This is Bosuilstadion in Belgium, home to Royal Antwerp Football Club. It was once a grand home of European football, with a capacity close to 60,000 and the venue for West Germany’s 2-1 win over Belgium in the 1972 European Championship semi-final. It also hosted dozens of eagerly-anticipated friendlies between the Netherlands and Belgium, up until 1977.

Originally opened in 1923, amongst the fields of the Deurne district of Antwerp (a traditional home of aristocratic estates), it was expanded in the 1950s for national team use alongside the success of Royal Antwerp FC, who won the league in 1957. Royal Antwerp haven’t won the league since, though, and despite some flickers of form from time to time, they have flattered to deceive in terms of recapturing their former glory and the stadium has been largely neglected, now holding less than 17,000 fans.

Renovation plans in the 1990s to revive the stadium as a host venue for the 2000 European Championship held jointly in Belgium and the Netherlands floundered, though one of the stands planned for the renovation – 3,000 seats, covered – was eventually built.

Royal Antwerp FC are best known now for the youth development partnership they began with Manchester United in the 1990s. Bosuilstadion, however, is hardly a theatre of dreams these days, as the photos from November 2011 below show.

Photo credits: jordi1880 (top three photos) and Dagelijksbrood on Flickr (bottom four photos).

It’s only days after Munich. Manchester United no longer have a first team. The Manchester United board’s decision to pull the plug on the club for the season seems understandable.

Jimmy Murphy expresses his disappointment, and takes a puff on his cigarette, listening to the reasoning presented to him by the board. The Manchester United assistant coach is representing the playing side alone, with Busby still hospitalised in Munich. They tell him nobody could put together a new team with just days until United’s next game.

“I can do it.” Jimmy says, straightforwardly.

“It can’t be done,” the Chairman of the board replies.

It’s now that Murphy’s earnest passion and determination displays itself.

“Don’t tell me what can’t be done,” Murphy replies. “When Matt Busby brought me here they told me we’d never make a go of it, that it couldn’t be done. That Manchester United would never make a success. Told us we couldn’t win the league playing kids. Told us we couldn’t match the best teams in Europe. And every bloody time we proved them wrong, so with respect sir, it can be done, it will be done, I’ll make sure of it.”

The previous scene had shown Bobby Charlton giving up on football: his box of boots, posters and balls placed tearfully outside the back of his house for anyone to take.

United is about the plane crash that led to that despair but it’s not about Charlton or Busby or Edwards, it’s about Jimmy Murphy, who is portrayed as the golden thread that kept the club united in the wake of an unbelievable tragedy.

Busby’s babes before the crash are portrayed as Murphy’s men – boys that he moulded into characters strong enough to win the league as kids, both on and off the field. It’s Murphy who tells Charlton to kick a ball against a wall at Old Trafford for an hour a day until he develops his left foot as well as his right. It’s Murphy on the training field in the pissing rain with the players, cheekily telling Duncan Edwards he’s almost good enough to play for Wales:

It’s Murphy giving a nervous Charlton a pep-talk on the Old Trafford pitch:

And it’s Murphy who, to return to the smoky boardroom, keeps Manchester United going.

“Because how we are in the future will be founded on how we behave today,” he tells the board. “Any questions?”

The focus on Murphy seems to be the cause of Sandy Busby’s ire – Matt Busby’s son was incensed that Busby was not shown in a tracksuit, not portrayed affably. But the fact is, Busby is besides the point to this story: the story of Jimmy Muphy. Busby has been lionised, always will be lionised, and quite rightly so. Murphy, on the other hand, has been a footnote to history, the assistant who was thrust into the leadership role with Busby’s absence after the Munich disaster (Murphy had missed the flight because he was away coaching Wales), the assistant who always had done more than anyone outside Old Trafford knew.  This Independent piece by Ian Herbert from around the 50th anniversary of Munich explains:

Murphy was, as Sir Bobby Charlton put it, “a brilliant teacher of players, but he didn’t want to command”. Perhaps that explains, as United prepare to mark the 50th anniversary, the sense among some around Old Trafford that Murphy has not been remembered as he might for his part in managing United through the days of impoverished struggle and, as Charlton remembers it, “panic” when the club attempted to rebuild after Munich.

