the tie through suspension.

Defensively for Manchester United, Phil Jones looks set to remain absent.  Patrice Evra, Chris Smalling and Jonny Evans are all available – these three played alongside Jones in the 3-1 victory at Old Trafford.  Rafael and Rio Ferdinand are available for Sir Alex Ferguson to call upon should he wish to.

David de Gea is due back for this tie having missed the midweek game.  The Spaniard was between the sticks when Chelsea visited Old Trafford in September, making 6 saves and being beaten only by Fernando Torres.  The former Atletico Madrid stopper has yet to feature in the Premier League in 2012, but did feature in the FA Cup loss to Liverpool.  Anders Lindegaard has been Sir Alex’s first choice in 5 of Manchester United’s last 7 league games, but an ankle injury for the Dane is expected to rule him out for the whole of February.

Stat of the day: Fernando Torres has picked up more yellow cards than scored goals for Chelsea

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Follow Barrie on Twitter and read his football blog.

Such an atmosphere is unlikely at Anfield, regardless of the FA Cup’stendency to prompt a mini-revival of hooligans’ heady days. There’ll be no tear gas to greet United as they disembark and head to their dressing rooms, and the Anfield stewards will be under scrutiny to ensure that cups of excrement and urine aren’t tossed on to the visiting supporters in the Anfield Road’s first tier.But like the ardent 2006 atmosphere, it has the potential to be poisonous again.

Chants about Munich, Hillsborough, Heysel and Harold Shipman will possibly be exchanged as both supporters stress that irrespective of the on-pitch gulf, Liverpool-United is still English football’s number one rivalry. City can be as raucous as they like, but the East Lancs animosity is rooted as far back as the 19^th century. That number again; 19…

It is also eerily similar to six years ago whereby a United player is at the centre of attention. Whereas Gary Neville celebrated a last-minute winner by clutching his badge in front of Liverpool supporters, Patrice Evra was racially abused by Luis Suárez. He will undoubtedly be booed, jeered and heckled by Scousers, ostensibly because he spoke about the Uruguayan’s sister’s genitals.

Evra’s display against Arsenal on Sunday was a throwback to his swashbuckling bravado between 2006 and 2010 for United. Although Wayne Rooney was banging in the goals and taking the plaudits two seasons ago, less impressionable observers identified Evra as United’s best and most consistent performer.

Cantona-lite is an endearing quality in M16 and Evra is many supporters’ favourite player, augmented by him commendingthem for protesting against the loathsome Glazer family. Quotable and eccentric, Potty Paddy’s forlorn form the past 18 months has arguably been distorted by followers’ fondness for him.

No one should doubt whether he has the mettle to withstand the Anfield crowd either. Football grounds can still be nefarious places, but many hardcore supporters have been priced out and/or become disenchanted with the game’s soul-selling exploits. Instead they are populated by so many tourists and bandwagon-jumping Johnny-come-latelys that nowadays, said nefarious environment is as rare as Kenny Dalglish blaming himself.

On his debut at Eastlands six years ago, Evra was substituted at half-time after a torrid 45 minutes, with City 2-0 ahead. That summer, after an inauspicious start, United We Stand’s website responded to rumours that Valencia – nicknamed ‘The Bats’ – would offer a bid for him with the headline ‘Are the Bats blind?’ His resilience, in spite of some ludicrous knee-jerking, was still admirable.

Comments about Arsenal being babies or his brush with a Chelsea groundsman haven’t been forgotten in either north or west London, yet he hasn’t gotten flustered on either patch. Not once has he been sent off since he arrived at Old Trafford, while at Anfield in October, he didn’t react despite proven provocation from Suárez. Instead he kissed the badge in front of the Kop.

Perhaps it is that spiky streak that has affected his performance level. It appears to be no coincidence that since he purportedly engineered the French mutiny at the 2010 World Cup that he suddenly switched from reliable to unreliable. If anything Evra relishes conflict too much, hence his recent regression.

The man of the match showing at the Emirates was a timely fillip in a week when speculation will continue to mount over whether he starts at L4 or not. Of course, he should. Ferguson didn’t withhold Paul Ince from the baying hordes at Upton Park, Cantona at Leeds or – until recently – Rooney at Goodison Park.

Gerard Houllier never started Nick Barmby at Goodison after his transfer across Stanley Park to the red side, and any similar strategy from Ferguson highlights a chink in the armour. Not only in his man-management, but the Reds’ occasionally porous defence which is, ultimately, vastly superior with Evra at left-back rather than Fabio da Silva. Welcome to Hell? It could feasibly be more like Hull.

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Follow Samuel Luckhurst on Twitter and read the Football Fix blog.

Is this season exceptional for injuries, compared to what United typically experience? Is it bad compared to our major competitors? And what about United’s injury record over the longer term – exactly how does that stack up? With those questions in mind, I trundled my mouse over to physioroom.com, captured whatever data was available, pumped it into Microsoft Excel and run the numbers. What I found was generally good news about our longer term record—but it definitely confirms our worst fears about the current season.

Overview

Data is available for all current PL clubs back to August 2002. However, I focused on only six clubs: United, Spurs, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and City. Partly, this was because of the effort (though now it’s reasonably quick to add another club). More importantly, though, the number of injuries is bound to be affected by how many matches a club plays, and most clubs typically have a significantly lighter schedule than us (since most are not regularly in Europe and do not go far in the various domestic cups). In terms of schedule, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and Spurs are probably most comparable to us; and of course, I included City, for obvious reasons.

For each injury, the data includes the player’s name, a brief description of the type of injury, and the date reported. Unfortunately, it does not include the date that the player returned to action. I had been hoping to calculate how many matches each injury cost that player, but it wasn’t possible. Consequently, I wasn’t able to determine whether our injuries are generally more or less severe than those at other clubs.

However, I was able to break the data down into major categories of injury (Ankle, Calf, Hip etc) and I was also able to analyze the data both by calendar year and by season (for the season dates, I counted each season from July 1, since the actual start date moves around, and injuries also occur between seasons).

The Bottom Line

So what of it? How do United fare?

In regards to our current plight, the answer can be summed in one word: bloody shithouse (OK, make that two words). Looking first at the calendar year 2011, already we have reported 65 injuries, making it our third-worst year (since the beginning of 2003), and we still have a handful of matches remaining this year. Our worst year in that period was 2009, when we had 71 injuries, but just one more injury this year will equal our second-worst (66 in 2004). Incidentally, our average for a full calendar year is 56.625, so we are already way above that. Our best year was 2005, with 41.

However, when we break the data down by season, the picture looks dramatically worse.

The data includes nine full seasons (2002-03 to 2010-11) plus this season’s partial data. On average over the nine full seasons, we have reported 57.1 injuries. Our worst season was 2002-03, with 74, and our best was 2005-06, with 46. Last season, we had 60, slightly worse than average.

This season, though, we are already at 40, and the season is not yet at the half-way mark. Although it is difficult to calculate, a rough estimation shows that if we keep going at the current rate, we could end the season with well over 100 injuries. Of course, there’s no way to know for sure. However, when I did the same estimation for the other teams, most actually do appear to be on track for what you would expect based on their history. Only ours and Arsenal’s are wildly out of whack, indicating that we both may be heading for very bad seasons in terms of injury.

I also counted the number of injuries we report each season, between July 1 and December 7. On average, over the previous nine seasons, we reported 27 injuries during that period. This year, as I have already said, it is 40, which is a record for that period. Any way you look at it, this is a horror season.

However, as discussed in the next section, the good news is that United actually seem to be doing OK in the longer term. Our record isn’t the best, but it’s not the worst either – about middle of the pack, in fact. (And our figures look even better when you exclude City, who, as we know, have not generally had a busy schedule until recently.)

The Details

And so, to the details.

1. Number of injuries, by calendar year

* The Average, Best and Worse figures exclude 2002 and 2011, which are both incomplete years.

2. Number of injuries, by season

* The Average, Best and Worse figures exclude 2011-12, which is incomplete.

An analysis of the seasonal data raises a couple of interesting points. First of all, while commonsense might suggest that the rate of injuries increases as we get deeper into a season, the data suggests otherwise. In six of the previous nine seasons, 48% or more of injuries had occurred by this date (December 7), even though a typical season is less than 40% done by then.

Secondly, the average number of injuries suffered by this stage of a season is only 27. We are way above that, with 40. In the period 2002-03 to present, we have never had as many injuries by this stage of a season. Last season, the figure was 32. The season before, it was 36—and both those seasons included the long-term injury to Hargreaves (who hardly counts as a seasonal injury).

3. Types of Injuries

This table shows the percentage of injuries that fall into each category (for example, 21.5% of our injuries were ankle/foot injuries). I did not include all types of injuries, and although I did tabulate this data for all six clubs, I am only including the data for United and the Average here. In general we have held up pretty well—we are slightly better than average in some areas, slightly worse in others. The biggest concern would be ankle injuries, which occur at almost 2% higher than the average rate (especially since this is such a large category for football). Our calf injuries are also running at slightly above the average rate, and perhaps it is worth noting that tackling is one of the main causes of lower-leg injuries generally. Perhaps we aren’t getting as much protection from the referees as some ABUs would have us believe!

On the other hand, we have done well in back injuries (despite Rio’s problems) and groin injuries. We have also done well in shoulder injuries (something I was previously concerned about): although the data shows we are about average, Rafael da Silva’s shoulder problems actually contribute a large proportion of those. When you remove them from the equation, our figures are way better than the average.

(By the way, Arsenal suffer twice as many shoulder injuries as anyone else, and more than three times as many as some. If I was an Arsenal supporter or coach, I would be asking questions about that, especially since shoulder injuries are relatively rare for footballers. But since I am not an Arsenal supporter or coach, I don’t give a shit.)

Overall, though, Arsenal have by far the worst record of the six clubs, in total number of injuries, seasonal averages or annual averages. The Gunners’ season average of 67 is worse than the maximum ever recorded by three of the clubs. Their minimum (57) is as high as our average and almost as high as several teams’ maximum. And looking at the type of injuries they suffer doesn’t offer many clues: apart from the anomaly I mentioned about shoulder injuries, the other categories all seem in line (in terms of percentage). It is not as if, for example, they suffer a disproportionate percentage of lower-leg injuries. Quite simply, their players get injured more often, in every way, and have been doing so over a long period of time.

Conclusion

Although the available data (which comes from physioroom.com) has some limitations, it does provide some comfort by showing that in general, our record is about average. However, Liverpool, Chelsea and City have been consistently and significantly better, and that’s a point of interest.

In City’s case, that may partially be explained by their lighter schedule in previous seasons. However, it should be noted that their rates this season, and this calendar year, are both extremely low—only 12 so far this season, and 30 for the calendar year to date. (I am sure you will join me in hoping their luck runs out sooner rather than later.)

