Old Trafford Protests, Sunday May 2, 2021

[ad hoc]

Nationalisation does not imply compensation

[DCI Harry Batt]

50%+1 isn't my idea. It would be an enormous improvement on what we have, with other reforms accompanying it. The mechanism for bringing it in is something that would need a lot of work. It's being difficult to do isn't much of an argument against it, for me.

Again, ensuring membership organisations are genuine is something that needs some work. Again, its needing some work isn't an argument against it.

[Janik]

It doesn't exclude it either. And note I was responding to what TonTon said, which wasn't Nationalisation - it was confiscation. And that does exclude compensation.

I am suggesting that nationalisation by confiscation by Act of Parliament would encounter problems at the High Court as it contradicts other, pre-existing Acts of Parliament that protect private ownership (precedence of Acts matters quite a lot IIRC). That the court would rule the government is at liberty to nationalise anything it likes... providing it properly compensates the previous owners to either market value or to mutual satisfaction. Hence the need to reform the High Court first.

Has there ever been a nationalisation in Britain which didn't include some form of compensation for the former owners? RBS maybe, on the grounds that the business was valueless, so diddly squat was full market value?


But this is all pointlessly hypothetical. The current government is highly unlikely to back 50+1, but they just might if there was enough public will behind it. What they won't ever do is go to 50+1 without a mechanism for paying off the private owners for their reduced stakes. If people are serious about campaigning for 50+1 they need to figure out where the money is going to come from to pay for it.

[DCI Harry Batt]

I think it's best to argue hard for it before getting caught up in the minutiae tbh.

[Snake Plissken]

If you take away the insane spending arms race by imposing a sensible model on all clubs they shouldn't need white knights to "keep going".

The argument used to be that English clubs would fall behind in Europe if that happened (which is irrelevant to all but a handful of clubs anyway) but recent events have shown that the current situation is unsustainable for European clubs as well.

The rest of the clubs outside the ESL seem to be doing OK. It seems to be the Big Clubs need saving from themselves and the solution to that problem seems to be doing so in a way that still preserves their place at the top table at the expense of everyone else. Like I said on the ESL thread, you are either a football club or a business. Pick one and take the consequences as well as the benefits.

Yes, 50+1 would be great. Yes, local ownership for community benefit would be great. But that isn't the world we live in and the chance of it happening got absolutely hammered by vested interests in 2019 and I see no reason why it wouldn't do so again.

I'll be honest and I'm probably not going to make myself popular here. I'm massively conflicted. The Glazers are not "good owners" in the traditional football sense. They haven't been to Old Trafford in years, they treat the club as a profit centre for their own personal use. I get that. I'm all for the occasional, shall we say, not entirely peaceful reminder that fans matter.

But I'm really, really struggling with the concept of them being complete shits in the way of a Steve Dale or various other rogues. This is how it looks like to me, a fan of another club.

Manchester United are still winning trophies, are in the top three (?) most popular clubs in the world, are at the top of the pile in terms of revenues and income, have manipulated the situation to practically guarantee themselves Champions League football and the riches that come with it every season, demanded and got more money out of the other 14 and still made noises about it not being enough, are making a profit (yes, siphoned out in dividends and financial chicanery but they ain't two weeks away from bankruptcy) and able to buy the best players in the world and pay them wages that few other clubs can compete with. The problem appears to be that they don't get to dine out at the top table every single night any more, are running a business operation against the virtually unlimited funds of a petro-state and a Russian oligarch and have failed to replace probably the greatest football manager of all time (despite trying with arguably two of the best available). They're just Mike Ashley but with a filled trophy cabinet.

If Man Utd were in 10th for a few seasons and buying players on the cheap, missing out on the top stars and hadn't won a trophy for a decade then I would have a lot more sympathy. But they aren't. They're second in the league and about to go into a European semi final with a 4 goal advantage. Most clubs would kill for failure on that level.

