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GOOD The new Mogwai album. Cantaloupe restaurant in Stockport. The Martinez goals. Amorim’s honesty. Pink wafer biscuits. Old school but still superb. Martinez’s goal celebration away at Fulham. I had no idea what he was doing, but I liked the hand shapes. I guess it’s inspired by the moves of La Mona Jimenez, the James Brown of Argentina. Aldi Jive bars. Better than a Twix. Newcastle fans fuming about anything United-related: “New ground? They’ve not painted the Tyne Bridge.” Longer days on the way. David Kynaston’s New Jerusalem book series. Ella Toone’s brave article in the Players’ Tribune. The away end at Fulham, loud and proud. Finally binning off the toxicity of X. Loads of Liverpool and United on the same flight to Amsterdam. Or is that bad? UWS’s website forum debates – online debate done sensibly, intellectually, funny. Bucharest’s sell-out crowd. Rangers in the home end – fair play for their supporters’ ingenuity. We’ve all been there. Denis Irwin on the Overlap. Parkruns (and new PBs). A Complete Unknown. Absolutely brilliant. American Primeval on Netflix. £15 away tickets in Bucharest. Cap Coffee van on Turn Moss. Kobbie star ting to prove his case with Amorim. Posh cinemas with comfy seats. New series of Severance. The brain implant trial that has “cured” Parkinson’s for a guy from Sunderland. Ruud’s return. ...& BAD Appalling home form in the league. Thursday nights and Sunday at 7pm being normalised for non-European games by TV companies. Getting ripped off by Bucharest’s taxi drivers. If you didn’t, you were one of the few. Plastic sledges that snap under the weight of a 14-stone man. Guinness bores. The ongoing United inconsistency. Sunday 7pm kick-offs. Big Jim Ratcliffe’s bright yellow gloves in the stands at Fulham. He looked like a very rich air traffic ground controller. Rangers fans in the home end. Every chant seeming to be to the tune of Seven Nation Army. Rangers in the home end. How did they get there? An ageing K Stand. Ticket price rise anxiety. Stewards being moved after 20-odd years stood in the same place. Rashford. Please leave. And Trump and Musk. Cuts to teaching budgets. Vaping. Games v Crystal Palace FC. Spanish cup competitions being played in Jeddah. Grown-ups who play computer games. Calling famous people you don’t know by their first names or nicknames, par ticularly “Pep”, makes me boak. Funerals. The incessant Rashford questions in Amorim’s press conferences. From the regulars on the Groundside board on uwsonline.com
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EDITORIAL FEATURES 12 Mourning/ Moaning Munich 14 Anfield There’s a lack of trust between United fans and the club right now. There’s worry about future ticket prices, about the decisionmakers and their actions. Much stems from the results of the first team, since they set the mood at every football club. Nothing else matters as much as results. And results have been atrocious, as we watch a team consistent for little beyond sitting between 12th and 14th in recent months. There was a lot of goodwill from fans when INEOS took control. Partly, it’s because they’re not the Glazers, the people at fault for United’s demise more than anyone else. Don’t say you weren’t warned in 2005. We’re now reaping what has been sown for 20 years, since the Glazers left United losing so much money that they had to go to market in November 2023 in what was optimistically called “a strategic review”. It might have been more realistic to call it “we’re going bust unless we get help” after they milked a little too much from their United cash cow and oversaw a succession of failed big-money transfers. There were no restrictions: anybody in the world could have come forward to buy or buy into United. After much talk and posturing and bullshit promises, the list was whittled down to two – Ratcliffe and Qatar. One liked a deal and got into the weeds to do one, the other either could not or would not show proof of funds, despite much cheerleading from anonymous social media accounts which have strangely disappeared. With the Glazers still in power, did Ratcliffe do a good deal or did he do the only deal that he could get done? Time will tell. On one side he’s got a free hand to make all football decisions, on the other his hands are tied by the deal he cut, FFP and United’s debts. He can’t buy his way to success as Abu Dhabi did at city, Qatar did at PSG or Abramovich at Chelsea. Ratcliffe did put money in rather than take it out. He wants United to succeed, yet he also needs to stem losses averaging £80 million per year or United are going under. Doing that brings pain. Good people at the club lose their jobs, not that they were guaranteed jobs for life. New staff have arrived, some have excellent CVs. Fans have been ready to support and until November Ratcliffe enjoyed a fair wind. Remember him presenting Bruno Fernandes with a shirt to mark 250 appearances before the Leicester home game (the middle one of the three) and getting polite applause? That wouldn’t have happened the minute the £66 ticket news came out. Goodwill was lost and it didn’t need to be. Dan Ashworth’s arrival and departure wasn’t an encouraging look, but United haven’t always got decisions right. No football clubs have. But it’s a bumpy ride. Staff have departed and relationships have broken down on both sides. Ticket office staff, fed up with abuse (they don’t pick the team by the way), push away the very fans they’re supposed to help, which doesn’t help anyone. Some fans will always moan about anything, since United is the sponge to soak up the frustration in their lives and negatives get more traction than positives online, but fans benefitted from reasonable ticket prices in the last decade, reductions in the cost of drinks at games (Old Trafford is one of the cheapest around for a pint), financial help with travel to away games. Staff were not furloughed during Covid, United’s community outreach work was superb. All this cost money, which the club didn’t really have if the expensively assembled team and their vast wages weren’t delivering. Cuts were needed and they’re awful, just as any rises will be which affect fans. These are very challenging times at Manchester United, made worse by a poor season. We have a talented coach and there’s a will for the club to be successful again from the decision-makers now in charge, but Ruben Amorim needs wins like any manager. Wins for him and us, wins for the club’s finances or there will be more cuts. Because it’s all about the Glory, Glory, right? Enjoy this issue, Andy Editor 18 £160 to See United 22 UWS in Bucharest: ‘Manchester, I Kiss You!’ 26 FC United at Matlock 28 Rangers at Home: What Happened? 36 MUFC Women: A Pleasant Surprise 38 Reds Around the World: Rainbow Devils 39 Transmission REGULARS 04-07 manUvia 04 Jim White 08-09 Guttersnipe 26 Keith Dewhurst Obituary 42 GAWI

