At Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium, two-year-old Skyla McDowell has just toddled out the club’s megastore clutching a bag containing her first ever football kit.
Dad Lee beams proudly. “After the last few days,” he says, “I can’t tell you how glad I am that she’ll get to wear it watching proper football.”
It is the morning after the tumultuous night before.
Barely 12 hours earlier, this historic club – along with fellow giants Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Tottenham and Chelsea – had scrapped plans to join an all-new, closed-shop European Super League. Faced with almost universal fury at a tournament - only announced on Sunday - that would have made them billions but effectively killed off the domestic game as we know it, the sextet withdrew their plans and offered grovelling apologies instead.
And supporters milling around Old Trafford – a mix of locals visiting the shop and tourists on a soccer pilgrimage – are both relieved at the U-turn but still furious such an idea had ever been considered.
“What were they possibly thinking” asks McDowell – that’s Lee; not Skyla; she’s off and running about the concourse. “How could they be that out of touch they thought this could work? The whole idea - it was just so un-football.”
The main sticking point for him - let’s be honest, for pretty much everyone - was that the league would have been effectively anti-competition.
By guaranteeing its 15 founding clubs – also including Real Madrid, Barcelona, AC Milan and Juventus – a permanent place, the ESL would have undermined the whole principle which football has been built on for more than a century. Namely, that you achieve the right to play in the best leagues not by being rich but by by winning games; that, conversely, if you keep losing, you get replaced.
“Of course, as a fan you want to be playing the likes of Real Madrid but the whole reason that’s special is because you’ve earned it by playing Burnley in the wind and rain,” says McDowell, who has just got himself and Skyla on United’s season ticket waiting list (estimated wait time: three years). “If you don’t get there on merit – what does playing Real Madrid even mean?”
The 36-year-old courier, of Lytham St Annes, is, of course, not alone in his bewilderment.
Fans, players, managers, sporting officials and government ministers across the continent have all spent the last three days condemning the £3.5 billion project. Even the future king of England – a man who has watched his gran navigate almost 70 years on the throne by never offering a hint of an opinion – felt emboldened to get involved. “I share the concerns of fans,” wrote Prince William, adding it risked causing “damage…to the game we love”.
Talking of institutions, here comes an Old Trafford one.
Kenneth Fox has been coming here for 70 years. As a teenager, he’d ride his bike the 10 miles from his home in Denton to watch his beloved United every other Saturday. Since then, he’s followed the team across England and Europe (not on his bike): Italy, Germany, Russia, you name it. He was there that night in Barcelona in 1999. Ask who is favourite player is and he asks from which decade. From any of them? “It’s an impossible question – too many,” he says before a pause. “Bobby Charlton,” he adds.
Now, aged 77 – and with a season ticket seat seven rows behind the manager’s dugout – he remains as passionate as ever: he and wife Bernadette (a season ticket holder for a mere 30 years) have just been to the store to buy United face masks.
So, how did he feel when he heard about the ESL?
“I’ll tell you, lad,” the retired print worker replies. “Disgusted. Gutted. Physically sick…Some of the best nights of my life have been under the floodlights, mid-week, watching European matches. But that’s because it was an achievement to get there. I’d rather see us relegated than join that rubbish.”
Would he have renewed his season ticket If the ESL had gone ahead? A long, agonised pause. “It’s hard to break a habit of 70 years but I don’t think I would,” comes the reply. “Perhaps we’d have started going to watch Stockport instead.”
When the news broke that the club was withdrawing its entry, he and Bernadette were in bed. “It came up as breaking news on my phone, bleep bleep bleep,” he recalls. “Fabulous, fabulous.”
Now the grandparents-of-three are looking to the future. “Let’s get the fans back, get a new centre back and get into next year’s Champions League because we deserve it,” says retired hospitality worker Bernadette, 68.
Few here today would argue with such sentiments.
But many now want said future minus the club’s current owners, the Glazer family.
Little love has ever been lost between the supporters and the American real estate dynasty. Protests at their running of the club have been virtually ongoing since they took over in 2005. But this new episode has created an especially venomous feeling.
“They are not fit and proper to run this business,” says Tony O’Neill, who co-hosts the popular Webby & O’Neill United YouTube channel. “The authorities should step in and investigate how these clubs – not just United; all six of these clubs – are being run. Because it stinks. Their greed has been exposed. They were happy to sacrifice the fans at home for the billions they thought they would get from TV.”
He, himself, it’s worth saying, is not without his own flaws. The 64-year-old was jailed three times in his younger years for hooliganism offences. Ask him what he does for a living and his reply is “this, that and the other”. He is, he adds by way of apparent explanation, “a Wythenshawe boy”.
Yet cut him down the middle, he reckons, and he’d bleed United. “I don’t think you could say that about the Glazer’s, could you?” he spits.
From slightly further afield than Wythenshawe – Kerela in India to be exact - is Vyshak Dileep.
He’s currently studying in Birmingham and has made the trip to Old Trafford today to visit the stadium he’s dreamed of seeing since he was five or six. When The Independent approaches, he is busy having his photo taken in front of the United Trinity statue. Best, Law and Charlton. “Legends,” he says.
He is, he readily admits, part of that international TV audience the ESL seems to have been aimed at.
Would he have watched it. “For sure, because if you love football you want to watch the big teams,” the 22-year-old says. “But I think it gets boring after a while because there is no competition. I think real fans eventually stop watching. It would have ruined the magic. - not just here, around the world too.”