United, unlike in future days, did not have enormous resources for Murphy to fall back in the days after the disaster. The coffins from Muncih were laid out Old Trafford’s gymnasium, polished by laundry room staff. Herbert continues:

In this scene of devastation, Jimmy Murphy’s great powers of judgement and humanity were to serve him well. Busby would be able to sign Denis Law from Torino for a club record £115,000 in 1962, but Murphy had to decide which youth team players to cast into the fray as United struggled to fulfil fixtures and which to buy when the league gave them special dispensation to bring some in. Ernie Taylor, Blackpool and England inside forward and Stan Crowther, a tough tackler from Aston Villa, were shrewd buys.

Murphy also convinced Billy Foulkes, who survived Munich, he could make the step up to club captain after Roger Byrne’s death. “Billy said: ‘I can’t do it and I won’t do it’,” Murphy’s son recalls. “My father said: ‘You can and you will’. That’s what my dad was like. He had this knack of picking people and he was usually proved right.”

Within three months Murphy had taken United to the FA Cup final at Wembley, an achievement perhaps as great in the circumstances as the win over Benfica there a decade later.

50 years on, the sense that Murphy’s story has been untold can be put to rest thanks to United.

We should begin with a pathetically brief description of what a ‘club’ is.

Clubs originated as a basic way for people to associate outside of family to support some kind of common interest. Some clubs have membership, some don’t.

What kind of clubs, then, are those that call themselves such things in Major League Soccer?

Writing at Match Fit USA, Robert Jonas argues — primarily from a Bay Area perspective, given the demise and rebirth of the San Jose Earthquakes in MLS — that clubs don’t exist in the league, in any sense he sees as valid.

For a league that reportedly lost nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in its first decade, 2010 is seeing some teams finally turning an annual profit — even as the country endures difficult economic times. Fans are embracing MLS in ever greater numbers, and new teams have been joining the league every year since 2005. At league headquarters in New York City, I can imagine the broad smiles and back-slapping that must be going on in the boardroom when looking back at how far the league has come.

However, back at the community level, the growth of MLS is having a divergent effect on the individual teams’ local fans and supporters. With each passing season, the idea that these people are actually “stakeholders” in the organizations’ success is fleeting. In fact, I will go so far as to say that identifying with these teams in the traditional sense as “football clubs” is fading fast. Your connection with your local “club” will soon be measured solely in terms of the dollars and time spent on their products and services. Oh sure, we’ll probably still have teams that feel the need to have the word “club” in their titles, but any semblance to the organizations of the past from which they borrow that term will cease to be.

I guess at this point I should clarify what I define as a “football club” in order to support my point of view. Using the traditional definition shared by many teams in a variety of sports, a club is an sporting organization where the community invests their efforts toward a common goal. In soccer, this means a team that is local owned and operated by the same people that participate and follow the progress of that team. Those that invest in the club are given the right to provide input to the club’s management team, and even elect those officials that run the club on a daily basis. The club then returns that investment through entertainment and value.

Jonas goes on to argue – referencing an interesting sounding speech by former Quakes GM Johnny Moore – that because MLS clubs do not have this local ownership by the fanbase, their relationship with their “clubs” is purely transactual, and thus they are not really clubs at all:

In two well publicized instances recently, supporters groups in Seattle and Toronto have raised their voices to express displeasure with their “football clubs.” Focusing mainly on the issues of season ticket packages and their costs, these organized protests have at least garnered official responses from the organizations. Both teams have announced new policies and price points moving forward in an effort to placate their supporters’ concerns. Maybe the Seattle Sounders FC and Toronto FC — two MLS franchises that invoke the notion of being a club by identifying themselves as such — were at least responding in a way that Moore might generally approve of

But really, in both these cases, the issues are not organizational but really that of straightforward customer complaining. The ticket buyers are consumers of a product, and they are voicing their displeasure at the perceived return on their investment. For me, this illustrates clearly the notion that TFC and Seattle Sounders FC are not true “clubs” — supporters do not garner any financial return on their purchases. Pure and simple, they may or may not be entertained during the matches they purchase tickets for, and that is as far as the relationship goes.