But it is undeniable that, so far, this season has been our worst, and if the current rate continues, it will be our worst by a very large margin.

None of which explains why many United fans take such strong exception to the term, which some regard as the ultimate badge of ‘Glory Hunter’ inauthenticty. Given the routine and unapologetic use of ‘Man U’ outside the UK by people who may have followed the club from afar for decades it’s worth investigating this small but not insignificant verbal schism in a bit more detail.

Having got the chronology straight, let’s now look at one of the reasons most frequently cited for why true Reds should have nothing to do with ‘Man U’, centred round a song mocking the death of one of United’s greatest heroes.

Duncan Edwards, WBA fans and ‘Manure’

The fact that United’s teenage England international Phil Jones has been likened by good judges of the game to the great Duncan Edwards, who died over half a century ago in Munich at the age of 21, probably tells us more about the latter than the former. Sir Bobby Charlton has said that ‘Big Dunc’ was the best player he’s ever seen, the only one who ‘made me feel inferior’, thus endorsing Edwards’ status as one of the ‘all-time greats’. He’s always had a very special place in my heart too, even though I never saw him play. After the air crash on 6 February 1958 he was grievously injured but through sheer strength of will somehow lived on for a couple of weeks before finally expiring. As an eleven-year-old I became obsessed with his condition throughout that period, checking the papers as soon as they arrived through the letter box at home, sometimes with better news, sometimes worse. I was deeply affected by his death, as remembered to this day by my closest school friend at the time.

To me Duncan in death embodied all the qualities one might want in any near-mythical sporting hero. He was the master of every footballing skill, including pin-point long and short passing with either foot, tackling with awesome power and precision, a towering header of the ball and finally, the possessor of cannonball shooting power, earning him the nickname of ‘Boom Boom’ Edwards in West Germany after he bulged their net from way out for England. But his appeal to me went beyond any of that. It was his widely acknowledged sportsmanship and generosity of spirit that attracted me, together with his modest, down-to-earth demeanour. His team-mates always looked to him as an inspirational match-winner and he became England’s youngest-ever debutant aged 18, and helped his fellow Busby Babes to successive league titles in ’56 and ’57. None of this went to his head and he seems never to have lost his innocent, bounding, almost child-like enthusiasm for the game, whilst displaying the deep-chested, mighty-thighed strength of an adult. In a way that is rare in such a macho culture, people like Sir Bobby who knew him well openly speak of having loved the man.

That’s why it is so shocking that supporters of West Bromwich Albion came up with a terrace chant not long after Munich, playing – with massive lack of subtlety- on the term Man U, mocking the memory of a kid who’d grown up just round the corner in the West Midlands, in nearby Dudley:

‘Duncan Edwards is Manure, rotting in his grave,
Man You are Manure, rotting in your grave
Man U, Man U never intended coming home…’

It should be noted that the first letters of the words in the last line add up to ‘Munich’, clearly intended to add to the taunting nature of the insult, albeit somewhat desperately.

There’s no doubt this demeaning, witless little song is pathetic at all levels, and it’s good to hear that WBA fans quickly dropped it from their repertoire. But is this ancient chant really enough to warrant some sort of purist United ban on the term Man U, as some insist? As it happens, most Reds seem unconvinced by the demand, and treat the chant as a repugnant but essentially irrelevant historical curiosity, and either carry on saying Man U or find other grounds for dropping it.

But before we pass on it’s worth taking a closer look at the song, not to berate WBA fans after all these years, nor to judge whether it really does in itself justify a boycott of the term Man U, but to put it into its proper historical context. If we do that I think we’ll see that far from being just a throw-away insult from long ago, it’s actually the progenitor of a whole tradition of open resentment and hostility towards Manchester United and everything the club stands for, played out over five decades.

Then it was West Brom and ‘Duncan Edwards is Manure’, now it’s across the nation and ‘Stand Up if You Hate Man U’.

Munich songs

If it wasn’t so repulsive it would be laughable that after over half a century we still get rival fans provocatively chanting their dismal songs celebrating Munich, often accompanied with that awful arms-out-wide ‘aircraft’ gesture. The phenomenon is mainly associated with Leeds United and Liverpool supporters, who seem deaf to all appeals to respect the dead and their families, but it seems that the Manure song was the first, which is really inexplicable coming from Albion fans, who had no particular history of strong rivalry with United before Munich.

It’s not clear quite when the Manure song was created but it’s possible it was around the time of the two FA Cup ties United played against WBA less than a month after Munich. The makeshift Reds forced a 2-2 draw at the Hawthorns and then won the replay 1-0 with a last-gasp winner in early March, 1958. Both matches were tremendously intense and totally gripping, as you can tell from the Pathe Newreel coverage, played in a breathtakingly competitive but entirely sporting spirit throughout.

The growing resentment against United

At first sight it might seem absurd to think people would be celebrating Munich so soon after the Crash, but in fact there was a hidden, largely forgotten and darker side to the public response to the tragedy, almost from the first. While most people in Manchester genuinely felt the communal sense of loss that is still the prevailing memory of Munich there were some Manchester City fans who have shamefacedly admitted in recent times that they celebrated the destruction of their rivals’ team in the pub as soon as they heard the news. They were presumably indifferent to the fact that City’s former star goalkeeper Frank Swift was among the eight journalists who were killed. To this day a significant number of City fans still derisively refer to United as ‘Munichs’, as do lumpen supporters from other clubs.

Contrary to the widespread impression that bitterness over the national wave of sympathy for Munich only came in later years when United became successful again, there were in fact open expressions of antagonism from the start.On the very day of the WBA replay, for instance, a Rochdale fan had this to say in one of the local Manchester papers:

‘I and thousands of other people who read your paper are fed up with all the bunkum that is written about Manchester United. We will grant that they have been a good team, but why not face facts…’ (Manchester Evening Chronicle, 5 March, 1958)

This was not the only expression of opinion along these lines. Another correspondent had earlier attacked the,

‘mass hysteria that causes ”the sheep”, for want of something better to do, to flock to Old Trafford terraces on Saturdays’. (Manchester Evening Chronicle, 26 February, 1958).

Lord has no mercy

Nor was it only disgruntled local letter writers who had a go at the supposed excess of sympathy flooding towards United. Less than a fortnight after the Crash, Burnley’s famous butcher chairman, Bob Lord, whose puffy face and thick neck resembled the meat he sold, objected to the idea of other clubs loaning or selling players to United to help them get over the crisis caused by having lost much more than a complete first team plus coaching staff to death and injury. He said,

‘No matter how sorry we feel for them they entered the European Cup knowing the risk and now thay should not feel that clubs are obliged to sell their best players on their behalf’ (Burnley Express & Burnley News, 19 February, 1958)

In fact United only bought two players in this period, neither at a particularly cut price, veteran ‘schemer’ Ernie Taylor from Blackpool and journeyman half-back Stan Crowther from Villa, both of whom left within months. There was no mass grab at talent by United. Expressions of sorrow amounted to very little in practical terms. United had to recover more or less alone.

When Bob Lord’s Burnley beat United 3-0 in the following month there may have been a legacy of bad feeling. The match on my 12th birthday – March 15 – descended into a mass 22-player brawl on the pitch and United’s 18-year-old Mark ‘Pancho’ Pearson was sent off, provoking the famous comment attributed to Lord that United behaved like ‘Teddy Boys’, a tag that never really left the side-burned Pancho. I remember the outrage I felt at the time over blobby Bob’s words which felt to me like a coldly deliberate belittlement of the kids who’d just been thrown into the deep end in horrendous circumstances.

Oddly, Matt Busby remained a good friend of the Burnley Chairman, whose club won the league title two years later with an excellent team, although they were undoubtedly helped by the fact that United were in no position to compete. It’s easily forgotten that several leading clubs were assisted for several years by United being taken out of the equation by Munich. It’s an ill wind in football that doesn’t blow the ball in someone’s direction.

Bolton fans join in

It wasn’t only in Manchester, Rochdale and Burnley that anti-United voices were heard complaining about all the coverage United were getting. For the three weeks up to the FA Cup Final the Bolton Evening News ran a succession of letters from Wanderers’ fans giving vent to their frustrations:

‘On Cup Final day I hope that Bolton will beat Manchester United to a frazzle…(I) shall be hoping for a blow that will shatter the prayers of the distinctly unhealthy and morbid sensation mongers whose sentimental partisanship is no more than a wallowing in momentary misery. I am afraid they will enjoy themselves anyway’ (Bolton Evening News18 April 1958).

‘I am really disgusted with the day-to-day sentiments expressed about Manchester United by the national press. If Bolton do win the papers will say they beat a poor team, but if they lose, the Munich to Wembley team will be toasted everywhere. All I can say is: ‘Carry on Bolton and get ‘em beat”. (Bolton Evening News 25 April)

The Labour leader on Bolton Council Ald. J. Vickers objected to the ‘disproportionate amount of publicity given by the press to Manchester United’, later adding that :

‘I thought the public were getting tired of all the tremendous amount of publicity concerning Manchester United…I hoped to see on Saturday not an emotional spectacle but rather 22 fit players giving a good game of football – with the best team winning’ (Bolton Evening News 30 April, 1958)

On the day, Bolton won the final 2-0, ending United’s Phoenix from the Ashes hopes in something of an anti-climax, even for those quietly exulting in the fact that the new Babes had finally go their come-uppance.

Blue Views: How United ‘exploited’ the Munich ‘thing’

It wasn’t only at the time of Munich that rival supporters complained about excessive emotion and ‘wallowing’ in the tragedy. It’s a theme that has popped up at regular intervals ever since. Take these comments directed at Reds around the time of the 45th anniversary of Munich in 2003, on a Manchester City website, Blue Views:

‘When are your club going to stop squeezing every last dollar out of that air crash?’

‘I don’t like the way they (Manchester United) ruthlessly prolonged and marketed the wave of sympathy that followed the Munich thing. You have to ask yourself honestly – did Man U benefit or suffer as a result of that air disaster?’

By the time these anti-Man U comments were posted online, United were well on the way to their eighth Premiership title under Sir Alex Ferguson, giving mooning blues yet more grief. If they didn’t like the alleged ‘marketing’ of sympathy over Munich, you can imagine how they must have felt about the unprecedented globalisation of the United brand then already under way on a huge scale, taking ‘Man U’ ever further afield to country after country.