I know that that sounds like I'm making it a first world problems thing. I also admit to the selfishness of being a fan of another club - but I'm self-aware enough to know that many of the fans of Manchester United don't give two shits about my club. In fact, their point would be "Tough. That's just business". Well, so is this. This the bed Manchester United spent 30 years making for everybody else.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Yeah but on what side? This is a genuinely conflicting issue for a proper Tory culture-warrior

Yeah especially since 95% of football hooligans all had one thing in common. they're all Boomers, bar a few tailenders who are boomer adjacent. Tricky call for the culture warriors. Boomer nostalgia is a big thing. There'll be people who might never have gone near a ground, who'll be getting all misty eyed at the sight of real football fans as it used to be. Out there protesting against these foreigners who have taken over our football for profit. It's tricky

I must say I enjoyed that immensely. Man utd would have to have given liverpool a proper thrashing for me to have enjoyed what would likely have been a deeply underwhelming game half as much as what actually happened. If you're going to kick off then that really did seem like the best time. You couldn't have done this if there were fans in the ground and attending the match. You might have had chants and banners, but it would have have been far more limited in scope and the game would have gone ahead. Also as E10 rifle said, there has never been a better time to disrupt the season.

The absence of an actual game to talk about really put a lot of strain on the pundits, With no game to talk about, and no game to fill nearly 2 hours of airtime they had to keep talking, and it got extremely thin in places. Souness was extraordinary. Even 16 years on he doesn't seem to know that the Glazers borrowed against the value of the club, thinking that they had taken a huge risk with their own money and put up their own collateral for the loans. He just seemed to assume that of course it must make sense. before going on to bestow the title of real football man on Roman Abramovich, who he had met a couple of times. Then there was the his bit about if the flare had got into the punditry box, they could have been maimed and scarred, before returning repeatedly to the dangers of being hit with a full can of beer, much like trump talking about cans of soup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf3b1AJNAR8.

But perhaps the strangest bit was in between complaining about the dangers of beer cans, he essentially said that such danger was ok for people like him and roy because of the way that they played (a dyad that Keane had little interest in being involved in). There is nothing more depressing and desperate than a macho hardman who is turning 68 on friday. I strongly doubt souness's claim that the Glazers are "serious business people" who "would not let this impact them one iota." If the "how we kill him I don't know, lets chop him up from head to toe" chant was lost in translation due to accents, I don't think it's easy to push that "Avi Glazer went to Epstein Island" banner out of your mind, particularly when you're seeing it all over the coverage of this incident.

I found Gary Neville's performance a fascinating high wire act from a man who was speaking faster than he was thinking (which is a big thing with him). I really don't know what his angle is here. Expressing anger is all well and good, but listen closely to what he is actually complaining about, and what his solutions are, and you find yourself involuntarily stroking your chin. His main problem with the Glazers is that they are running man utd like a small club, who don't paint the steel girders, man utd's large landbank is going fallow, when it could be developed and turned in "Man utd World" and how he wanted his team to be able to go out and buy the best players and crush everyone with their might. But it was also interesting to hear him sayng that 50%+1 couldn't happen in the UK context, and that football needed an independent regulator to stop and punish clubs from doing things like this, but it seemed to be very light on possible regulations for this independent regulator to enforce. And then I remembered that Gary is a property developer, who has teamed up with a foreign billionaire to try and sugar daddy a club into the premier league, and then thought about his persona as Red Nev, the voice of the ordinary fan, and had a good old giggle to myself. You can legitimately describe him as the voice of sky sports, you can legitimately describe him as the voice of club owners not invited to the super league, you can describe his angry populism as "THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE" but can he also be the voice of the fans? Just how many hats can one man wear?

See it couldn't help escape my notion that Sky Sports and BT sport have been really pushing this anti ESL line, with a side dollop of pundits complaining about Greed, and I can't help feeling that this might have been oh so different if the ESL had decided to let Sky wet its beak with the TV contracts. Now there's too much big media involvement in this movement for it to be a truly Grass roots affair, and there are far too many people involved in this because they've got legitimate reasons for fury for it to be a proper astroturf movement, but it's more like the pitches you get in the premier league, which are real grass, grown and supplemented by an artificial framework.

I think perhaps the funniest part of the evening was when it seemed as though they had run out of things to say, and it was abundantly clear that they had to stop talking to Gary because he might say something that he might later regret, or get done for incitement to violence, Micah richards had checked out at the start saying that he was a manchester city club ambassador and couldn't say anything bad about his owners. Souness was doing an impression of the sort of sundowner that would love to live near the glazers in Florida, jamie Carragher was being extremely careful, and seemed uncertain, and was prepared to allow Gary to take the lead, and Keane seemed to be becoming increasingly withdrawn, and seemed to be looking at Souness like he was about to call a doctor. The presenter flailing for something to say, then decided to get back onto more familiar ground. Get the pundits to engage in pub level talk about transfers that aren't going to happen, and in the process reveal why they were so unsuccessful as a manager.