Jonas is right in the most basic, vertical sense: Toronto Football Club are, for example, owned by a company whose aim is to make money, and not by fans. They sell a product, soccer games, for this purpose. That they do not consider themselves associated with fans for the common cause of TFC was demonstrated by the recent ticket price rise debacle. They consider fans consumers to be milked.

But the same is not true horizontally in Toronto Football Club as a cultural institution: that is, the very protests Jonas mentions show that fans have clubbed together for the sake of the sporting organisation in question (Toronto Football Club) in a way that meets Jonas’ definition of a “community [that] invests their efforts toward a common goal.” It is true that the fans do not own this club in a formal sense: but nor can they simply be divorced from it in terms of what Toronto FC is. Cultural capital is important, too.

It is notable that the TFC protests aren’t just about “me”, but are expressing the fears of fans about the damage that pricing out supporters’ groups could do to the club as a whole, built on the idea of “all for one” (I’m simplifying a very complex situation in Toronto, of course).

We could also look at this from the opposite pole. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch became a bestseller because it illustrated the personal and communal passion that surrounds supporting a football club (in Arsenal’s case at the time, not one any regular fans had any monetary stake in).

Can we not consider that football fans associating to support a common cause in ways uncommon to regular consumer transactions – singing, tifo, protests, fundraising, travelling thousands of miles in support of the team – creates clubs as community institutions in a cultural sense, regardless of formal ownership?

Let’s read Jonas’ words again: “Pure and simple, they may or may not be entertained during the matches they purchase tickets for, and that is as far as the relationship goes.”

If we were discussing purchasing tickets to a movie at our local multiplex – yes. You don’t form either a vertical (with the company from whom you give money to) or a horizontal (with your fellow movie goers) relationship at the cinema that lasts beyond the length of the movie. The same is obviously not true with sports clubs, and particularly peculiarly, with soccer clubs: we find friendships, we find shared spirit, we find lasting ties. Community spirit is intrinsic to a club as much as the opportunity to purchase membership financially, I would argue, even if it is a much more fluid and slippery relationship – yet it might be an even more important one.

In follow-up posts I’ll try to illustrate what I mean in a little more detail, and I’d more than accept that there’s a big difference between being a fan of the club called Manchester United and the club called FC United of Manchester due to the varied opportunities for fans to be a part of those clubs. One is clearly closer to pure consumerism than the other. But fandom and the sense of association around soccer clubs is also not as straightforward in England or in MLS as the swiping of a credit card.

Three recent emails from MUST to its e-membership, currently at 163,430 (unpaid) members, introduced BetFred’s partnership with MUST and hinted that Done was testing the waters before fully backing a takeover bid.

The first email to MUST members explained the new partnership:

MUST met with Fred a couple of weeks ago for a chat over a cup of tea and a tour of his headquarters. As you look around his office a large picture of Duncan Edwards  takes pride of place – it is obvious Manchester United runs through his veins. He loves the club and he wants to see the right ownership in the future – perhaps a Barcelona style model. We agree with him there.

We’ll be forwarding a special message from Fred to MUST members along with his thoughts on the Liverpool game and United generally so look out for that to follow shortly.

As a direct result of the meeting we’ve entered into a partnership with BetFred which, with your help, will generate the revenue MUST needs to fund our ambitious expansion plans. We’ll be ploughing every penny from the BetFred partnership into the development fund for our Million Member Project (currently 163,430 members) which is set to be launched in the New Year. Details to follow in the coming weeks.

The two key factors in creating this partnership are:

* A fun way for supporters to generate funds to develop our Million Member Project.
* The first stage in building a relationship with Fred which could be hugely significant in our plans for change of ownership at United

This partnership with BetFred is a huge opportunity. We need to show Fred how much interest there is from members so we want to make him really sit up and take notice. Just by clicking through the link you can really help even if you don’t sign-up.