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GOOD The new Mogwai album. Cantaloupe restaurant in Stockport. The Martinez goals. Amorim’s honesty. Pink wafer biscuits. Old school but still superb. Martinez’s goal celebration away at Fulham. I had no idea what he was doing, but I liked the hand shapes. I guess it’s inspired by the moves of La Mona Jimenez, the James Brown of Argentina. Aldi Jive bars. Better than a Twix. Newcastle fans fuming about anything United-related: “New ground? They’ve not painted the Tyne Bridge.” Longer days on the way. David Kynaston’s New Jerusalem book series. Ella Toone’s brave article in the Players’ Tribune. The away end at Fulham, loud and proud. Finally binning off the toxicity of X. Loads of Liverpool and United on the same flight to Amsterdam. Or is that bad? UWS’s website forum debates – online debate done sensibly, intellectually, funny. Bucharest’s sell-out crowd. Rangers in the home end – fair play for their supporters’ ingenuity. We’ve all been there. Denis Irwin on the Overlap. Parkruns (and new PBs). A Complete Unknown. Absolutely brilliant. American Primeval on Netflix. £15 away tickets in Bucharest. Cap Coffee van on Turn Moss. Kobbie star ting to prove his case with Amorim. Posh cinemas with comfy seats. New series of Severance. The brain implant trial that has “cured” Parkinson’s for a guy from Sunderland. Ruud’s return.

...& BAD

Appalling home form in the league. Thursday nights and Sunday at 7pm being normalised for non-European games by TV companies. Getting ripped off by Bucharest’s taxi drivers. If you didn’t, you were one of the few. Plastic sledges that snap under the weight of a 14-stone man. Guinness bores. The ongoing United inconsistency. Sunday 7pm kick-offs. Big Jim Ratcliffe’s bright yellow gloves in the stands at Fulham. He looked like a very rich air traffic ground controller. Rangers fans in the home end. Every chant seeming to be to the tune of Seven Nation Army. Rangers in the home end. How did they get there? An ageing K Stand. Ticket price rise anxiety. Stewards being moved after 20-odd years stood in the same place. Rashford. Please leave. And Trump and Musk. Cuts to teaching budgets. Vaping. Games v Crystal Palace FC. Spanish cup competitions being played in Jeddah. Grown-ups who play computer games. Calling famous people you don’t know by their first names or nicknames, par ticularly “Pep”, makes me boak. Funerals. The incessant Rashford questions in Amorim’s press conferences. From the regulars on the Groundside board on uwsonline.com

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