Football is as it was and as it will be

LockerRoom: I spent Friday buying canned goods and bottled water and rooting out the old iodine pills. I checked the ventilation in the large bunker which I have dug in the back garden and I took the cats to the vet and had them placed humanely in a blender, writes Tom Humphries

Farewell, my furry comrades.

Malcolm Glazer had bought Manchester United. The end of the world was nigh. They said so on Sky News, and it was funny to see Sky reporting the whole event as if it was football's 9/11, even though Sky and their money are among football's pollutants.

I sat down and, to my bank, which had just announced over a €1 billion profit, I wrote a sincere note of congratulations and thanked them sincerely for their fervent interest in my €171 overdraft. That sort of personal attention makes one feel guilty for being the rebel digit in their perfect ledger. I then wrote a series of what might transpire to be useless cheques and sent them to weepy Manchester United fans to cheer them up. If they bounce, blame the bank. Big business bastards!

As I awaited the darkening of the skies and the lowering of the clouds, I consoled myself with one thought: although the Antichrist had turned out to be a small American in bad clothes and loafers, at least he had revealed himself unto us in a novel way. His way of smiting the world was to come among us as a rich man and buy a big business from other rich men. Cunning.

Well, the scales have certainly fallen from my eyes. See, I'm the one who always gets Bono and Michael O'Leary mixed up because of all the good works they both do. I'm the one who thought that the Manchester United Superstore was basically a big charity shop which was dedicated to the eradication of world hunger. I thought everyone at United did things for the love of the game.

In these circumstances it is common for Americans inflicted with a certain strain of gullibility to stop and ask themselves ostentatiously, "What would Jesus do?" They even wear bracelets with the letters WWJD in case they forget themselves and start wondering what Osama or Elvis would do. Myself, I always like to stop and wonder "What would Eamon Dunphy do?" He would shake his head and say, "I told you so". That's what he would do.

I went to the Good Book to check it out. And there it was. Chapter Two. Page 27. "The conventional wisdom of the 1990s is that money has ruined soccer, that the greed of contemporary players and their agents is a cancer that is destroying the game. The truth is that professional football was deformed at birth. The game was never honourable, never decent, never rational or just.

"Class was the root of all professional football's evils: those who played the game for money, the heroes who drew the crowds, were working class: those who administered the game, the directors and football club shareholders, were, as the greatest player of the age, Billy Meredith, contemptuously described them, 'little shopkeepers who govern our destiny'."

Thanks Eamon. Thanks Billy. You've filled two paragraphs and made the point.

Football this morning is just as it was, just as it will be. Malcolm Glazer buying Manchester United is not a sad occasion or a time for tears. The Munich Air Crash was a sad occasion . Watching Leeds is a time for tears. Being a business and having that happen to you which happens to all businesses is just part of the price you pay.

How sad it was to see quixotic but nasally whiny little Man U types cropping up on the telly announcing that they would be fighting Glazer on the beaches and in the trenches and over the prawn sandwiches.

What happened to Manchester United goes with the territory. If you invest a lot of emotion in following millionaires whom you have never met because they all wear the same colour shirts, well, then you'll get your heart broken a few times.

The modern day supporter is like an extra in Braveheart: good for authenticity but expendable. The money comes from Uncle Rupert and from various other slick generators of cash. Does anyone really think they were shaking in the condo in Florida when news came through that some United supporters were burning their season-ticket books? Think the Glazers were wondering if they would ever be able to fill those few seats in Old Trafford again?

It would be no bad thing if Malcolm Glazer came in and began the process of dismantling Manchester United brick by brick, player by player, spiv by spiv. Manchester United fans, for all their dewy-eyed romanticism about the heart and soul of soccer, have never given a hoot about equity or fairness so long as their club has the money to continue spending big.

Manchester United fans have never gathered outside Old Trafford and protested that it wasn't right to spend £28 million on a teenager discovered and raised by another club. They burned no effigies of Rio. They've never launched a campaign to spread the wealth of the top clubs around the league so that the Premiership might become genuinely competitive. They've never howled in anguish because the fact that Fergie is a bully and a tartar offends their sense of fair play. They shed no tears when Manchester United stomped all over the romance of the FA Cup.

They've never gathered outside Old Trafford and had vigils for the league to introduce a salary cap system so that every team has the same sized squad and the same sized wage bill.

Thus the rich teams wouldn't hoard all the good players while the other teams spent their time acting as fodder on Saturdays and raising starlets for sale in the ring during the rest of the week.

Manchester United and their fans have grown accustomed to a world that is unfair but which up until Friday suited them just fine. Now that Chelsea have a deep-pocketed Russian and United have a tight little American they have been forced to re-evaluate all they knew about the world.

So these are dark days. Civilisation as we know is threatened by a little man in a sky-blue leisure suit.

It's probably safe to presume that Malcolm Glazer is basically just another little business bandit on the make. He'll milk Manchester United for a while and then he'll die or he'll get bored. Manchester United will have a season or two of the kind of ordinariness that other clubs can only dream of and then it will be business as usual.

Soon everyone will cringe at the memory of how they wailed and howled when they thought that last Friday was the day the music died.