Roy wanted Man utd to sign Harry Kane and Jack grealish. A frequent and tired refrain, and some comforting received wisdom. It falling to jamie Carragher to gently point out that Jack Grealish isn't remotely as good as Marcus Rashford, or bruno fernandes, and no-one pointing out that paying ?200 million for a player who turns 28 this summer, and has porcelain ankles might not be the smartest use of the club's money. And then as souness was giving it a half hearted, half-remembered rehash of his nonsensical Chuck Palahniuk style violent homoerotic fantasies about "Messing with him physically" about jack grealish, Then something considerably more interesting than the violent fantasies of an old man came up and they cut away with an enormous sense of relief.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens from here. My strong suspicion is nothing, but it will have made it abundantly clear that people are not keen on any of the change that the ESL clubs want, least of all their own supporters, and while peaceful protests are good and can get you quite far, sometimes you just need to break shit in order to make a point.

[DCI Harry Batt]

The problem appears to be that they don't get to dine out at the top table every single night any more

If you genuinely think that's "the problem", then I guess you're looking at such different things things so differently that there's not really anything much to base a conversation on.

[NHH]

Snakes argument seems to a footballing version of ‘I don’t have a pension so why should they?’

[Snake Plissken]

No, I had this last night. If the argument was "there were 20 biscuits being given to 20 people and now there are only 18 and that's wrong because there isn't enough to go round" then fine, I'm in support. But the argument is "there are 20 biscuits to go round and it's outrageous that having been accustomed to having 18 of them, we now have to settle for 16".

Or, to use NHH's analogy, "I don't have a pension because you emptied the fund to build your new boardroom and shiny HQ which then got bought out by asset strippers".

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Snakes argument seems to a footballing version of ‘I don’t have a pension so why should they?’

Or is it maybe, to torture that analogy, "I was told my pension when I signed up was going to involve a Champions League final every other year, and they lied to me"?

[ad hoc]

Analogies are supposed to provide a clearer way of understanding things, but this pension/biscuit stuff has done the opposite for me.

I do know, however, that this doesn;t ring true

The rest of the clubs outside the ESL seem to be doing OK.

(at least to me, a supporter of Sheffield Wednesday, but I suspect to a lot of other fans of a lot of other clubs too)

[G-Man]

I might have overlooked it, but 50+1 and profit-making can be reconciled, as Bayern and Dortmund have shown. Roughly, you have two parts of the club: the general entity whose members elect the office-bearers, and the business arm which runs the commercial side of things in particular relation to the professional team, in interaction with the elected office bearers and their appointees (who may be part of the commercial arm anyway).

That requires, of course, that there's no private ownership of clubs. But it doesn't preclude as system whereby investment for profit is a possibility.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Anyway, big up those United fans - lovely to see, let's have lots more of it.

[NHH]

No, I had this last night. If the argument was "there were 20 biscuits being given to 20 people and now there are only 18 and that's wrong because there isn't enough to go round" then fine, I'm in support. But the argument is "there are 20 biscuits to go round and it's outrageous that having been accustomed to having 18 of them, we now have to settle for 16".

Or, to use NHH's analogy, "I don't have a pension because you emptied the fund to build your new boardroom and shiny HQ which then got bought out by asset strippers".

Yes, but did you hear Andy Mitten last night on MOTD? He explicitly mentioned Bury and Bolton and Macclesfield as part of what they wanted. It wasn't 'they're not spending money on us and we're not winning', even though BBC asininely imagined that he had, only for Mitten to say nothing about this whatsoever.

It's much easier to put a protest in a box of 'whining' and that's what the BBC do, because they can no more get their heads around it than the Privy Council could understand why the Northern peasants rose up in the Pilgrimage of Grace, but when other peasants shrug and say it's just whining, it boils my piss. If people can't see the opportunity for solidarity, nothing will ever change, because solidarity is a prerequisite for grassroots-driven change.

[E10 Rifle]

Word.

If there's one thing that's cheered me above all others about the past fortnight it's the reassertion of fans' unity of experience, big club and small alike, something that the past 30 years have chipped away at but evidently not eradicated. As someone who's had cause to invade a pitch and stop a game in the past four years, I totally see those Man Utd fans yesterday as allies and comrades. This sort of stuff gives us more of a chance. Force the crisis. Kick away the sheen. And the greater the world of possibilities becomes.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Another plus one for NHH's post here.