With hindsight it’s clear that a very particular set of resentments against United had taken shape all that time ago.Beyond the persistent and vacuous ‘Munich’ songs, there is a broader hostility and jealousy which goes back a long way,sometimes bordering on genuine hatred. There have been several sources of this envy, each essentially going back decades, including United’s romantic but tragic history, plus their year-in-year-out reputation for flamboyant attacking football, their succession of household name stars, and their unrivalled popularity, now crossing all frontiers. The last two decades of success have only intensified the dislike, not created it. As Fergie said after the Reds had been pipped to the league title by Leeds in 1992:

‘There is a certain envy for Manchester United which made our task all that much more difficult. We know all about that kind of thing now…I don’t want people to weep crocodile tears for us but I find it difficult to understand why rivals should take so much satisfaction from someone’s downfall. It’s bitter and twisted but we will be ready for it next time. In fact we can use it to our advantage this season. It will be a cause for us, a rallying point to make sure we try even harder.’ (Six Years at United by Alex Ferguson, 1992)

The launch of the ABU Club in 1993

The master of ‘circle-the-wagons’ motivation, Alex Ferguson duly won United’s first league title for 26 years in the following season, 1992-93. This was their fifth major trophy in three years, and it prompted Irish broadcaster Des Cahill to launch the ‘Anyone But United’ Club’, spreading the ABU phenomenom far and wide. It gained much tacit support from United’s rivals everywhere, all those people happy see their own teams losing if it would help thwart United.

There was a genuine and widespread perception in the ’90s that United were arrogant, subject only to their own rules, and commercially rapacious beyond the reach of ‘smaller’ clubs, such as City, and hence the unacceptable face of the modern game. Certain players undoubtedly got under the skins of rival fans, especially Eric Cantona with his Gallic hauteur and upturned collar swagger, not to mention his extravagant match-winning skills. Then there was the visceral loathing for Fergie himself with his gum-chewing, stop-watch time-keeping and purple-faced will-to-win. No wonder people wanted any and everybody to beat United, anything to prevent United winning yet more silverware.It was the ‘mine enemy’s enemy is my friend’ philosophy applied full force.

The new movement had its own anthem, ‘Stand Up if You Hate Man U’, which got Chelsea chairman Ken Bates rising to his feet, even when United weren’t playing. Just as football can generate a sense of community and identity through support for your own team, it can also do so through its opposite, bonding together in hatred for an opponent.

Much of this United fans loved. We hadn’t had a hero like King Eric since the Sixties, and his puffed-out-chest, other-worldly charisma even struck a chord with non-football fans too, those who started mentioning ‘Man U’ to show how au fait they were with popular culture, often throwing in an ‘Ooh Aah Cantona’ for good measure. All this is inseparable from the way Sky Sports had turned football upside down, pouring in vast sums of money for live satellite coverage several times a week, transforming spectator habits everywhere, as pubs and sports bars became tiny stadiums full of baying crowds. You now didn’t ever have to attend a match to feel part of the action anywhere in the world where Premiership football was available, and soon that was pretty well everywhere. And it seems everywhere it went, so did the term ‘Man U’.

As the 1990s progressed, with the Reds piling up the trophies, including two Doubles, the ABU phenomenon spread ever further, even penetrating the international arena. England fans sometimes took more delight in singing anti-United songs than backing their own players, even when matches were played at Old Trafford and even when as many as seven United players were representing the country or when United players were scoring goals for England. Talking in 1998, Gary Neville ( another hate-object) described how he and his brother were repeatedly on the receiving end of this hostility in England shirts:

‘Phil and I went straight out to look at the Wembley pitch and were greeted by a chorus of ‘Stand Up if You Hate Man U’. We’d had this abuse before playing for England, but over the last year it’s got worse.’

By this time it was clear that the term Man U was taking on multiple meanings. It could be part of an anti-United rant, or it could be the trendily familiar term used by a doting middle-class mother whose six-year-old has got his first replica shirt. And all the while it was spreading right round the globe wherever English football was shown on TV, where it was more than a catchy point of recognition, it was a triumph of marketing.

Marketing Man U – ‘the oil-well’

Bearing all this in mind, it’s worth saying that an important and revealing feature of Red opposition to the term Man U stems from the fact that it has come to symbolise not just what some rival supporters hate about United, but also what genuine Reds dislike too, all that mega-store consumerism and obsession with ‘the brand’. Here’s what esteemed RoM regular ‘CedarsDevil’ had to say recently in a thread prompted by a Bloomberg article about United’s market dominance:

‘Biggest brand in sport, what the fuck next? Compete with Coca Cola? Better still have more branches than BurgerKing…Bloody stupid labelling…’

There are United fans who’d love to take the club back to the kind of down-to-earth institution it used to be, rooted in the working class communities of Stretford and Salford, not a leisure centre for the middle class ‘prawn sandwich brigade’ so memorably dismissed by cult hero Roy Keane. At times there has been an understandable backlash against the aggressive merchandising of the club as its expansionary plans are rolled out across the globe. For years there were endless complaints from fans about the high prices for replica shirts and how often the design was endlessly changed to maximise profits.

Already by 1996, the year of the Double Double, United were selling 850,000 replica shirts a year worldwide, a quarter of a million more than any other club in the UK and 350,000 more than any English club. It’s no wonder that Edward Freeman, ex-head of merchandising at Old Trafford, had this to say in Management Today in February 1999, when United were on course for their unique Treble:

‘It’s an oil-well. Up through the ground gurgles this lovely red & white gold. No-one’s quite sure how or why, but it seems to keep on coming…(It’s) a seven days a week, 52-weeks-of-the-year international sporting brand – a money printing machine’.

United’s chief executive Peter Kenyon (who later became the object of derision when he defected to Chelsea for bigger bucks) also waxed lyrical in Forbes magazine about United’s commercial prospects in July 2002, just prior to the start of another Premiership title-winning season:

‘Our growth potential is in internationalising the brand. We’ve already built Man U megastores in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and we’ll soon open one in Bankok… We’ll begin opening a string of Red Cafes, in branded family restaurants, which are to spread all across Asia…’

In 2002 Vodaphone replaced United Club Call (to which I was embarrassingly addicted ) with ‘Man-U-Mobile’ as the club’s phone service, seemingly oblivious of some supporters’ dislike of the term, adding to the sense that the club was losing its soul.

However, while all this sort of thing provokes horror in some supporters, others are quietly proud that United attracts such remarkable levels of world-wide interest. In a certain light it can be seen as fulfilling Matt Busby’s visionary idealism for the expansion of international club football. Matt had insisted on taking United into the European Cup as champions in 1956-57 in the teeth of reactionary official opposition, but not just for short-term Red Devil glory, but to promote his longer-term aspirations for the future of the sport as a whole. Think what Matt would have thought about over 300 million people saying they support United – or Man U – from Manhattan to the land of California, and all points east. In fact that globalising process was already under way at the very end of Matt’s reign, in Scandinavia.

Our friends in the North

It’s not widely remembered that from 1969 Scandinavia had access to more English football matches live on television than we did in the UK, creating a knowledgeable and passionate audience for United. This growing popularity in that region must have delighted the ageing Busby, who will have surely viewed it as a vindication of his dream. Despite being in relative decline in the ’70s and ’80s ,United were the most-watched team in Scandinavia between 1971 and 1995, with around 70 matches covered live. (For those who like obscure facts, Scandinavian fans saw more goals scored by Mark Hughes in that period – seven- than by any other player, followed by McIlroy,McClair, Bruce, and Giggs with four each).

Leaving aside the (undoubtedly important) issues surrounding the current ownership of United by the Glazer family, and all that implies, the logic of Matt’s vision must surely be to celebrate much of what is happening today, when the whole world can be gripped by the drama and romance of supporting Manchester United, whether or not you choose to call them Man U .

Who could possibly begrudge anybody the intensity of experience conveyed in this report on the Champions League Final in 2008, from the Hindustan Times:

‘Soccer finals don’t get any bigger than this: Manchester United playing against Chelsea in the Champions League final in Moscow…but what struck beady-eyed us sitting here in ‘indoostan, glued to our tallies (sic)… was the sheer mixture of quality and high-octane entertainment provided. Television cameras beaming the match live to millions worldwide lingered lovingly on the fouls and the battered bodies, as well as on the goals and the subsequent faces. This was Jacobean theatre performed by the two English clubs full of a non-English dramatis personae. For us sitting here in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata or Bhatinda, cheering on either Man U or Chelsea might seem a tad strange to the guys in the bar at the Old Mancunian or Stag’s Head. It may seem odd.. to find Indians roaring in cheer or collapsing despair to the proceedings of a “European” tie. But as the gladiatorial spectacle evident from Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium in the wee hours of Wednesday night here showed , (Indian sports and media mogul) Lalit Modi and gang could pick up a tip or two about truly globalising a spectator sport.’ (Quoted in ‘Nemanja Vidic – Captain Fantastic, by Frank Worrall , 2011)

I’ll still say United, but you can say Man U

Whether I have really got to the bottom of the Man U issue I’m not sure, but I hope I have shown just how complex and multi-layered the whole thing is. I suspect Man U will remain the term of choice for millions of fans round the world, who’ll have no qualms about it, while a stubborn rump of self-styled traditionalists in the UK will continue to poor scorn on its branding superficiality, just as envious rivals will continue to exhort everyone to ‘Stand Up if You Hate Man U’ till kingdom comes.

As for myself, I would as soon name my wife Mrs Blatter as call Manchester United Man U, but today I would never tell anyone what to call our club. The last time I did that I came to regret it deeply.

I used to correspond by email with an elderly, rather lonely American who was mad about sport, including soccer. Bob was a former student of my late father-in-law and he’d worked in the theatre and also at the US Space Agency, putting into clear English all the technical jargon for ground-crews preparing to launch manned rockets into space.This was a man who cared about language and was quick to grasp its nuances and subtleties. He’d become a big fan of United, hardly missing a match on satellite TV in San Diego, continually enthusing over David Beckham’s crosses and Wayne Rooney’s bulldog Britishness. He used to ask me all sorts of questions about the history of the club, which I’d answer in much the way I have contributed to the RoM site in recent times, and he was always very appreciative and encouraging in return.Then one day he happened to use the dread term ‘Man U’ once too often, as most Americans do without a second’s thought. I reacted badly, telling him ‘real United supporters’ would never use such a term. I could tell from his crestfallen response that I’d rather hurt his feelings, making him feel that I didn’t ultimately accept him as a true supporter, just because he was an American and because he hadn’t got the correct lingo. I immediately realised my mistake and tried to reassure him on the matter, but I never fully succeded. Sadly Bob was taken seriously ill not long after this stupid exchange and he died a few months later, without me ever quite getting him to feel he was still part of the worldwide United family.