Some people aren’t interested in betting and that is fine. We don’t want to encourage members to bet who don’t wish to (or the Under 18s). However, for those who do enjoy a bet we’d urge you to switch to the MUST BetFred partnership. Fred is more than happy to pay out to United fans – almost as much as he likes taking money off Scousers.

The email hints that Fred is only just getting started – “The first stage in building a relationship with Fred which could be hugely significant in our plans for change of ownership at United”. It’s clear months, perhaps years of groundwork went into establishing the partnership, of obvious mutual benefit.

An email then followed from Fred to MUST e-members with a number of betting tips. Not bad for Fred to have a direct line to 163,430 football-mad potential customers.

Now, I’m not a United fan, I’m just on their email list because I pay attention to this stuff. But it sure felt odd to get an email from a supporters’ organisation with extensive betting tips and essentially an encouragement to gamble, without having asked to receive that kind of correspondence.

Six days after that email, MUST dropped another message on their 163,000-odd e-members, now asking “Are you happy to receive messages relating to match previews along with the MUST BetFred partnership or would you prefer not to?

“We don’t want to annoy any of our members by sending them messages they don’t wish to receive so let us know by clicking link [1] below and simply ticking the “opt out” box on the survey if you don’t want to receive messages.”

One can presume that Fred’s unsolicited betting tips a few days earlier had provoked the ire of a fair few folks not expecting that signing up to support the Trust would result in receiving emails about gambling from BetFred.

It’s not surprising MUST has jumped into bed with Fred: he’s very rich, very influential and he’s from Salford, Greater Manchester, a hardcore United fan. He’s also the kind of man you’d want on your side with the Glazers: toughness, ambition and willingness to take risks have long defined his career, rising from absolutely nothing on the streets of Salford to preside over a gambling empire, Britain’s largest independent chain with 800+ shops. He began his rise as a 15-year old in 1959 running an illegal gambling ring, turning legit and making a fortune with a serious of aggressive acquisitions, and a heads-on, personality driven approach to branding his bookmaking shops.

Until last year, BetFred was United’s official bookmaker. Now, the Glazers will surely wonder what a Fred-backed MUST campaign could achieve, with his connections and aggressive approach to takeovers. At the same time, MUST must be careful not to abuse the trust they have earned from supporters, and think carefully about how they use their email list and promote gambling in general: the moral high ground is easy to fall off, after all.

Sign at Moss Lane, home of Altrincham FC in the Conference National and Manchester United Reserves.

Photo credit: campdavemorecambe on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

A retraction of the initial blog piece on EPL Talk’s main point (when it became clear the author had misheard “Come on the U” (or something similar) for “Fuck You”) didn’t stop 283 comments discussing the principle of the use of bad language at games by supporters on both sides of the Atlantic. Many pointed out that worrying about offending an English team with foul language at a game of Association Football made little comparative sense, given the reputation of English fans to come up with a vast array of offensive chants.

But how true is it, as the implication of some of the commentary had it, that English football culture is one that tolerates or even welcomes bad language at games?

I’ve been digging through the Football League’s recent fan survey (polling 36,000 supporters) this week for unrelated reasons (there’ll be more to post from it), but in this context, I thought the following chart on “Attitude towards bad language at football matches” might be of some interest (click on the chart to view it full-size):

What we see is this: about half of all fans don’t mind bad language “as part and parcel of going to football matches”. A good third or so say “it doesn’t stop me going to games but it is something I’d prefer eradicated from the game.” Perhaps not surprisingly, 15% of those on the terraces say “it adds to the matchday experience”, while only 6% of those in Family areas agree with that (some might be surprised at how low that 15% is, actually).  7% of fans are either deterred themselves from going to more matches or deterred from taking their children because of bad language. Digging deeper into the survey, 18% of supporters with children under six say they are deterred from taking their children to games.

Interesting numbers: a large number of fans at Football League games shrug off bad language, a substantial minority would like to see it eradicated, and small numbers both love it so much it adds to their matchday experience or are so concerned about it they don’t take their children to games. A complicated picture of the experience of bad language thus emerges in English football culture (at least from this statistical sample), one that depends a lot on whether a fan is there for a family experience or not in general.

