Home › Blogs › sleth's blog

FC United of Manchester: Parasitic Twin, or Dream Come True?

Sat, 03/08/2008 - 02:14 — sleth


When FC United of Manchester broke away from Manchester United of Manchester they were buoyed by a sense of power and rage. A very definite belief that Eric Cantona was coming down the mountain to lead them to some unprecedented crazed Sodom, unleashing a firm stream of piss all over the shiny jackboots of the Glazer regime, was born; the Glazers weren’t United, we were, and as such we could fucking well go off and re-form United as we saw fit. The whole thing quickly ran away from most logical people, and the hardcore calculations fell into increasingly militant hands, until a lunatics-have-taken-over-the-asylum type atmosphere came to dominate. Simple mathematics were replaced by anti-capitalist fervour, and nobody cared about “success” or glory. This was the best possible soil for the FC thing to succeed as an independent species, and its champions moved like a column of leaf-cutter ants, securing the paperwork and putting their ducks in a row. When they achieved their miraculous objective, it was proper news. Amazing. They’d built a separate entity from United, one that had a team, a name, and an account elsewhere in the world of football, and they’d just gone and done it like that, all their own work.


Manchester United is like a multicellular organism, one with vast numbers of aspects and tendrils; each of its sub-groups and their attendant suites of hangers-on, parasites, saprophytes, mutualists, and organisers, constitute a complex, dynamic ecosystem, interconnected via nutrient and energy flow, waste disposal, and the distribution of various functions which determine cell-type. Cells in this case are supporters’ groups, fanzines, hooligan gangs, day-trippers, lifelong straight members, and others. Sometimes, complex organisms spawn offshoots, simpler versions of their parent, which find fertile ground in which to begin a new, uncertain existence. Plants are especially capable of this, via an amazing “alternation of generations” which sees gametophytes become sporophytes which in turn spawn gametophytes, which become sporophytes, and so on. It is a magic cycle, billions of years old.


Football clubs were not considered capable of this offshoot-spawning feat until FC came along. The pioneers that they are, FC made United look like a married middle-aged bloke, who, after years of side-shagging, arguing and irresponsibility, had inadvertently impregnated a casual fuck, and was now faced with an unannounced, but not unwanted, child. FC made the rest of the football world look like married, mortgaged, ball-less mugs, shackled to their dreary destinies with no hope of combating the downward commercial slope their footy was adrift on. And the bastard child? They loved it, and didn’t care who knew it. Somehow there seemed nowt particularly weird or wrong about it. I mean, it wasn’t like they had any public responsibility to MUFC or anything. That was Glazer’s job. But, like all of life, the FC story carries its own inherent truth about its absolute independence from the parent organism.


FC fans have manufactured a sense of satisfaction among their delirious number based on the fact that something unavailable to MUFC is very much available to them. That something is the atmosphere and camaraderie of the terraces, the ability to get pissed and smoke hybrid herbals, while denying the evil Glazers their (sometimes) hard-earned cash. Old Trafford’s remaining faithful admire this and continue to complain about the poor atmosphere and the day-trippers who are nicking arse room off more deserving fans. By doing this they admit to their impotency, which drives FC’s sense of righteousness up even higher, like a homosexual who elicits an admission from a heterosexual of the occasional bisexually curious thought; it confirms that we’re really all FC fans underneath, and it’s only a matter of time till we all wake up, inject a massive amount of monies into the FC coffers, and really, truly, madly, deeply resuscitate red Mancunian footy as only we Mancs properly can. We could aim for the lower divisions, nothing too fancy, and eke out football’s dying years in style. We’ll all be happy and gay and a facsimile of the glory eras of the 1970s and early 80s will be ours, providing we’re not too old and decrepit to enjoy it by then. But nobody really talks about the supposed focus for all this: The game itself.


Last season, when it became obvious MUFC were actually making a serious bid to win the league, the migration happened in reverse, and the source of sustenance was the football, not the boozing, smoking, or ability to stand up unencumbered by stewards. Everyone wanted to be there when we slapped that big meaty back-hand across Chelsea’s smug face, and it was clearly evident that trophies trumped piss-ups all day, every day.