[Jobi1]

Jamie Carragher was fantastic, as was Gary Neville (who basically told the Glazers to fuck off right now). Roy Keane was good, Micah Richards was superb. And then there was Graeme Souness, who expressed his love for Abramovich and said good things are being done by Abu Dhabi, and was so anti the protests, I thought Norman Tebbitt had possessed his body. And thew feckless Sky host, who coukdn't stop talking about the "violence". And Sky News made that their talking point as well.

So for Carragher and Richards in particular standing up for the Man Utd fans -- while being in the pay of Sky -- was significant.

The Sky host was absolutely nauseating, felt like a barely veiled audition for GB News. So much so that at one point Neville had to stop him and effectively tell him to stop being ridiculous. The news coverage immediately afterwards as well wasn't great either, with the report inferring the team were still blockaded in the hotel, despite another one of their reporters having minutes earlier confirmed that the hotel steps and approach road had been cleared quite some time before and there didn't appear to be anything at all stopping them from getting out. All a lot of tedious OUTRAGE-mongering.

[Snake Plissken]

Yes, but did you hear Andy Mitten last night on MOTD? He explicitly mentioned Bury and Bolton and Macclesfield as part of what they wanted. It wasn't 'they're not spending money on us and we're not winning', even though BBC asininely imagined that he had, only for Mitten to say nothing about this whatsoever.

It's much easier to put a protest in a box of 'whining' and that's what the BBC do, because they can no more get their heads around it than the Privy Council could understand why the Northern peasants rose up in the Pilgrimage of Grace, but when other peasants shrug and say it's just whining, it boils my piss. If people can't see the opportunity for solidarity, nothing will ever change, because solidarity is a prerequisite for grassroots-driven change.

I don't disagree with your wider point but are these protests about solidarity with other clubs? Really? Really? I didn't see any protest flags when the Big Six were demanding a bigger slice of the overseas TV money. Or against the Big Picture plan. If the Saudis resurface tomorrow with a suitcase containing 2bn in cash are the people on the pitch last night going to say no?

And I'll say it again - it's not "peasants vs peasants", it's not "solidarity of the poor in the wider fight against the aristocracy" because Manchester United are the aristocracy. They're just trying to conscript everyone currently living in a mud hut in their efforts to go off to war for the crown against a rival Prince.*

(Fuck me, I'm torturing analogies today.)

[DCI Harry Batt]

"I'm not showing solidarity unless you do first" is a bad strategy.

[Snake Plissken]

I'm trying desperately not to draw parallels with post-2015 Labour Party here but "sorry" would be a nice word to hear from these people. The next to last match I attended in had me walking for a tram surrounded by home fans chanting for the death of their CEO because my lot had had the temerity to win at their place for the first time in 50 years.

I believe 50+1 is unachievable for a long, long time but I'm happy to stand with anyone behind - as an example - demands for more equitable distribution of TV money among the four divisions.

[Patrick Thistle]

"I'm not showing solidarity unless you do first" is a bad strategy.

So is demanding solidarity with anyone who seems remotely on the same side.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Anyway, big up the United fans. Much more of that, from everyone, would be great.

[Patrick Thistle]

Word.

If there's one thing that's cheered me above all others about the past fortnight it's the reassertion of fans' unity of experience, big club and small alike, something that the past 30 years have chipped away at but evidently not eradicated. As someone who's had cause to invade a pitch and stop a game in the past four years, I totally see those Man Utd fans yesterday as allies and comrades. This sort of stuff gives us more of a chance. Force the crisis. Kick away the sheen. And the greater the world of possibilities becomes.

See I feel the opposite. That actually the last few weeks have shown how divergent the experiences of fans at different levels of the game have been. It feels like some people have only just woken up to what is happening in their game but are still oblivious to their own role in it supporting clubs who have taken football along a trajectory.

[DCI Harry Batt]

It's good to have this place to thoroughly deflate any positive feelings one might get from the outside world.

[EIM]

See I feel the opposite. That actually the last few weeks have shown how divergent the experiences of fans at different levels of the game have been. It feels like some people have only just woken up to what is happening in their game but are still oblivious to their own role in it supporting clubs who have taken football along a trajectory.

Manchester United have had one of the most militant and active fanbases since the inception of the PL.