One could question the wording of the survey, of course, as the phrasing of it as the use of bad language being “part and parcel” of going to games, and not really defining what is meant by bad language (I don’t think I have to specify how far this range goes), makes for very malleable interpretations. Overall, it’s perhaps surprising that such a large chunk of fans would actually like bad language eradicated, rising to 45% of supporters in Family areas.

Now, this is only in the Football League, the level below Manchester United in the Premier League, if we’re still relating this to our initial prompt. That league’s own fan survey (the most recent one I could find online came from 2008) phrases the issue differently. Instead of asking those broader questions about whether fans would like bad language eradicated from games, or asking how it impacts their decision to bring children to games, it simply looks at how offensive fans find chanting:

The survey also notes, unsurprisingly, that older fans are much more likely to hear something they define as “offensive language/chanting”, 47% of those over 65 years old. On a sidenote, it’s rather alarming to see that the trends on “abuse about sexuality” and “abuse about gender” are going the wrong way, though the latter is partly explained by the changed phrasing explained in the footnote above.

The Premier League says that “Once supporters are at a Premier League match, have they witnessed any examples of poor fan behaviour? Encouragingly, in the vast majority of cases they haven’t”, but it would be far more useful to have the more detailed analysis of the Football League’s survey on this issue.

As for how this all relates to the American side of the pond: I couldn’t find any surveys of Major League Soccer fanbases, but it sure would be interesting to have some statistical comparison rather than just anecdotes.

Aon’s business has very little to do with Chicago, and hence the fact they sponsor Manchester United, and not the Chicago Fire. Aon has 500 offices in 120 countries and are the world’s second largest insurance broker, employing 36,000 people. All of those employees will receive an Aon-adorned Manchester United jersey, according to this SportsBusiness Journal article. Aon has grown by gobbling up companies far and wide, and this global business has been hugely successful, but has left them struggling for identity. Manchester United, they believe, is the global brand to give them a recognisable worldwide identity both internally and externally:

A $10 billion provider of insurance brokerage services and consulting, Aon is looking at its four-year rental of sports’ most valuable real estate primarily as a means of coalescing a disparate company fashioned from 445 acquisitions over 20-plus years that is now spread over 500 offices in 120 countries.

The adoption of ManU as a “unifying” platform is a tacit acknowledgment that the Gaelic word chosen for the company moniker in 1987 did not do the job, as Aon means “oneness.”

Despite the company’s size, there has also been some market confusion. There are various energy companies around the world named Aeon and Eon, not to mention Aegon, an insurance and investment firm based in The Netherlands. Ironically, Aegon is the shirt sponsor for Ajax, another top European soccer team.

“All that stuff put us in a position where we’d started to look for something four years ago that could really punch through the general noise and get our brand some global visibility,” said Aon Global CMO Phil Clement.

But everything Aon looked at was either too expensive or would have taken too long to introduce and activate. A media blitz was considered, as well, but that also wasn’t the answer.

“We saw competitors try to do this purely with advertising without seeing any real success,” Clement said, “and at numbers considerably larger than what we’re spending on this sponsorship.”

Nothing had the reach and immediacy of an association with what is arguably the world’s most famous sports team.

What that SportsBusiness Journal article fails to mention is that something has changed in relation to Manchester United’s brand since Aon inked the deal to replace AIG as its shirt sponsor way back in June 2009 in a £35.9 million deal.

Since then, the green and gold  protests against the Glazers have dominated the headlines about Manchester United, at least in England. This week, the Telegraph reported that many fans planned to avoid purchasing the new Aon shirt.

AON, it might be said, won’t be worried by this. Their target with this deal is less England than the world, where awareness of the green & gold protest is less deeply evident. It’s not even particularly Manchester United fans that Aon are aiming to appeal to; it’s just people who are aware of their global brand, which is almost everyone, according to their research:

“It was our perfect storm,” Clement said. “We were looking for a global opportunity. We had this unique exposure to the AIG/ManU relationship, which we saw as very positive, and because we aren’t a consumer brand, we didn’t have any of the concerns some companies might have had about following AIG.”

To a man, Aon officials say ManU’s power as a corporate bonding agent will take precedent over any external marketing.