That’s why you’ll never again find me telling someone, ‘real supporters don’t call Manchester United ‘Man U’ ‘

Booknote

Here I want to acknowledge my debt to a series of essays in an academic collection called ‘Manchester United – A Thematic Study, edited by David L. Andrews, published in 2004. I am particularly appreciative of Gavin Mellor’s chapter ‘We hate the Manchester Club like poison’ which I have drawn on extensively, especially his important and detailed research into the early reaction to Munich, one of the best things I’ve read on the subject. I have also taken quotes from Kirsten Rosaaen & John Amis’s excellent ‘From the Busby Babes to the Theatre of Dreams’. There are several other valuable contributions such as the chapter by Bo Reimer on Scandinavian United supporters and I recommend the book if you’re not too easily put off by academic language, or indeed by Professor Toby Miller of New York University’s continual reference to Man U.

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Why Saying ‘Man U’ Isn’t So Bad… Part I

‘Why the fuck are we called Man U, for fuck sake, it’s United you dicks.’

One RoM regular has referred to our name being ‘desecrated’ by the use of ‘Man U’ and asks, ‘How hard is it to type Man United? It’s only 5 more letters.’

People often ask me what I think so I decided to explore precisely what’s at stake, hoping to pin down why feelings run quite so high on this apparently pointless divergence within United’s far-flung phantom empire. Of course I have my own views on the subject, as I regularly point out to my wife, but I must admit I have been surprised by how elusive the whole issue turns out to be, even on seemingly obvious questions. On the other hand, as I peered into Manchester United’s past through this tiny linguistic prism it has been surprisingly pleasureable to see the sheer richness of the landscape revealed. That’s why I hope you’ll bear with me on this somewhat meandering journey along the long and winding road of United lore.

But first, let’s start with a little historical quiz. What do the following all have in common?

2-8 November 1951: England team list in ‘Sport’ magazine, naming several Manchester United players.

27 April 1952: Football results column in the ‘Sunday Pictorial’, when Matt Busby’s United defeated Arsenal 6-1 to secure the club’s first league title for 41 years.

1 February 1958: The Arsenal v Manchester United match-day programme for what turned out to be the Busby Babes’ last domestic appearance before the Munich Air Crash five days later. (United won 5-4, of course, in a pulsating match dominated by the Herculean Duncan Edwards.)

26 March 1960: The Fulham programme for the first time I saw United, when Dennis Viollet scored twice in a 5-0 win to set the United record for league goals in a season, still unbroken.

15 September 1963: ‘Sunday Mirror’ match-report scoreline when George Best made his debut in a 1-0 victory against West Bromwich Albion.

7 May 1967: ‘Sunday Mirror’ report when United beat West Ham 6-1 to clinch Matt Busby’s fifth and final league title.

Got it? The correct answer is of course that in each case the abbreviation ‘Man U’ was used, with not a peep of ‘for fuck sake’ protest from anyone.

So what’s going on? Why has an expression used uncontroversially – even honourably – decades ago suddenly become so contentious?

Following the paper trail

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s it was absolutely routine to see the term ‘Man U’ in print, particularly in the tabloids and populist broad-sheets. It was a space-saving device and you’d find it mainly in the football results and league tables alongside other abbreviations such as WBA, QPR, Man C, Sheff U, Sheff W and so on. You’d also see it when international teams were announced, a player’s club affiliation being placed in brackets after his name, just like today. Then it often popped up in the ‘Stop Press’ or ‘Late News’ column which would be left blank for last minute updates, especially in local evening papers.The Man U abbreviation also began appearing in the scoreline above match reports, as in the Quiz examples. And finally, when I first began attending matches at the end of the decade, programmes often used the term as well, not on the front or team sheet page but tucked away in the small print of the fixture list and league table.

Knowing all this, I wanted to find out when the term first came into use. So I trawled through books such as ‘Manchester United – A History since 1909′ and Stephen F Kelly’s invaluable ‘Back Page United’, plus my own scrapbooks and haphazard piles of yellowing cuttings. From these sources it became clear that it took quite a while before the fully stripped-down term became commonplace.

In the 1920s, for example, the most common shorthand was ‘Manchester U’, although the ‘News of the World’ was already using ‘Man Un’ as early as 1940 while the ‘Sunday Dispatch’ rather clumsily put ‘M’nchester U’ in 1946. Gradually in the late 1940s the now-predominant abbreviations ‘Man United’ and ‘Man Utd’ took hold, as seen on supporters’ hats at the 1948 Cup Final. These terms have since always been deployed far more frequently than ‘Man U’ and to this day ‘Man United’ is still what you’ll hear spoken by such Old Trafford luminaries as Sir Bobby Charlton, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and David Beckham, just as it is by countless fans. On the other hand, I am not aware of either Sir Matt Busby or Sir Alex Ferguson ever using any of these shorthands.

Meanwhile, ‘Man U’ appeared with growing frequency in the early 1960s, particularly in the mass-circulation Daily and Sunday Mirror, the leading tabloids of the day. I can also point to plenty of examples from other papers such as the Daily Mail, The People, the News Chronicle and Daily Herald, all of which show conclusively that there was absolutely nothing problematic or provocative about printing ‘Man U’ in those days.

However, here I would stress two things. First, throughout that period 50 or 60 years ago, I can find no examples of journalists using ‘Man U’ within the main body of an article. Second, I have no memory whatsoever of anyone in the early ’50s who actually said ‘Man U’ in conversation. I believe it was at first an almost entirely written phenomenon, largely relegated to the small-print sections of newspapers and programmes. It seems to have caught on only slowly as a spoken expression, in an almost underground way in the more informal Sixties, without ever being particularly pushed by the media.

Nevertheless, I should here admit that others remember things differently. That’s because even among supremely knowledgeable Reds there is no real agreement about where and when people started saying ‘Man You’ in the modern way. All sorts of different explanations get put forward, none shedding much light on why people get so het up about it.

Did ‘Man U’ start at the movies?

On the basic question of chronology, one of the most interesting suggestions is the claim that the term ‘Man U’ was spoken as early as the 1950s in the cinema. It has been said that ‘the rot’ – if such it is – started in the old Pathe Gazette Newsreels which used to appear between the main feature and the ‘B’ movie. For some of my pals with no interest in politics or the doings of royalty this was the time to grab a choc ice or Orange Maid lolly, but for me there was always the hope of catching some fleeting shots of soccer stars such as Stanley Matthews or Billy Wright.

We used to go to ‘the pictures’ almost every week in the Regent Cinema in Amersham or the Embassy in Chesham in the ’50s, and I loved seeing the top sports stories of the day on the vast shimmering screen. As with many other youngsters, this would have been my first real exposure to top footballers in action and it was exhilarating to gaze up at these gods so dramatically magnified in scale. In some cities there were even dedicated Newsreel Theatres screening these news compilations on a loop, usually changing three times a week. They were the antecedants of today’s TV news.

I’ve no doubt the cinema, far more than TV, did an enormous amount to spread the word nationally about Matt Busby’s fine attacking, free-scoring Manchester United teams in the late ’40s and 1950s, an under-appreciated aspect of the club’s rise to wider prominence.The Busby Babes excited crowds wherever they played, pioneering European football in 1956-57 whilst also tilting for the first domestic League & Cup Double of the 20th Century, and Pathe cameras were present for many of the key encounters.

However, despite the undoubted importance of this first phase in the ‘nationalisation’ of Manchester United I had my doubts about the likelihood of anyone referring to the team as ‘Man U’ at that time. It would surely have been out of keeping with the Pathe house style, which had a certain tweed-jacket, pipe-smoker ‘establishment’ quality, giving events a portentous, almost epic quality at times through the rich tonality of the narration.

This was shown at its best in the Pathe coverage of the Munich Air Crash on 6 February, 1958, which caused the deaths of 23 people. The grainy, achingly sad scenes of snow whipping across the wrecked aircraft fuselage lying on the runway have been used in almost every modern documentary on the subject.The commentator speaks with hushed restraint as he names those United players who had been killed and those who survived, such as the fatally injured 21-year-old Duncan Edwards.It was the same with the reports from the Rechts der Isar hospital over the following weeks, when everything was treated with tact and sensitivity. Pathe were there again as United rose from the ashes to win the improbable series of emotion-charged FA Cup ties that took the team to Wembley again, beating Sheffield Wednesday, WBA and Fulham on the way.

All this I knew, and I was reasonably conversant with both the classic Babes footage and the post-Munich match coverage. Nevertheless I decided to view as many Pathe Newsreels as possible to check for myself that somehow ‘Man U’ hadn’t surprisingly slipped through as claimed, perhaps in some breathless piece of narration over shots of the players in action.

Pathe News: historic United footage

Both Pathe and their rivals Movietone tried to replicate the style of live-action sporting commentary of the kind already familiar to BBC radio listeners. Match footage was shot on big cumbersome 35mm tripod film cameras, and it would have been far too expensive to film the whole game just for a brief report so they would gamble on capturing the best bits, guessing when a move might end in a goalscoring opportunity, hoping to catch the vital moments. If they were lucky they would add the excitable ‘and it’s a goal!’ later in a dubbing theatre.

As I trawled through You Tube and Pathe’s own archive I was astonished by just how many newsreels featured United. It’s a wonder no-one has made more use of this brilliant black & white treasure trove of United film going back to at least the 1930s.

There are surprising treats such as matches from United’s classic FA Cup run in 1948, including the Aston Villa, Charlton and Derby County ties plus the Final itself at Wembley against Blackpool ( the first United match covered live on TV by the BBC). Then there are unexpected gems such as United beating Leeds 4-0 and Arsenal 1-0 in the Cup in 1951, with Stan Pearson getting a hat-trick in the first match and the winner in the second.

One oddity is a report by Universal, a Pathe competitor, covering a rather embarrassing 7-1 defeat by Tottenham Hotspur in an exhibition match in the Yankee Stadium, New York, in 1952, when United were Champions. The narration is by an American who calls the fans ‘boosters’ and refers to the United players as ‘the Manchester Uniteds’. For fuck sake.

There are several Pathe reports from around 1957 featuring the famous footage of the Busby Babes, including the 1957 FA Cup Final when the Double hopes were dashed by Aston Villa. I was also pleased to find rip-roaring action from the two legs of the Cup Winner’s Cup in 1964 when United knocked out the holders Tottenham under atmospheric floodlights.There was even newsfilm I’d never seen before of an FA Cup match I’d attended myself at Old Trafford in 1968 with my Spurs fan brother Chris, when a late Tottenham equaliser made it 2-2 on the day. To make it worse, Spurs won the replay, highlights of which I remember seeing on TV.

Having now seen most if not all of these wonderful old Pathe Newsreels featuring United I am sure no-one ever used the term Man U, either in commentary or in a caption.

But do look for yourself. Who cares if they say ‘Man U’? These are irreplaceable pieces of United history, in triumph and tragedy, and it’s marvellous that we are able to access them so easily.

