Dissatisfied Supporters of Manchester United Built Their Own U

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/sports/soccer/out-of-love-for-man-u-fans-built-breakaway-club.html

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MANCHESTER, England — The e-mails and phone calls flow in regularly from all over the world, as soccer players, parents and fans want to get in touch with the club here known as United. The club’s staff members understand the interest in the team that famously wears red and black, so they do their best to reply to each request, whether it comes from Africa or Asia or America.

“Yeah, it can be a little awkward sometimes,” Andy Walsh, the general manager of F.C. United of Manchester, said recently. “We just try to be gentle and say, ‘I think you’re looking for someone else.’ ”

Walsh is the top executive at F.C. United, a team that never should be — yet often is — confused with Manchester United F.C. After all, the differences between the teams are stark. Manchester United is a juggernaut, having won three European championships and 20 English top division titles while playing at the so-called Theater of Dreams, Old Trafford. For the last 26-plus years, it has been coached by Alex Ferguson, whose retirement announcement earlier this week made news around the world.

F.C. United of Manchester is a seventh-division semiprofessional club that pays its players less than $250 each a week and has aspirations of someday playing at its own stadium (it rents another club’s field).

But this is not simply a case of some linguistic gymnastics and a tiny, yet meaningful, preposition. Rather, F.C. United of Manchester carefully selected its name the same way it carefully selected its uniforms and carefully crafted its club constitution. The club was founded in 2005 by a group of Manchester United fans who were unhappy with the business practices of the American owner Malcolm Glazer, who many fans felt stripped the club of its basic fan-related principles: affordable seats, consistent match times and a sense of value for the average customer.

F.C. United was formed as an entirely fan-owned club — one member, one vote is an abiding principle — and what began as a small, emotionally charged venture has grown into something far larger.

“We’re not a Manchester United tribute band,” said Vinny Thompson, who works as F.C. United’s promotions officer. “We’re a proper football club.”

One might even argue that they are among the most impressive lower-tier clubs in Britain, where soccer’s primary schism is between the league teams — those in the top four divisions — and the nonleague teams, which play in the divisions below.

F.C. United entered the soccer hierarchy on the 10th rung of the ladder in the 2005-6 season. In the years since, it has been promoted three times, with the chance to go up one more level on Saturday with a win in the final match of the Northern Premier League’s Premier Division playoffs. If F.C. United wins, it will be two steps from holy ground — league football — where, conceivably, it could someday work its way up to the same level as its more decorated doppelgänger.

At the moment, that is even more fantastic than a pipe dream, but all signs point to F.C. United’s being a team on the rise. It has strong leadership, with Walsh, one of two full-time staff members for the club, which is a nonprofit organization that does community work, runs youth teams and routinely plays in front of crowds of 2,500 — or about 10 times the average attendance of other teams in its league.

“A lot of other teams in the league budget their entire season on playing a home game against us,” said Adam Jones, a defender on the team. “That’s how many fans we bring. We played Kendal, which is two and a half hours away, on a Tuesday night and we had 800 fans come. They sang for the entire 90 minutes.”

Jones added: “There’s nothing in nonleague football quite like it. Nothing.”

Any disenfranchised fans of other teams who might be considering their own versions of F.C. United of Manchester (The Jets of New York? The Marlins of Miami?) would be wise to take note: emotion is a powerful catalyst. Walsh said frustration among Manchester United fans had been building for years after the team supporters’ group lobbied to keep Rupert Murdoch from buying the club in 1999. So, after Glazer’s takeover succeeded, it was a natural tipping point.

This wasn’t a coup; Walsh and others who gave up their season tickets at Old Trafford in protest generally did so with heavy hearts. But taking back control of their soccer experience was, in Walsh’s words, a matter of principle. “I don’t support their business model,” he said. “It ignores the fans. And because of that, I won’t give them any cash.”

Buoyed by that sense of sporting righteousness, F.C. United was born. In its first season of existence, the club invited donations from any and all who were interested in joining on the ground floor, and anyone who sent a donation, including a 12-year-old boy who taped 50 pence (about 80 cents) to an envelope and mailed it, became a founding member. Support was significant, and the club raised more than 180,000 pounds (about $278,000) that year.

Today, F.C. United has roughly 2,500 adult members and routinely occupies the middle ground between a quaint, charming community club and an organization that is seeking to build its own stadium because it has aspirations of advancing up the English soccer pyramid.

Sanctity of spirit is the club’s driving force. Volunteers work the turnstiles at home games; a motion to never sell advertising on the team’s jerseys passed with 96 percent of the vote; and language on the club’s Web site colorfully affirms the commitment to fan-based ownership by noting that “no fat cats can get their hands on our club’s money.”

The club does have ambitions, starting with its plan to build its own ground in Moston, which would allow the fans to have their own home base in the northeast section of the city.

The players are not required to maintain the same level of allegiance to the larger cause as the fans/owners — Jones said there are several Manchester United fans on the team and even one player who backs Manchester City — but the roots and mission of F.C. United are not a secret. Most players earn about $220 a week, and many are paid that much only if they play in that week’s game. Otherwise, they might receive $46 or less to train, prepare and then sit on the bench.

There are a variety of ownership models throughout European soccer, with some teams being run by tycoons or conglomerates and others operating under a hybrid fan-and-executive structure. Playing for F.C. United, then, is at minimum a tacit endorsement of a model that Walsh calls “an attempt to find a better way for football.”

F.C. United believes its fan-based system is sustainable and superior, and in an era when numerous teams in the English league experience significant financial problems, Walsh noted that there is surely nothing wrong with trying something different.

When F.C. United of Manchester is compared with its more famous neighbor, different is a bit of an understatement. While F.C. United played for promotion on Saturday, Manchester United took a victory lap at Old Trafford, celebrating Ferguson’s career and the club’s latest Premier League championship.

Manchester United does little to acknowledge F.C. United’s existence (save for a disparaging line or two that Ferguson wrote in his book several years back), while most F.C. United owners have done their best to move on from the glamour of backing a global juggernaut.

They still love United; it is just not the same as it was.

“I don’t know, it’s complicated,” said Thompson, the F.C. United promotions manager. “Man United, they might be my wife, and this is my mistress.”

He laughed. “Or maybe it’s the other way around,” he said. “I’m not sure.”