Money Makes The Ball Go Round

It's the end of the world as we know – and I feel fine. When Sam first heard that the Manchester United football club had been taken over by a strange, gnomic little figure who speaks in an alien tongue, I immediately thought: so that's what BP Fallon is up to now.

But, no, it turns out it isn't my old mucker Beep at all; it's a wealthy American dude by the name of Malcolm Glazer. Which is a disappointment, although not for the reasons put forward so robustly by the Man United supporters who we can now take pleasure in describing as 'malcolmtents'. No, Sam would like to have seen Beep move into football, if only because, since the big beat grew old and flabby, that's where all the solid gold action, third leg boogie and recreational drug use is happening nowadays. And that's only the life of an average kit man.

Emotionally Stunted
That said, I have high hopes – the best and only kind – that my good buddies in Motley Crue will help to redress the balance somewhat, now that they have gone back out on the road with a combined age greater than that of the AC Milan defence. And an even more practised ability to fall apart at the top.
Yeah, rock 'n' roll is badly in need of a shot of decadence and depravity, but while we're waiting for the Foghat reunion tour, the old footie is doing its bit to keep the tattered showbiz flag flying. Of course, the fans don't like to think of it as a business at all, preferring to live with the mad delusion that the big clubs are all about tradition, history, romance and empathy with the working class from which they first emerged.
Yeah, and Lee Bowyer is a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. The truth is that a club like Manchester United is a big business fronted by a football team. The glory – remember that, United fans? – is only skin deep. The real point of the exercise is to play on the emotions of the emotionally stunted by fleecing them for the privilege of buying tickets, replica strips, computer games, TV channels, books, videos and the odd prawn sandwich.
And yet the poor befuddled masses continue to refer to these rapacious money-making monstrosities as "our club", a proprietorial conceit made even more absurd by the fact that so many of the fans live hundreds or even thousands of miles from the ground. What is with the Irish, in particular, that huge numbers of people claim personal and passionate allegiance to a football club which the vast majority of them only ever get to watch on television? And why is it that none of them support Scunthorpe or Gillingham? Or, for that matter, Grasshoppers of Zurich. (The suggestion that Young Boys Berne have a thriving fan club among the Christian Brothers is another story altogether).
Could it be, one wonders, that their loyal attachment is based on nothing more than a spot of cynical stick-with-the-winners bandwagon-jumping at an impressionable stage in their young lives? I think we should be told.

Grand Old Club
Of course, Sam hails from a tribe of more principled disposition. Since almost the dawn of time itself, the Snorts have leant their support to the mighty Shamrock Rovers FC, a grand old Dublin family supporting a grand old Dublin club. That's if we can find out where they're playing this year.
Yet even some of the Rovers support was not immune to 'crossing over' in the quest for reflected glory. Sam remembers with disgust the sudden emergence of the sinister gaelic football cult at Milltown, whereby certain vulnerable types suddenly developed a weird gleam in the eye and turned their back on the Hoops in favour of the newly thriving Dublin gaah team of the 70s.
Fuck these people. Sam is not a bitter man, but to this day he takes great pleasure in seeing all those gloomy sods in blue jerseys wandering forlornly down Jones' Road after the Dubs have received yet another All Ireland hiding from the likes of Kerry or Meath.
Gaah may be a ghastly hybrid sports experiment of unique aesthetic vulgarity, but at least it serves the purpose of ruining the lives of a whole generation of turncoats. And for that we must be thankful for its existence. Well, that and the great punch ups. Similarly, Sam is one of many who now take pleasure in the travails of Manchester United, a club that was a byword for arrogance when it was lording it over all the rest. To hear the fans complain about Chelsea's vast spending, is to imagine that Wayne Rooney was picked up in a pound shop. And to hear them mourn the 'death of a club' on account of the fact that a weird little yank might jack up ticket prices, is to hear the sound of millions of chickens coming home to roost.
Speaking of fowl play, Sam is reminded that the domestic football league here was once known as the Kentucky Fried Chicken League. We can only hope that this is a portent of things to come at Old Trafford. Or the Red Devil Stadium, as Sam already prefers to call it.