There’s more than one Man United

Most eyes were probably on events in Barcelona’s Nou Camp and Munich’s Allianz Arena last Tuesday evening, but there were happenings of a less-gilded though far more uplifting and important nature unfolding at the same time at the tidy little Tameside Stadium in Ashton-Under-Lyne in England’s north-west.

All in all, it seemed somehow fitting that FC United of Manchester should have sealed their promotion from the Evo-Stik Northern Premier to the Vanarama Conference North with a 1-0 win over Stourbridge on the sort of night on which we had become so accustomed to watching Manchester United jostle for continental honours.

The smaller club’s backstory — how the purchase of Manchester United by Malcolm Glazer persuaded a small but sizeable knot of the club’s fans to detach and start anew — was well-documented at the time of its birth which, in one of those can-you-believe-how-the-time-has-flown moments, is already ten years back over our shoulders.