Soccer as social history

For me those lustrous black & white pictures are tremendously evocative, reminding me forcefully just how much football has changed in my lifetime. The thing that strikes one immediately is how battered and worn those old ‘mudbath’ pitches were compared with today’s carefully manicured surfaces.Then there are the mountainous crowds packed together on the steep all-standing terraces with little or no cover from wind and rain. These heaving, seething, broiling masses of supporters always seem swathed in industrial fog or cigarette smoke, or both. Then there’s the drab uniformity of the massed ranks pressed together, especially in those early post-war Austerity years, when everyone seems to wear flat caps, trilbys and ill-fitting ‘de-mob’ suits. It’s all gaunt faces and scrawny bodies, spectators and players alike. No need then to enquire, ‘Who ate all the pies?’

When you see these fans in close-ups there is more individuality and character of course, amidst the bony faces and bad teeth, which betray harsh working lives of endurance and deprivation. Archive film like this is an invaluable resource for social historians, showing if nothing else how much health has improved since the creation of the NHS in 1948, the year of Busby’s first trophy.

These newsreels straddle my own childhood and capture what football was like when I first went to games at the end of the 50s, although gazing nostalgically at these old films today that seems almost impossible to believe. Everything is so very, very different now. Yet I can still somehow identify with the grinning schoolboys in caps and belted macs caught in crowd scene cutaways, so vital for film editors trying to assemble a credible sequence from discontinuous, unlinked action shots. Not that I ever wore my school cap to see United, especially that first time in 1960. After all, I had skived off early from school that day.

‘Famous Football Teams at Home No 4: Manchester United’ (1936)

One of my favourite discoveries in the Pathe archive was a short item from 14th December 1936 entitled ‘Famous Football Teams at Home No 4: Manchester United’. It’s a bit surprising to find United featuring so early in the series, given their perennial yo-yo status in the 20s and 30s and sure enough, they were relegated again at the end of this season, 1936-37, having only just come up the year before.

There are remarkable pictures of the United players training and then we see their faces in close up, mostly unrecognisable but strikingly similar to any other working class men from that Depression era decade. These craggy-featured players could easily be coal miners, steel-workers or shipyard welders.There’s a similar story on Manchester City ‘at home’ with a portrait shot of Matt Busby, not long before he left to join Liverpool, looking very smart and controlled, with slicked-down, centre-parted hair, a commanding presence even then.

As I listened to the narration to this 1936 report, ears cocked for a possible ‘Man U’ (none to be heard), I was suddenly taken back to a forgotten part of my childhood. It was the use of a phrase I hadn’t heard for years, now long passed out of use: ‘the United’. That’s how some supporters would refer to United not just when I was a kid, but way back over a century ago. In the same way as today some might say ‘Man U’, then it was ‘the United’.

There’s only one t’ United

I first really became aware of this convention when I began supporting the team after Munich, especially when I started attending matches and would hear genuine Mancunians talking. It was brought home to me in September 1960, after I’d just seen Tottenham trounce United 4-1 at White Hart Lane, on their way to the first Double of the 20th Century. As I have described before, I fainted in the Underground after the match (heat, lack of food, hours of standing, disappointment) and collapsed onto the platform at Euston. A kindly old United supporter checked to see if I was OK and he ended up giving me a whole bag full of pre-Munich programmes, photos, cuttings and – most generous of all – several Babe autographs, including that of my hero Duncan Edwards (who I’d never actually seen play). I felt very strongly even then that he was passing on a kind of sacred trust to me with these ‘Holy Relics’. Hearing that Pathe voice-over from 1936 refer to ‘the United’ brought back to me the fact that this sad-eyed old gentleman at Euston had done the same.

It must have been around that time that I sometimes adopted a respectful but none the less entirely fake Manc accent and would talk about ‘t’United’, which would come out as a sort of strangulated ‘chunited’, which my brother would mock in evermore ‘eeh by gum’ stage-Northerner tones. A bit like middle class kids going all Gangsta today, I suppose. Boys will be boyz.

‘The United’ in the Golden Age

Having been reminded of my own ‘t’United’ heritage I began looking for its use historically. In fact it goes back to the very beginnings in 1902, when the club’s name was changed from the original Newton Heath to Manchester United. A few years ago the BBC got hold of what is believed to be the oldest footage of a United match, a 2-0 away win against Burnley from that first season under the new name. The researchers noticed in newspapers that the team was referred to as ‘the United, better known as Newton Heath’. This then became a regular – though never exclusive – term in United’s first Golden Age.

August 1908: In those early days there was a popular sports paper called ‘Athletic News’ which covered United extensively before and after World War 1 and they frequently used the tag, ‘the United’. Here’s their report on United’s 4-0 replay victory against Queens Park Rangers in the inaugural Charity Shield in 1908, after United had won their first league title:

‘In the spring the Rangers and the United were on an equality. On Saturday the United showed football justifying their title (as Champions)’ . (Athletic News, 31 August 1908)

April 1909: In the following year United won the FA Cup for the first time, beating Bristol City 1-0. The ‘Daily Mirror’ covered the match, noting that:

‘The Manchester men knew that Bristol had won three out of four league points from the United.’ (Daily Mirror, April 26, 1909)

April 1911: Another now defunct sports paper, ‘The Umpire’ had a long report when United won the League for the second time in three years in April 1911, beating Sunderland 5-1 at Old Trafford, under the headline:

‘MANCHESTER UNITED CHAMPIONS: Bravo, United!‘

The report by ‘The General’ was peppered with references to ‘the United’:

‘The United turned out without Hofton….the United defenders showed great form…The United had terribly bad luck… The Wearsiders were working manfully to keep the United out…The United had the better of the game…the United had several chances…’ (The Umpire, 30 April, 1911)

September 1911: When ‘the United’ beat Swindon 8-4 at Stamford Bridge to win their second Charity Shield with Harold Halse scoring six goals , the Mirror was there again to cover the match:

‘…Tout scored with a fast low shot, making the score only 4-3 at halftime in favour of the United…Five minutes from the finish Wall scored the eighth goal for the United…’ (Daily Mirror, 26 September, 1911)

‘The United’ enters the history books

So, it’s very clear that the term ‘the United’ appeared fairly regularly in those early glory days (unlike ‘Man U’ which doesn’t surface at all), and the practice carried on well into the inter-war period. ‘Jacques’ of the Athletic News often used it in the 1920s and we’ve seen it already in Pathe’s Newsreel in 1936.

Closer to our own times you can also find the phrase ‘the United’ still just about in use in the Official History of Manchester United, written in 1948 by the Red-supporting journalist Alf Clarke of the ‘Manchester Evening Chronicle’, who was one of the eight reporters who tragically lost their lives at Munich. This slim but invaluable booklet cost one shilling and was the first detailed history of the club, prompted by Matt Busby’s team winning the FA Cup that year for the first time since 1909.

Alf gives charming, somewhat folksy accounts of several key moments in United’s chequered history, in some cases passing on stories which would otherwise have remained unrecorded and it’s noticeable that, alongside the more common use of ‘United’ he occasionally drops back into the old style, which had a certain ‘respectable’ working class formality about it. I’ll give just one example, partly to keep the memory alive of one of the few United ‘greats’ of the grim inter-war years.

Alf liked talking about his favourite United players, many of whom were personal friends, and he was a particular fan of one of the greatest goalscorers United have ever had, Joe Spence, who joined the club in 1919, having served as a machine gunner in World War 1. Known for the terrace cry of ‘Give it to Joe’, Spence played for United for 14 seasons, making a then record 510 appearences and scoring 168 goals, all at a time when the team was struggling on and off the pitch. As Alf says, with powerful understatement:

‘What a great servant he was to the United’. (Official History of Manchester United, 1948)

(In passing I’d just flag up that phrase, ‘a great servant’, which is still used today when players like Paul Scholes or Gary Neville are discussed. I’ve always disliked its Victorian master-servant overtones, although it certainly fitted the position of footballers before the abolition of the maximum wage in 1961).

By 1948, when Alf Clarke was writing his history, it was already increasingly rare to find ‘the United’ in print so it rather stuck out when I heard it used in the commentary for the Pathe reports on United’s FA Cup defeats of Leeds and Arsenal in 1951. It already sounded a little quaint.

Nevertheless, it was nice to find another quote from a few years later showing that Manchester City were sometimes referred to in a similar, slightly archaic fashion.This is what Dennis Viollet, who grew up a City fan, said after he’d scored the winner in a tense 1-0 local derby victory in October 1956 (on the way to the Babes’ second successive league title):

‘I’ve nothing against the City but I’d rather score against them than against anybody.’ (The Red Devils: FA Cup Souvenir, 1957).

Finally, one last, rather touching little example of this use of ‘the United’, which I found in the 1958 Supporter’s Club Handbook, for the season following Munich. There I spotted an advert from a raincoat company, appropriately enough in Newton Heath, simply wishing, ‘SUCCESS TO THE UNITED’.

The end of the ‘Pathe Years’

It’s revealing to see how these verbal traditions persisted for decades, through a period when support for ‘the United’ still largely came from cohesive communities clustered around Manchester’s factories,engineering works and textile mills. There were few differences in culture and life-style between players and supporters and perhaps even reporters as everyone spoke in more-or-less in the same way, in what remained an overwhelmingly working class sport. Fans were generally locals, some of whom went to Maine Road to see ‘the City’ one week and Old Trafford the next.

But well before the end of what we might call ‘the Pathe Years’ (they folded in 1970), there were destabilising social upheavals which transformed the face of Britain, and hence the lives of the great mass of football supporters. The Sixties saw a heady mixture of ‘You’ve never had it so good’ consumerism, ‘permissive’ youth culture, ‘Get offa my cloud’ rock rebelliousness, and momentous struggles for equality and liberation, all against the backdrop of declining industrial communities with their ‘tribal’ loyalties. Taken together with the gradual ‘nationalisation’ of support for Manchester United in the 1950s , massively intensified by Munich, these changes had an enormous impact on the nature of support for the club, including the language used by fans all over the country, a process accelerated when TV coverage of football expanded in the Sixties.

Did they say ‘Man U’ on TV?

It is around this period, with United both growing in popularity and yet simultaneously attracting ever more bitter envy from supporters of rival clubs which could never match or compete with the United mythology and romantic appeal, that the somewhat populist tag, ‘Man U’ really started to take hold in popular discourse, certainly in private conversation. It has been claimed by the highly regarded Tom Clare no less (he’s written extensively on United’s past as a longtime supporter going back to the Fifties) that it was on ITV that the dread term first gained wider currency. He exonerates the BBC, who could be expected to have higher standards.

And so it’s to television we must turn next to check whether people really did say ‘Man U’ on television. Is Tom Clare right?

