“Hated, adored, never ignored” is not a slogan; it is Manchester United’s weather report. The forecast rarely changes: storms gathering, hot air swirling, and somewhere in the distance, a chorus insisting we deserve every drop. You can measure it in the banal cruelty of scheduling and the gleeful asymmetry of coverage; you can feel it in how every United misstep is framed as rot, while our rivals’ stumbles are curated as character studies in becoming.
Start with the calendar, that quiet instrument of pressure. United have been shunted into a rash of Monday nighters and midweeks, a fatigue tax dressed up as “broadcast optimization.” Club executives have even raised it with the league, because at some point the pattern stops being coincidence and starts looking like policy-by-shrug. Then Boxing Day, once a bustling English ritual, has been stripped to a single Premier League match: United, alone under the lights, a national spectacle by design. You can call it progress; it feels like theater.
Now the media palate. In England and America, the tone is set before the whistle: United are a morality play; everyone else gets a TED Talk. Liverpool broke the British transfer record for Florian Wirtz, huge fee, huge fanfare, and he is still searching for his first goal in red. The coverage? Earnest patience, think pieces about adaptation and expected threat, a symposium of calm voices promising it will come. Maybe it will. But swap the shirt for ours and the commentary toggles to autopsy mode.
Meanwhile, United’s new striker Benjamin Šeško has two early goals and still gets cast as a case study in what might go wrong, not what might go right. The story is never “emerging platform,” always “pending indictment.” The obsession is not with truth or time; it is with narrative gravity, United as the black hole that bends every beam of light.
Refereeing and stoppage-time discourse? You already know the chorus. Our added time is indulgent; theirs is justice. Our penalties are charity; theirs are courage. Week after week, you feel the thumb on the scale, if not in the call then in the conversation after it; each segment framed to remind you United chaos is uniquely deserving. Bias is slippery to prove and easy to deny; what is undeniable is the editorial angle, the way a 50/50 becomes a referendum when the badge is ours.
None of this is a plea for sympathy. It is an acknowledgment of the terrain. We are the largest club in the country by a mile; the lights are hotter here because the room is bigger. United are the stage on which England performs its ideas about success, failure, money, tradition, and modernity. That scrutiny has always existed; it is only more visible now, amplified by every camera in the sky and every microphone on earth.
So we absorb it. The travel, the Mondays, the think pieces, the sanctimony. We metabolize the noise and make it fuel. Jim Harrison wrote about weathering long winters; Anthony Bourdain admired the people who kept showing up when the romance wore off. That is United at our best: stubborn, imperfect, fearless enough to be boring villains in other people’s stories while writing our own.
Hated, adored, never ignored; good. Keep talking. We will be busy playing.
Be the first to comment