“Foremost is the notion of unifying our firm,” said Hans van Heukelum, head of global marketing for Aon Risk Services and the person responsible for activating the ManU deal. Still, he was quick to trot out measures of brand recognition in countries like South Korea (better than 90 percent), which happens to be the fastest growing Asian insurance market. Some companies were pursuing the ManU deal solely for the sake of their Asian business. “We have a very credible Asian presence with our clients, but beyond that, it’s a brand play there,” van Heukelum said.

The same is true of India, the Middle East and Africa. In Europe, sales incentives and client hospitality are paramount. Having a marketing platform every region’s company can use is more important than having a giant marketing plan forced on every one of Aon’s regions.

Aon, then, are a good partner for Manchester United in times of fan strife, as a non-consumer brand less likely to be concerned by visible public protest.

Still, ironically, Aon specialise in risk management, a fitting match with the Glazer debt hanging over Manchester United. And a certain nervousness at Aon’s headquarters about the Glazer protests can be seen in their decision to reach out to Manchester United blog the Republik of Mankunia to offer some PR spin for fans. It’s not often sponsors go to the fans and take their questions, as David Prosperi, the VP of Global Public Relations at Aon Coporation, did:

RoM: Your company is now associated with a club against whose owners thousands of fans protest against each week. What’s that doing for your ‘brand value’?

DP: We think the passion of the Manchester United fans is part of what makes the brand so strong. What other team has such a large fan base outside of its own country? What other team sells more shirts than the entire 32 teams in the U.S. National Football League? What other team has aided brand awareness of 100 percent in Korea, 90 percent in China and 80 percent in Japan? What other team has over 60 million web page impressions per month? We think the brand value of Manchester United is of high quality and remains quite strong, and that its continued strength will allow Aon to grow our brand in a more powerful way than if we did it ourselves.

RoM: As fans we’re obviously concerned with the amount of debt the club is taking, rumoured from to be anywhere from £300m to £700m. As an insurance and risk management specialist does Aon see any opportunity to possibly restructure or free the club from the debt by any way possible?

DP: One of the things that attracted us to pursue the sponsorship opportunity is the passion of fans of Manchester United; the passion they have for the players and for the team to succeed and win. We also greatly admire the club’s desire for wining and for excellence, along with the fact that they have built a powerful brand with tremendous global reach. We think that the work that David Gill and his team are doing is great, and we do not see ourselves as being in a position to offer advice on financing or how to manage the club.

RoM: In the past Manchester United supporters’ groups have publicly criticised he club’s commercial partners. Are you in favour of this free speech?

DP: Aon is all about free speech and all about transparency. We believe in transparency in all of our dealings with our clients and we are all about providing them with the highest value for price. The reason we reached out to The Republik of Mancunia is that we want its readers to get a little better understanding of Aon, what we do as a firm and what we hope to accomplish as the shirt sponsor of Manchester United. We hope that dialogue can continue over the course of the sponsorship. We understand that there will always be differences of opinion and we respect the rights of the fans of Manchester United to voice their opinions. That is where their passion comes from. As long as free speech is based on the facts, then we can always agree to disagree on certain issues.

The Manchester United Supporters’ Trust (MUST), leading the way in the protests against the Glazers, reminded overseas fans today that their support was as important as local fans in challenging the ownership.

From reading a lot of the supporters’ forums, it is very apparent that many United supporters now see the new Aon shirt as a symbol of the Glazer family’s ownership rather than a symbol of the Manchester United we historically know and love. It’s important that all American Reds understand the necessity to remove the Glazers from our club to improve our future chances of success and survival. It’s now clear the huge effect the debt burden inflicted on us by the Glazer family is having.

Aon will be hoping the risk they’ve taken on Manchester United’s global brand doesn’t come back to bite them as the Glazer story continues to unravel, a concern they will clearly see even from 1,136 feet up in the American Midwest.

Photo credit: sergelapelle on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Arsenal vs. Manchester United, 28 August 1948. United won 1-0 in front of 62,000.

Photo credit: manchesterunitedman1 on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Photo credit: Green&Gold_LUHG on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.