The first live TV coverage of ‘Manchester’

In these days of multi-channel saturation coverage of football from all round the world, it’s hard to convey just how different things were when I was a kid. Then there was only the one BBC public service channel until 1955 when ITV was launched to break the monopoly, funded purely by advertising. There was virtually no live TV coverage of club football apart from the FA Cup Final and, much later, occasional European Cup matches. Even recorded highlights were on a very limited scale, not much more that a couple of matches a week.

We’ve seen that the first live coverage of a United match was the 1948 FA Cup Final, after which there was nothing more on the BBC for nine whole years, until United reached the Cup Final again in May 1957, against Aston Villa.

I have listened carefully to the whole TV commentary for that final by Ken ‘They think it’s all over’ Wolstenholme, constantly reminding myself that this is the only TV recording available of a complete Busby Babes match and that the team was the youngest ever to grace an FA Cup Final. I can thus say with conviction that our Ken certainly never refers to ‘Man U’. In fact he hardly even uses the word United. Instead he consistently refers to ‘Manchester’, as when chiding the United fans for booing Peter McParland after he’d smashed goalkeeper Ray Woods’ cheekbone with a reckless charge early on, reducing United to ten men for most of the match. In those pre-sub days, Villa won 2-1, ending United’s hopes of the first Double of the 20th century.

Meanwhile ITV covered a United match live for the first time shortly before that Cup Final defeat, Granada cameras being present at Old Trafford for the European Cup semi-final second leg against Real Madrid in April 1957. United drew 2-2 to lose 5-3 on aggregate, ending their chance of an unprecedented Treble, only achieved 42 years later.

TV Highlights before Match of the Day

The BBC had various programmes from the early 1950s, such as Sports Special, Saturday Sport and Sportsview which would have recorded highlights of football matches, usually not more than two matches per Saturday.Before the introduction of Ampex video tape in the late ’50s, the action was shot entirely on ‘telerecording’ 16mm film capturing the pictures direct from the big electronic ‘pedestal’ Outside Broadcast cameras, which explains the relatively poor quality. The film had to be rushed in relays by despatch riders to labs in London to be processed, accompanied by shot-list ‘dope sheets’ to assist rapid editing. There was so little time the edited footage would then be transmitted in negative, ‘reverse-phased’ electronically by the ‘telecine’ machine to give the correct black & white pictures. Wolstenholme would introduce these 15-minute highlights from a studio in London, where he cheerfully smoked cigarettes while the match was going out, casually using an ash-tray hidden beneath his desk.

With all these Sports shows, there were perennial complaints that the BBC favoured Southern clubs at the expense of the North, vigorously denied. It has been claimed that the first time United were featured at Old Trafford was only as late as August 1957 against Leicester City. To put this in context, by that time the Busby Babes had been Champions in both of the previous two seasons.

Personally I have fond memories of Sports Special when we first got a TV around ’58 , getting early glimpses of my first great heroes, Munich survivors Harry Gregg, Bill Foulkes and Bobby Charlton and others favourites such as Dennis Viollet and Albert Quixall. Needless to say, I have no memory of whether the commentators ever said ‘Man U’.

Match of the Day launched in 1964

Gradually the pressure increased for more football on TV, leading eventually to the launch of Match of the Day in 1964, initially somewhat hesitantly on the relatively new channel, BBC2, before the success of the show saw it move to progressively better slots on BBC1. It became one of the ‘signature’ series in the BBC’s Saturday night schedules, persuading parents to let kids stay up late and drawing adults out of pubs early. These shows helped make the reputation of the great teams of the era, not just Busby’s United but also Bill Shankly’s Liverpool or Don Revie’s Leeds. It was no surprise that soon ITV were trying to compete for this growing armchair audience with The Big Match in London and regional variants elsewhere, must-see shows screened on otherwise insufferably dull Sunday afternoons, when almost everything was closed under Lord’s Day Observance legislation, only repealed in the 1980s.

United as Showbiz

Shows like this also made household names of even journeymen footballers and magnified the star quality of the very best players, such as Charlton, Denis Law and inevitably,’the Fifth Beatle’,George Best, not to mention the great characters of the game like Nobby Stiles, so beloved by the casual fan after his role in helping England win the World Cup in 1966, which itself had a massive impact on the popularity of football.

Football was getting drawn ever closer to the centre of popular culture as a branch of showbiz, when Saturday night audiences could pick-and-choose who their favourite team might be, often with scant regard for locality or traditional loyalty. There is no doubt that countless thousands of TV viewers all over the UK, many of whom perhaps never saw the Reds in the flesh, were drawn by the mystique, the romance, the glory and – crucially – the tragic past – of Manchester United, especially as Matt Busby went in search of the ‘Holy Grail’ , winning the European Cup in memory of those who died at Munich.

Knowing that my friends would sometimes say ‘Man U’ by this time in casual conversation, I couldn’t resist checking as many old Match of the Days and Big Match recordings as I could access online. The results were mixed.Of course it’s an impossible task to see every United match covered by ITV, or indeed MoD, so all I can say is that having viewed a considerable number of both, I have not found a single reference to ‘Man U’, either spoken or in a caption.

Liverpool’s famous perch

I’m not saying Tom Clare is wrong, but I am saying I can’t confirm that he’s right, although I had tremendous fun on the way, that’s for sure, re-living matches I attended or watching goals I’d long forgotten. On all sides, commentators refer to ‘United’, even Wolstenholme dropping his ‘Manchester’. Quite early on, in the mid-60s, you see on-screen captions saying, ‘Man United’ on the BBC but it’s not until well into the 1980s that I found ITV’s much loved Brian Moore referring to ‘Man United’ in commentary, for example in the brilliant FA Cup semi-final replay in 1985 when United beat the mighty Liverpool 2-1 in a Titanic clash decided by goals from Mark Hughes and Bryan Robson. What a great match, what a fabulous result at a time when Liverpool were still infuriatingly secure on their ‘fucking perch’. (I wonder what they have done with that famous perch, now they no longer need it. Perhaps it’s tucked away at the back of the legendary Anfield Boot Room.)

Shock Horror: Spelling mistakes on Match of the Day

As I happily trawled through these old recordings, I noticed oddments, such as Tommy Docherty using the phrase ‘early doors’ in January 1976, in an interview after United had beaten Birmingham 3-1. It’s usually said that, as applied to sport, this was one of many additions to the football phrasebook by former United manager Ron Atkinson, in his pre-disgrace ITV co-commentator days.

I also found a few things that I found mildly shocking, as an old BBC hand myself. I recall rightly getting quite a ticking-off from the managing director when a programme from my department in the 1990s had an apostrophe in the wrong place on a caption, so it was a real surprise to see spelling mistakes at least four times on Match of the Day in the mid-’60s, back in the good old days when standards were supposedly so much higher.

On three separate occasions Match of the Day had captions mis-spelling the name of that very fine Irish full-back, Seamus Brennan, rendering it ‘Brennen’ on each occasion ( against Spurs at home, Notts Forest away and Arsenal away in ’64/65). Even more surprisingly, they even got the name wrong for former England captain, Johnny Haynes, calling him ‘Haines’ for Fulham v United in 1964.

To be fair, those captions were difficult to alter in those pre-digital days, being large cumbersome pieces of black card on which names were rather crudely pasted in white letters and then placed on a caption stand in front of a camera, the image being ‘supered’ over the obligatory wide-shot of the stadium. (I remember the cap stand process well from my first BBC series in 1969, re-creating 18th Century life in a National Trust stately home using an OB Unit more used to covering Match of the Day. They loved the very different task of bringing to life how people lived upstairs / downstairs two hundred years ago, based on my researches. The crew wanted to talk history, I wanted Match of the Day gossip).

Anyway, the TV folks may have cocked up the occasional name caption, but I found no evidence that either BBC or ITV commentators were behind the popularisation of ‘Man U’.

Conclusion

So, to conclude, we know beyond any doubt that the popular press used the abbreviation Man U from at least the early 1950s, without any complaint or controversy. It is also reasonably clear that the term gradually entered the vocabulary of ordinary football supporters by the early Sixties at the very latest, picked up from the press but without any significant boost from either cinema or television. This was a slow, underground, word-of-mouth phenomenon, very possibly started by United fans themselves, unpalatable as that might be to some today.

Having got the basic chronology more or less straight, we still haven’t got to the heart of why significant numbers of Manchester United supporters today feel so strongly about a term which had such prosaic origins over half a century ago. Nor does any of it explain why opposing fans take such delight in baiting Reds with taunts based around the term.

In Part 2 we will resume our quest by looking at the notorious song about Duncan Edwards which is often cited as the reason why we should not use the term Man U. That’s a view not shared by all United fans however, despite its agreed status as one of the earliest examples of the despicable genre of ‘Munich’ chants, but we will also look at how it relates to that other anti-United favourite, ‘Stand Up if You Hate Man U!’

At the time of the Munich Air Crash on 6 February, 1958, which caused the deaths of 23 people, including eight United players and eight journalists, Jimmy was manager at the Plaza Ballroom on Oxford Street in Manchester, which was scheduled to hold the Manchester Press Ball. As soon as he heard the first tragic reports he put up a sign saying, ‘Press Ball cancelled’, closed the doors and sat with stunned staff listening to the radio as more terrible details filtered through.

Jimmy had been on friendly terms with many of the journalists and players, including dashing England centre forward Tommy Taylor. The whole city was reeling with shock, disbelief and collective grief, with many openly weeping in the streets. The following night , when the Plaza held the annual staff dance of Walker’s Showcards, Jimmy interrupted proceedings in order to raise cash for the Lord Mayor of Manchester’s Disaster Fund for the crash survivors and relatives. As the DJ on the night he got the dancers to throw coins and bank-notes of all denominations onto the ballroom floor for as long as he could hold his breath, which of course he managed for an almost inhuman length of time, raising a considerable sum of money.

Although I became a United supporter immediately after Munich, I knew nothing about this Jimmy Savile connection until years later. But when I did learn about it, I was thrilled, because he’d been such a formative influence on my childhood around that same time. I was a devoted fan of his show on Radio Luxembourg, the commercial English language station which he’d joined in late 1958. With its famously variable signal the station pumped out British and – crucially – American pop music in a way that the BBC had simply not yet mastered, attracting huge audiences of kids like me with their succession of ‘hip’ DJs. In those pre-central heating days I used to huddle under the eiderdown with the electric-bar heater glowing in my darkened bedroom like a neon sign in some dingy rock ‘n’ roll dive. Like so many of my generation, I’d tune in when I should have been asleep, hoping to hear Fats Domino, Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis. Jimmy was outlandish even then with his ‘guys and gals’ and ‘owzabout that’ catch-phrases which made him a whacky, liberating spirit, just right for me as a 12 or 13-year-old. He launched his ‘Teen & Twenty Disc Club’ around that time and I joined immediately, proudly carrying my membership card for years, until it finally fell apart.

