LUHG!!

Gill is jus tinkin of the money!!Deserves wat he gets!!

I’ve not said it’s a fundamental human right. I’ve said there’s more at stake here than a business and its business plan. I also didn’t say that this was the peak of civil disobedience up there with Rosa Parks. I’m arguing that there is a place for protests like this in the context of them having nowhere else to go with their campaign as they’ve been shut off.

Also, Gill wasn’t being compared to a Nazi sympathiser; he was called a Quisling, which if you wilfully wish to portray as an Nazi comparison;I’d say they’re using a word that’s in common usage to mean ‘turncoat’ or ‘collaborator’. Maybe there’s a better word, but in the list of crimes perpetrated at MUFC in the last few years, I think linguistic errors are pretty low down, and it’s revealing that this choice of word seems more bothersome to you that 600M of debt.

Ultimately though, you think that football clubs aren’t worth this much effort; it’s all just a bit of fun at the end of the day. I think they’re much, much more important to society than that. Maybe that’s one for Tom to cover off here?

Brian, I’ll join you in defending liberal society from people who refuse to accept that there is such a thing as the cultural sphere that embodies values that transcend the financial. In the meantime, it’s worth remembering that civil disobedience has a long history within the self-same liberal society you mention. It’s a pillar of protest that when the routes to bring about change are denied not because your case has no merit, but because wealth brings influence and power, and its not a fair fight, then debates about liberalism are essentially for the textbooks and divorced from the realities of life at the sharp end. Are road protesters right to lock on? Are environmentalists right to board whaling ships? Civil disobedience has a long and crucial part in our culture. As things go, it worth pointing out that most of the rights and priveliges we currently enjoy we have not because anyone thought we should have them but because they were demanded by people, who usually broke the law.

John – lets turn the tables. Is it moral to do what Gill does? If you think it is, then that colours your views. I think it’s disgustingly immoral. I’ve met the people on the receiving end of this – people who feel alienated from places that they scattered relatives ashes at, places that a woven into the way they understand their lives and that of their family, and people like Gill force them away from that. Is that right or moral? A pox on his house, then, if not grafitti.

My main concern is to condemn the act of vandalism itself. If the fans think vandalism or delivering personal threat will strike fear into the “regime” and cause them to back off from increasing the prices, then it is too naive. There will be certainly be more alienation between fans and management but nothing will change.

Already, the Americans style of ownership has not won any fans because everybody is clear that they are no benefactors but just bringing debts onto the clubs. I don’t mind boycotting the tickets and merchandise or petitioning. Either way, it is better to work together and highlight the dissatisfaction in a manner which the management will be more receptive to.

But if he wants a quiet life, he should bugger off to private industry. He’s running a football clubs for god’s sake, and running it in a way that by design excludes thousands and thousand of people who’s family history and memories and narratives are utterly entwined with that football club and he shows no sign of treading softly on their dreams.

My question to you is brian, what should Man Utd supporters that might actually work, since raising the matter with MPs, with competition authorities and the government and the media has stopped precisely fuck all happening?

You say it’s not the Roman occupation of Judea. But what is it then? If it’s just a business, they why the hell are you reading this blog? Why do you care? At what point should Man Utd stop fighting to retain a sense that the club isn’t a money-making machine, isn’t some adjunct of the modern global sports-entertainment complex but something more than that, in the face of people who genuinely couldn’t give a frig about any of that? And if you think that any of those things aren’t worth bothering about, then we’ll have to agree to disagree. If you do think they matter, then I’m afraid warm words will do the square of sweet FA to preserve them.

I am pretty sure the answer to your comparative question about debt load is no, though there are a number of reasons for that particular state of affairs, including the following:

1) Relatively few North American sports franchises are worth as much as Man Utd; roughly the top half of the NFL and a few marquee baseball franchises can match their valuation, but it is way ahead of any basketball or (especially) hockey team.

2) The NFL is notoriously conservative in who it approves as an owner, and one of the things they look at very closely is the financial wherewithal of the various bidders. I don’t think that the league would have approved such a highly-leveraged plan for the purchase of one of its franchises, and Glazer himself put in a much higher percentage of his own funds when he bought the Tampa Bay Bucaneers.

3) North American franchise owners have long ago mastered the art of maximising revenues through raising ticket prices, the introduction of “personal seat licenses”, earning nine months of interest on season ticket “deposits”, stadium naming rights, corporate boxes and club seats. Notwithstanding the recent increases at Old Trafford, Man Utd still has some way to go in this regard before they would approach what the Glazers are used to extracting from Bucs’ fans.

4) Similarly, North American owners have been able to extort massive financial support from local politicians terrified of “losing” their franchise. Again, the Glazers got a very sweet deal from Tampa (including a completely new stadium and highly attractive economic terms) after threatening to leave for Baltimore (which had had its team moved to Indianapolis in the middle of the night by a rapacious owner).

All of that means that a North American owner doesn’t “need” the kind of debt the Glazers have taken on at Old Trafford.

Finally, it should be noted that Brian has been spot on throughout this thread.

1) Is David Gill morally obliged to resign from his position with Man Utd as a protest against the Glazers’ mismanagement of the club?

2) Do Man Utd supporters then have the right to punish his failure to resign by vandalizing his property and threatening his physical safety?

the answer to #1 can be as unequivocally affirmative as you like, but the answer to #2 is just as unequivocally no. This is a football club, not the Roman occupation of Judea.

He doesn’t need the money, unless one defines human need as requiring plush mansions in leafy suburbs. Why shouldn’t he resign? Roy Gardiner – his boss before Glazer – did just that. That he didn’t says that he either agrees, support and enjoys implementing their plans, or he’s agnostic, but will take the cash anyway from them.

Either are moral judgements, and people who make moral judgements have to expect a response. It’s like someone closing a factory down and putting hundreds of families on the breadline, then being aggrieved that people had a pop back at you as if this was an act at which its unreasonable to have a response to. It’s about accountability, which is a major deficit for most people – the people who make decisions that affect the material substance of life are generally unaccountable for it.

David Gill doesn’t have to defend his actions in the media, because he doesn’t interview, unless he’s in control of the story. He’s not losing his job because of it. He’s not a public official in line to lose his job at the next set of elections. He’s a private sector official in day-to-day control of a cherished cultural asset. The private sector doesn’t have an impact because football doesn’t operate like most markets. There’s no way to hold him to account in the normal ways advanced societies have, of checks of balances, or action and response. Like Mr Burns in his gated community, making decisions that affect thousands, but immune from the people who make those decisions.

As for Ferguson, he’s a monomaniac. At last, he’s got the club he’s wanted. Total control of things, he’s the king of the place. The previous regime, terrified of another Busby hanging around inhibiting a successor, started to ease him away from things. But the Glazer’s only chance of success is to have a winning team in the short-term, and so they’re needing him like nothing before. His refusal to condemn the Glazers – in spite of previous words to the contrary – and active condemnation of fans opposed to the takeover makes him a shill. As Upton Sinclair might have said, it’s hard to make a man understand when his chances of a second Champions League trophy depend on him not understanding it,