A famous Scottish ecologist designer called Ian McHarg once made an important discovery about pathology and health in systems. McHarg noted that organisms who failed to adapt to environments, or failed to manipulate environments to their advantage, suffered pathologic dysfunctions wherein vital behaviours, nutrients, and psychological attributes evaded them to the point of extinction. On the other hand, organisms that did succeed in adapting or manipulating environments prospered and contributed health to those systems, generating complexity and efficient energy flow via food webs. One form of adaptation is relocation to more favourable environments. It could be said that FC constitutes a sub-population of organisms that, upon discovering their inability to live with a set of conditions, were forced to re-establish themselves elsewhere, thereby qualifying as healthy. Health, of course, would mean complete independence, with the new environment providing all necessary sustenance. All the minerals, metals, vitamins, psychological climate, and reproductive functionality must be present for FC to enjoy health, as understood by McHarg. But is that the case? Are FC getting their zinc budget filled, or is it just any old iron? FCUM’s tendency to frequently return to OT for sustenance, particularly when silver is on the menu, suggests their newfound habitat is somehow deficient in at least one vital element in the footballing periodic table.


But the castration of our footy fans, via in-house CCTV and the switch to a “family atmosphere” at grounds, counteracts any logic vis-à-vis the supposed focus for all of this. If watching world-class football continues to be shit with no signs of improvement, will a secondary migration occur, one that really will push FC into a higher realm of attainment than they currently occupy? And if this comes to pass, will it be an act of parasitism, or a dream come true? The second law of thermodynamics dictates that, if you took a swimming pool filled with one half hot and one half cold water separated by a glass partition, upon lifting the partition the two sides would mix, and eventually the temperature of the water would be a uniform lukewarm affair, as the cold water will have absorbed the energy from the hot. If a further fifteen thousand United fans were to be absorbed into FC, would the same thing happen to the respective atmospheres at the two clubs? Would United’s atmosphere become even shitter than it is now, while FC’s already warm jamboree was enhanced greatly? And would the character of the people composing the migration represent the last of United’s true atmospheric “heat”?


This is not to say that FC is our parasitic twin (in the same way that it is incorrect to say the same of Manchester’s relationship with Salford), because they spawned themselves like a plant spawns its offspring, and like a plant spawns its offspring there’s always the possibility that offspring will prosper to the point of self-fertilising with its parent one day in the future. For that to happen, vast numbers of “gametes” would have to be released from MUFC, to fuse and form part of FCUM, and push them into this mythic place midway between numbers 1 and 92 of League clubs. The question is, will playing (and possibly beating) Grimsby, Wrexham, or Notts County, be enough to satisfy lads who were at the Camp Nou in ’99, Rotterdam in ’91, or OT on literally hundreds of occasions when United have fought epic battles with the best in the country, if not the world? If the answer’s no, then the great empire of Manchester United, like most great empires, will have been defeated and extinguished by in-fighting between its most powerful factions, one of which is its new owner. If the answer’s yes, English football may be transformed forever, as other clubs (like Liverpool and Chelsea) follow our lead and begin the systematic destruction of Glazer’s, Gillett and Hicks’, and Abramovich’s little profit schemes. Like symbionts, United and FC’s true fans provide each other with the raw materials needed to survive; one provides growth in the form of warm bodies, and the other provides metabolic energy via its raw and spontaneous atmosphere. The acid test will come in the final third of each season, when FC begin to suffer from that cyclic silver deficit, and the trickle back to the big house occurs again, hungry for the glitter of that which is not gold, but is instead an affirmation of our superiority as a world footballing force. To stretch the metaphor further (and why the fuck not?), United is the plant, and FC are the chloroplasts. Each has its own DNA and therefore its own specific function. But what is more important, matter or energy, dumb flesh or kinetic song?

Comments

Fri, 04/11/2008 - 23:47 — Anonymous

Wow!

Heh! Your biological analogy throughout the post killed me! You must go a little easy on that, you know.

That said, a really good article on the two extremes in Manchester. To take your analogy further, if United is the particle FCUM is the anti-particle. A coming close of each other would result in the annihilation of both. I know, it's contrary to the hot water - cold water analogy, but then you started it. :)

- Red Ranter
http://redrants.com

Recent comments