Jimmy Savile was a strange and sometimes unsettling character but I’ll always be grateful for what he gave me in my adolescence, opening my ears to some of the most elemental and expressive music of the period. But I’ll also always have a soft spot for the man because of his uniquely imaginative response to the Disaster in Munich, and the small part he thus had to play in United’s history.

There’s obvious truth in parts of that (probably not the bit about chocolate coins… or the belt) but I honestly think it does him a disservice. It kind of aligns itself to the hairdryer narrative of the ferocious competitor dragging his charges mercilessly to victory. The script was the same when Wenger and Fergie were locking horns in the nineties. The former was portrayed as cultured and debonair; the latter as an old school disciplinarian. In reality SAF is the far more rounded of the two with plenty of interests outside of the sport. Arsene was very much the football geek.

If it was all about being ‘driven’ and ‘gay’ for success (I paraphrase) why has Roy Keane’s management career proved such a disappointment? Here was a player very much in his manager’s image, who had plenty time to learn from the best. He is just as uncompromising and committed, and just as scornful of decent efforts and plucky runners up. But Keano’s überferg approach to management didn’t work. Being a toxic leader to those poor souls genuinely unable to achieve in a way he found so routine destroyed rather than made stronger.

But that’s the thing about perfectionism – it’s not always a positive thing. It can be a disease. Having an unquenchable desire to succeed upon success is born from dissatisfaction. A win is a win but when it’s done it’s gone – and it’s never enough. Worse for a pathological perfectionist is if victory never comes. Or stops coming. It can not only ruin a team and harm a club, but also crush the man. If you measure your worth in silver, how do you cope with a bare cabinet?

For me Sir Alex’s greatest managerial achievement has been managing himself. Anger and siege mentality are hardly conducive to longevity. Over his 25 glorious years at United not all have been glorious. He must have experienced desperate lows and private self-doubt in his first few years at the helm. And even once the honours starting to gush forth and multiply, there were significant troughs to punctuate the many peaks. He has never crumbled under the immense weight of his own expectations or succumbed to narcissistic rage or injury. Nor has he simply thrown money at every problem or succumbed to the vanity of playing pretty potless football like some of his contemporaries.

Contrary to the catatonic caricature, Fergie has remained temperate throughout. He has treated success and relative failure with a reserve that would make Kipling proud. Whatever keeps him restful and energetic away from football – be it holidaying in France, the wine, horse-breeding, the wine, learning to play the piano, or indeed the wine – it seems to be working.

Over the last quarter of a century, he’s been extremely patient and shrewd, and always incredibly pragmatic (some would say too pragmatic in recent years, but hey – that’s for any day!). Even his famous outbursts and tirades seem increasingly tactical and calculated, often used to make a point or distract attention away from another story. It’s all about control – of the media, the players and the story. And always himself.

Love him or loathe him, he is an incredible man. Not for his fire or his fury, but for his wit and intelligence. Above all else, he is a very canny Scot. It helps make him the best manager in the history of the game. Sir Matt Busby created the Manchester United we now take for granted – the style, the ethos, the glamour – no one can compete with that. But Fergie has provided all the success and glory Busby must have dreamed of. For that, we and generations to follow must be eternally grateful.

Now if he’d only sort out the midfield…

On his 25th anniversary, Sir Alex is being hailed as one of the greatest managers of all time. Rightly so. He possesses the four qualities that shape the finest leaders of footballing men: he buys well, bonds well, prepares well and exudes an aura. Never underestimate the power of an aura in a sport where psychology is key.

Everybody salutes Ferguson, the ultimate football man. His greatest achievements? Barcelona, yes. Moscow, of course. But there’s so much more to him. I’ve been covering football for 25 years and have never met a more fascinating, multi-faceted individual. So let’s celebrate the man, as well as the manager. A few years back I enjoyed the rare privilege of being in Ferguson’s office in Carrington and mentioned I was going away to Glasgow with the kids. He recommended three museums to visit, all science and shipping stuff, two of which he was patron of. Typical Ferguson. He can talk about science, shipping, politics, wine, horses, antiques, art and big bands. And more. Sir Alex: so much more than a football man. You’re lucky to have him.

Daniel Harris, On The Road and The FCF

Working out Fergie’s greatest achievement is difficult and easy at the same time. On the one hand, there’s so much to consider, yet on the other it’s so obviously the 92/93 title win. Everything that’s come since then is a direct consequence of it, and before it happened, it was all that we wanted – the rest is gravy. Hawksmoor bone marrow gravy, but gravy nonetheless.

I only passed ten years of my consciously United-obsessed life without seeing us win the league, but it was more than enough, and though the European Cup took a fair bit longer, the desperation to possess it was nowhere near the same. Once we won the league, anything was possible – not even possible, but inevitable – whereas the title was something that happened to other people, and always those we didn’t like (with varying degrees of intense hatred).

But while we’re here, it’d be rude not to consider the treble. The biggest compliment I can pay it is that over the last couple of seasons, when United have been in with a chance of it, part of me wonders if them doing so would denigrate the feat of the ’99 lot. They were a very special side – far, far superior to what we’ve had recently – and if anyone ever does emulate them, then it ought to be a team of requisite quality.

Both the ’93 and ’99 sides were true to all that we love about United: men, mavericks and local lads playing fast, hard, attacking football, boiling with attitude and zest. And a lot of that is down to Fergie, who, for all his faults, is a preposterous, inspirational, incredible character and concept, responsible for joy that we could never have imagined. A salut.

Barney, Red News

Of course our gaze gets captivated by all the trophies in the cabinet, understandable considering we’ve won so much under Sir Alex, that you’d have to get an Abacus (google it, oh young readers) to count up exactly just how many we’ve welcomed. We stopped counting Charity Shields, when once upon a time we’d be giddy about ‘winning some silver early’.

But come with me on a journey, because whilst the room almost continually stocked full of trophies since 1990 is the clearest definition of his success and achievements,it is not just his trophy cabinet which actually defines him. Leave that room, past the spanky ever growing museum which now includes his own history and that of his players and walk along the corridors of both power and passion, where normal fans can sit, near to prawn sarnie munchers, pacing through the updated facilities and at time unwholesome corporate ornaments on view, and look at how Old Trafford and Manchester United has grown and changed along with Fergie.

United have always been on the forefront of ground development, and we have always been the bottom line to pay for it, but if pretty much none of this would have been possible without the Red Army, certainly the club owes the debt for enabling all its way and all it has done to the man who has become part of the fabric. Certainly, these past 6 years and more, he has kept it all together, he is the one the scent of Ginge must thank.

United have always been good at, pretty much (don’t mention the Frank O’Farrell debacle, from both sides) of staying loyal and keeping managerial upheaval to a minimum, and if we are blessed to have had two men in the same mould as Sir Matt and Sir Alex, what makes the latter and his time that much more remarkable is the pace of that around him. Football spiralling out of control, yet somehow he manages to ooze control over club, team and players.

You just run out of superlatives. You can say he shaped a dynasty, the success laid out for all to see, like a embryo growing in the womb, the shoots of 1990, growing with each phase, the tiny patter of a ECWC in 1991, and then re-born in 1993. Such is his way, you can pluck a cliche out of thin air. But they work. Not standing still on a moving bus as he used to say (though I doubt he’s travelled on many of those since coming down), accepting every challenge; try and don the cap of Sherlock Holmes to work out where it came from, the ingredients that combined like pure science (or our sort of religion) so Eric like we clicked and then some, but that first Holy Grail we’d have accepted with glee and pretty much then put up with normality. Yet he tore the script up, so we went on and on. 1994, 1996, 1999. To some everything else since 1999 appears a bit dimmer; how can you beat that? But incredibly, him just trying, is worthy, let alone what we actually have achieved since that barmy night. Every year we seem in with a shout of a repeat. Never able, perhaps never will, but the feat of wanting it again, whilst the very players who’d got him there were questioned not long after the Nou Camp for resting on their laurels, gazed themselves at a manager who would accept nothing less, however able or unable the squad at that time around him, however limited or limiting, to eye such treasured heights. But no words, eulogies, do it – his drive, his determination, his stubborness, his ‘mix’ – justice.

Then and now. United, he, we. We’ve all changed. But we’re all the same, somewhere, and when you look at our lives, and then the world around us, it’s mad to think there is a man, greyer, as fearsome if not as often, still doing the jig, still wanting it. It’s almost scary. The Presidents and Prime Ministers, the Dictators and despots, they may well have gone from their own realms, but our leader, facing the occasional grumblings of discontent from his people, remains. In a scary world, he is less scary and our focal point. We may moan about him – some way too often – but he keeps us, the United world I mean, safe.

Now we’re on the Old Trafford pitch, having walked through a different tunnel, a stand just for Families (nice if more kids would be allowed elsewhere….), and where once we joked it resembled the film set of Vietnam it was so bad, now it is pretty much able to cope with concerts, rugby, Rooney overhead kicks and Diego Forlan stripping. We’ve a third tier, so high we can’t see them, and they can’t see us.
It’s all changed.

In 1987 when Red News sat down with Fergie for the first time for an interview, the hotel was fairly ramshackle on a pre-season tour of Scandinavia. There were no groupies, bar us oddballs waiting for him, and he called the group in to an empty breakfast hall as he pondered cereal and greater plans for what was to become his club. Able to get away with calling it ‘his club’ where others might be scorned because he’s ingratiated himself so well into the fabric, the custodians allow it. There have been mistakes, and some have called him for them. I haven’t liked some decisions, but as with my own frailties in life, I have always said that, sadly, even the perfect aren’t quite as perfect as you’d want them to be. I look in the mirror, and hush loud calling.

Nobody came into that breakfast hall. No photographers, no stalkers (bar us, again) and in between the egg cups and coffee pots he laid out a vision. ‘To make Europe once again take notice of United’. We’ve always been big, if not the biggest, but now we are in a different universe to then, again of his making, again not all great, all of which the bean counters should be grateful for, but here he laid our his plan to put United back on the map. A map remember all screwed up because, because of them, we weren’t even allowed into European competition back then. He’d argue time and time again behind the scenes for reinstatement – he had a plan you see.
At times we doubted the plan in those early days. He talked of playing ‘total football’ in one programme before a game where I struggle to remember seeing any type of football, but we know now. Not settling to just concentrate on the first team and save his skin. If we remove ourselves away from Old Trafford, look at Carrington; he was working not just on the XI we were watching, but the ones that would come afterwards, and those in ten years time. He picked up Sir Matt’s blueprint, long since discarded. And had a go.

