Stealing the core of our club

AS the Goldwynism has it: ‘it’s like deja vu all over again.’ The familiar beats play out: stadium protest banners, heated meetings in pub backrooms; threats of balaclava’d aggro, all to a backing track of lurid media frenzy. 1991, 1995, 1998, 2004 and now 2010. Such regularity.! It’s like the Activist Olympics.

There is one man who was involved, to some degree, in all those previous ‘Games’ – by which I mean the fan agitation surrounding the plc flotation, the launch of IMUSA, and the wars against Murdoch and Glazer.

He’s Johnny Flacks, who’s been at Old Trafford since 1955, and his is a name that should be known by any half-aware MUFC fan. He was also a leading light in the pioneering years of the Football Supporters’ Association and, I should say, happens to be friend of mine.

Johnny’s spent many hundreds of hours in committee meetings and smoky backrooms down the years, selflessly trying as ever to meld notoriously disputatious United fans into fighting forces for various causes with varying degrees of success. And on Monday morning, he popped up on the front page of The Guardian calling for Ferguson to offer his sacrificial resignation to kick-start a proper fight against the Glazers.

Even I, an inveterate controversialist who’s always at his happiest setting fire to churches, was taken aback. But such has been the effect of the now infamous Glazer Bond Issue Dossier. Sean Bones, a spokesman for the Man United Supporters Trust, even claimed that he’d never seen so much anger amongst United fans as he had encountered during this past week.

Certainly, fans have been talking of little else: the football against Burnley was treated as a sideshow, although last night’s exceptional encounter redressed the balance somewhat. For people like me, who have been banging on about the Glazer Apocalypse for almost five years, the temptation is to say both “I told you so” and “have you only just realised this?” But I suppose it takes seeing it confirmed in black and white – and, in delicious irony, in the Glazers’ own words – to hit home properly. They have – obscenely – somehow managed to guide a record turnover club into making an operating loss, before the Ronaldo fee saved the bottom line bacon.

Add on the almost comic loss of £35 million playing the currency hedge game, and you have the most damning indictment of a corporate management regime since AIG’s 2008 accounts came out. The coup de grace came with the “sell and leaseback” confessions – which I first warned of here in 2005 – whose significance even the thickest Main Stand ostrich can grasp. Of all the Bond Dossier contents, this one is the best candidate for the ‘45 minute WMD’ analogy: every Red knows what selling your homes and renting them back constitutes.

Humiliation. Servitude. Defeat. Happy New Year!

I laughed bitterly when I read Tom Hicks Jnr’s comments to an LFC fan: “Blow me, f**kface. Go to hell.”

If any line ever better summed up the contemptuous, and contemptible, attitudes of the Yank mountebanks who’ve hijacked both our grand clubs to the punter in the street, I have yet to hear it. That it should come to this, at both ends of the East Lancs Road, the fulcrum of England’s footballing excellence for 70 years: I don’t want to resort to Scousey shroudwaving but, really – Matt and Bill must be turning in their graves.

I have no idea how this is going to play out yet, as the magma is still spouting freely as I write. Various fans and groups are promising this and that, though experience tells you not to count on the cheques written by hotheads being necessarily cashable. But, on the purely financial front, as I have written before, there is one possible way out of this impasse for the Glazers, if they cannot find some Arab to get them off the hook in the meantime. It is to break the TV deal cartel and go it alone, possibly in conjunction with a European Superleague. That would be the death of English football as we have known it for more than a century.

Fans would then be faced with the choice of following them down that road at the expense of everything else they have always held dear.

When I first met Johnny Flacks, at Ewood Park in 1993, he gently chastised me for my then United uber alles approach. “I’m a United fan until I die, and I hate Leeds and Liverpool as much as you. But above all, I’m a football fan.” He left the wise reproach hanging at that. I came to realise he was right. Better we accept a decade of trophy-free suffering than be executioners of the English game.