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Anti-Glazers protestors may claim early success but criminal activity will only hurt club they love

The repercussions will continue to be felt for club and fans - ACTION IMAGES
The repercussions will continue to be felt for club and fans - ACTION IMAGES

The righteous indignation of the English football fan is quite the cocktail once stirred. In the space of 14 days, it has triggered not just the demise of the European Super League, the brainchild of billionaires too conceited to understand the forces with which they were meddling, but the cancellation of arguably the most significant club fixture in the global game. Clearly, Patti Smith was on to something when she sang that people had the power to redeem the work of fools.

It was 11.30am in Tampa, Florida when Joel Glazer, perhaps tuning in to check how his much-vaunted trust-rebuilding exercise at Old Trafford was going, would instead have seen hundreds of Manchester United fans encamped on the pitch to express their hatred of his family. Even the TV scoreline told its own story: “Postponed – other.” Matches have been called off for a multitude of reasons over the past 14 months, usually involving the depredations of Covid-19. The latest scenes bring another startling twist, revealing that not even the grandest occasions are safe when supporters run out of patience with their clubs’ grasping owners.

Fans across the land are emboldened. For years, it had looked as if they were mere pawns in a realpolitik that pitched US private equity against Middle Eastern sovereign wealth, where nothing mattered except money. But events of the past fortnight have suggested a different reality, in which one relatively limited protest outside Stamford Bridge led within minutes to the Premier League’s Big Six realising that their alignment with Florentino Perez was a terrible idea. The scrapping of United’s match with Liverpool will fuel many fans’ growing conviction that only direct action can produce the change they seek. First, they watched their voice determine the format under which their teams would play in Europe. Now, they have the casting vote as to whether they play at all.

It is an incipient revolution, drawing strength from some stark rhetoric. Gary Neville, just when you thought he had exhausted his well of anger, cranked up the dial again, raging about the ESL’s plot to create a “famine” for everyone else. An emotive word, famine: one best deployed, in all honesty, about genuine starvation, rather than about rich football clubs finding themselves disadvantaged by even richer ones. Neville recognises, though, that a tipping point has been reached, and is using all the exposure of his platform to establish himself as the Robespierre of our times.

But what exactly does he mean when he talks of “mobilisation” and “fan-led reform”? For we saw exactly what mobilisation looked like on the chaotic approaches to Old Trafford, and it was not a pretty sight. Bottles were thrown, batons had to be drawn in response, and two police officers were injured, one suffering a serious slash wound to the face. If this truly was a great democratising moment, restoring power to the disenfranchised fan, then the most polite verdict is that the demonstrators overplayed their hand.

The objective was plain enough: the overthrow of the despised Glazers. At Arsenal, similarly, the message of the recent red flares outside the Emirates was that supporters would not rest until the Kroenkes had packed up their toys and gone home to Colorado. But coups are seldom bloodless. The Arsenal malcontent who left an effigy of Stan Kroenke hanging from a lamppost was clearly not acting in jest. If a certain pride was taken initially in the passionate backlash to the ESL breakaway, the subsequent escalation of fury gives rise to fear about how and where this all ends.

The atmosphere is so febrile that the violence witnessed at United is likely to spawn copycat versions, given that protestors achieved not just publicity, but postponement of a game once thought too big to move. Some fans will deduce from this that outright rebellion works. After all, they have tried the peaceful approach to pushing the Glazers out, wearing green-and-gold scarves en masse in homage to the colours of the club’s founding fathers, and all that transpired was the saddling of the club with more debt. The ESL debacle has become their cue to take matters into their own hands.

And yet for all the ferocity of their outrage, history indicates that their efforts will ultimately be in vain. Protests against Mike Ashley have been going on at Newcastle since 2008, the year of Kevin Keegan’s resignation, and he is still there, as recalcitrant as ever. Blackburn fans bitterly lamented the takeover of their club by Venky’s, an Indian poultry company, a decade ago, to no avail. Even the drama at Old Trafford could be depicted as an extension of the “Love United, Hate Glazer” campaign that has been smouldering since 2010, with no sign of the owners listening.

The protestors’ attitude is that while the battle against the ESL has been won, the wider war against cynical owners is only just beginning. They believe they have tasted early success, but it is a delusion. Highlighting the inadequacies of their Florida owners is not accomplished by slashing a policeman in the face. Such criminal overreach will only succeed in harming the clubs they love.