In his time we’ve seen the road we all share littered with glory and trophies – Warwick Road itself is now Sir Matt Busby Way. The core and essence is still there, what we stand for, thanks primarily down to him whatever our recoil about those above him and those he has to deal with it, but every facet; the Cliff, gone, terracing, gone, Assistant Managers coming and going, yet he has not just stayed, and remained, he’s evolved. He’s finger tipped a connection between then and now. And not let go like a Taibi short connection.

Steve McClaren was supposed to be the innovater of our first changes into Sports Science, Carlozzz into defence, tactics, but it devalues and doesn’t give credit to the man who employed them, and took something from all of them. We have quibbles as any family does, but the man picking cereal is now a Sir, the ground all seated, the trophy cabinet full. In changing times, Thatcher in charge, then Grey, then Blair, etc, we have our constant. As I conclude the Ed in the RN 25th edition: “It’s only when he’s not in charge any longer that it will just sink in just what he’s achieved. And how much were going to miss him.”

I talk to younger Reds and they can’t believe some of the horror stories from the 70s and 80s. There is a fear of that cycle returning if this one ends. But not under SAF, time and time again seeing the media throw him into the water for sharks with ‘crumbling empire’ talk, he calmly walks to shore, drying off, and eventually sitting on his lounger, laughing his tits off. Wondering how to carry all the treasures he’s just picked up.

It’s not just been a remarkable journey, it’s been a life shared. We have walked each step, we have grown old, been born, had kids ourselves, become men from kids, all during his reign, and that’s what it feels like, like a fiefdom such its length. Ruled over maybe, but connected. We’ll pick out on field memories to translate that quarter of a century into specifics that makes it easier to comprehend, none more so than the Nou Camp, we’ll think of off field moments – Eric signing, Keane gone, in an instant – but it is he who touched every one. If you’ve met him, you won’t forget it. It may have been but a second, but he carries the aura that only the greats like Sir Matt and Bestie can.

Blessed to have both he and Sir Matt, only Manchester United could have both. Its story, his story, they sort of merged somewhere. Manchester United’s journey will continue of course, as it always has, but for now, pause for thought about when you joined this marvellous adventure, and all the changes then and now (the FA were still after us, so no rare change there then), and that is as defining as all the silver that glistens. That United coped in a football industry that suddenly speeded up and mutated, whether we liked it or not. Fergie is that link between past and present, and bloody hell, hopefully more future too. Because, yes, I really do. I love him like every single one of us.

Ed Barker, United Rant

Forget the 36 trophies, and incredible longevity for a second, and think about the groundwork laid by Sir Alex Ferguson for success. That is his greatest achievement. Recognising Manchester United as a club on its knees – almost bankrupt, with a decaying stadium, and booze culture among a group of average players – Fergie set about rebuilding from the ground up in a way no manager will be allowed to do again.

Ferguson is a long term thinker, and this has paid off almost every time. He reignited the club’s youth policy – a decision that would bear fruit almost a decade later. He change the mentality of his squad, perhaps even the club, from one of winning an occasional cup, to seeking glory at every turn. And he set about this with an obsessive degree of control, and attention to detail, that is uncommon among his peers. In an era when administrators and even supporters are obsessed with the balance sheet, Ferguson truly is United’s greatest asset.

Doron Salomon, Stretford End

In a word, youth. Michael Keane became the 80th teenager to be given his first team debut by Fergie, at least three a year – a phenomenal achievement particularly given how much the game has changed. Every time the squad has been rebuilt he’s chosen to combine youth with some marquee signings – to do that once and succeed is something of a masterstroke but to do it time and time again is pure genius.

After winning the league last year, Fergie exclaimed, “That’s the future of Manchester United, young people”. People always want to know the secret to his longevity; it probably lies within that statement – youth. Young people keep him hungry; they provide new managerial challenges and a sense of pride if they develop through the club to the first team.

Carrying on the traditions of Sir Matt Busby, he’s continued one legacy and built another. The Ferguson era will never be replicated. The story of Fergie’s Fledglings will be told for generations to come. That’s his greatest achievement – not just achieving success, but achieving it with a core nucleus of young players.

Rebecca Stephenson, Freelance sportswriter and broadcaster

When asked to put down on paper Sir Alex Ferguson’s greatest achievement of his 25 year tenure at the helm of Manchester United, I could turn to my heart; my spine tingling memories and some of the most amazing moments of my (almost) Ferguson-encompassing life.

But during a recent visit to Carrington I decided not to answer instinctively with the moment that gave ME the most pleasure, but by opening my eyes more and focusing on the picture that far outweighs one goal, game, season, trophy haul or signing.

As you stroll through the corridors of Old Trafford and Carrington in 2011 you realise that this one man has formed an empire. Much as Microsoft and Apple echo to the personas of Gates and Jobs. Manchester United, is now a reflection of 25 years of one man.

The glorious history of the Busby Babes and the tragedy of Munich, may well have occurred decades before the man from Govan was ever a dot on the horizon of the club, but his staunch adherence to the culture initiated by Sir Matt Busby has intrinsically linked him with the entire entity of Manchester United.

Today, it is difficult to see where Sir Alex Ferguson stops and Manchester United begins, or to imagine that one will eventually have to function without the other.

25 years of teams constructed, destructed and rebuilt; 25 years where legends were born; formed and consigned to history; 25 years of footballing structural, economic and Bureaucratic revolution.

The footballing world and the Manchester United of today is almost unrecognisable from 1986, but one man remains a constant. A chameleon who has adapted to every twist, turn and explosion to keep the club atop of the ever changing tide of football, and continue to deliver those superficial tokens of the underlying successes.

A dream world of trophies, pulse-raising players and goose-bump inducing moments and memories. All fruits of the achievements of Sir Alex Ferguson

So how can you define his greatest achievement? Perhaps it is as abstract as his workplace itself. Old Trafford isn’t Manchester United, nor a shirt, nor a crest. So his greatest achievement is Manchester United and what it is today. That and the legacy that will engulf it until the club’s heart no longer beats.

Rob Blanchette, The Faithful MUFC and The Midfield General

I used to love Big Ron when he was United manager. Dripping with jewellery and diamonds. Looking like a car sales man that would give you the best deal on earth. Woollen coat so big and thick you could smuggle Gordon Strachan in there, and he would think it was a three bedroom house. The man was the walking epitome of what United was back then. If that specific history was happening now the kids of today would call it ‘swagger’.

Of course, the swagger was lined with a huge problem. And that was the inability to win trophies. ’83 and ’85 brought us two fantastic FA Cup wins, when that was about the maximum we could expect to achieve in any given season. Big Ron had brought us Bryan Robson, and he was our king. And the teenage talents of Whiteside and Hughes gave us hope for the future…

But ultimately we knew our place in the food chain. We were the team every neutral loved because we were the glamorous losers of English football.

The day Atkinson was sacked I felt ill. I was just a child of 10 years old. I knew nothing and no one different. So when we recruited a dour looking Scot as his replacement I didn’t really blink an eye. The club had survived on the glamour of the past so long that when we were faced with a bit of reality (we were second to bottom in November when Ron was sacked) it really was the most depressing of things. I could smell we were about to be relegated. How would I face all my mates who supported Liverpool and Everton when we went down to Division 2?

That season Ferguson saved us and we ended up mid table. I was deliriously happy with 11th place! 25 years on, and as a Manchester United supporter I’ve lived a fairytale life with my team.

I was always brought up to believe that United would play well, and then probably lose. It wasn’t a completely defeatist attitude to football. It was just how many non-Liverpool fans felt about their clubs in the 1980s. Everyone tried to win… and then Liverpool took the trophy home. I never had the choice of supporting Liverpool. It was impossible in the dynamic of our family. You supported United through every trial, and grinned and bared it as you watched Hughes, Hansen, Souness, or a Dalglish lift the big trophies.

When Fergie bought Steve Bruce, I thought “Who the fuck is Steve Bruce?” I wanted heroes to follow. I wanted more Robsons! What we got was Viv Anderson, Jim Leighton and Brian McClair. I actually liked McClair as I watched him be prolific for Celtic. But all in all it was a bit of a yawn fest to sign these names. However, finishing 2nd to Liverpool back in 1988 felt like a huge step forward. The scousers didn’t even blink an eye as they cantered to 9 points clear of us but it produced real hope for United fans.

The following year we came 11th again. Order had been restored. Hope had been put back in permanent storage.

The next couple of years were tempestuous. I was stood in the Stretford End as we beat the newly crowned champions Arsenal 4-1, with Neil Webb’s volley almost flying down my throat, only being stopped by the goal net from where I stood. But a few weeks later we got stuffed 5-1 at Maine Road and life was depressing once again.

I had little time for Ferguson. I didn’t ‘get’ him. I knew he wanted the best for the club, but I could see no way of him achieving it. And that’s why 13 year old boys, like I was then don’t run football clubs!

I remember Mark Robins goal that saved the manager’s job at Nottingham Forest. History has warped that part of Fergusons reign slightly but I remember it all clearly. Fergie was a goner. Lose in the Cup and he was sacked. It was more ‘expected’ than a possibility. Somehow we shaded a very good Forest team out of the Cup, and despite being entirely rubbish in every other tournament, we went on to win that blessed old trophy. Winning the 1990 FA Cup was up to that point the greatest thing I had seen in football. I just didn’t believe it got any better than that.

So twenty one years have passed since us beating Crystal Palace for that FA Cup at Wembley. I don’t need to list all the titles we’ve won since then. I don’t need to list the heroes that Sir Alex has cultivated, from your Cantonas to your Giggs, Rooneys to Ronaldos. But what I will testify is this: Lady Luck shined down from the heavens when she delivered us a nutjob from Aberdeen. Nobody knew it back then. No one could possibly believe that the man would win us one solitary league championship, yet alone be knighted for his incredible achievements for us. But Fergie is the modern footballing architect. The Godhead who equally builds and destroys. A man who refuses to live on past glories, and only looks forward. It is him ALONE that we owe the last 21 years of success to..not the players. He is the true creator supreme.

And soon, he will be gone. We don’t know when. Reality always gives me a sharp jab when I think of Jock Stein (Fergie’s mentor of sorts) I watched him die on the sidelines on my TV. You can’t help but think Fergie’s fate will be the same in some morbid poetic fashion. But the truth is Manchester United will have to survive without him in full capacity in the not so distant future. The Blue Menace and its cross-town monies are upon us, and the future may well look nothing like the 1990s and 2000s did. Football is cyclical. Maybe it’s another clubs time?

But Fergie has given us the attitude that we need not think like that. That if we dig in, and search your heart and use your experience, that you can beat anyone, at any time.

That is Sir Alex Fergusons greatest gift to us, The Red Army. Not the 37 trophies he’s brought us. Even when the man is gone, a statue of him will stand outside of our grand old stadium. And it will always remind that the truth is: We are Manchester United. The greatest football club the world has ever seen.