Thanksgiving is a strange holiday to map onto football. Gratitude is quiet and inward; United are loud, chaotic, and forever on the brink of collapse. Yet every November, somewhere between the family obligations and the dull roar of the world, I find myself oddly thankful to be shackled to this club.
You do not choose Manchester United in any rational sense. You inherit it like a family story, already half true and half myth. You grow up with tales of Busby and Best, of Charlton and Law, of a team built from the ashes of Munich that came back to conquer Europe. You learn that this club has seen the worst thing that can happen to a team and still found a way to lace up their boots and go again. Gratitude starts there; with the knowledge that sorrow did not win.
Then comes the Ferguson era, which for many of us is not history but memory. League titles felt like rent to be paid, not miracles to be savored. The treble, the last minute in Barcelona, the years when United could go to any ground in Europe and look utterly unafraid. It was arrogant and beautiful and usually effective. That sort of run distorts your sense of what football is supposed to be. You start to believe that competence and ambition are birthrights. They never are.
Because then the last dozen years happen. The post Ferguson hangover that never quite clears. Managers that did not fit, owners more interested in balance sheets than balance on the pitch, a circus of signings that made no sense. You watch Old Trafford leak rain and points; you watch former titans of the club carve up the team on television, sometimes accurately, sometimes not, always noisily. You watch rivals lift trophies, play coherent football, build smart recruitment structures, while United muddle along, haunted by their own reflection.
Abject is the right word for a lot of it; not every match, but enough to scar. There is a particular pain in watching something you love lose its way. Yet there is also something bracing about it. The tourists and the glory hunters drift off. What is left are the lifers, the ones who still feel their stomach turn when “Glory Glory Man United” hits and the floodlights come on. The club shrinks back down to a slightly more human size, even as the global fandom remains enormous.
That is the romance of it. Not the Instagram clips or the sponsor announcements, but the stubborn belief that this club is more than its current form. That United are still the greatest club in the world, not because of the league table, but because of the weight of stories stitched into that red shirt. The comebacks, the collapses, the heartbreaks, the nights when Old Trafford becomes something closer to a cathedral.
I am thankful because supporting United is a long, messy love affair rather than a smooth transaction. They will break your heart; they will test your patience; they will give you ninety fifth minute winners that make all of it feel worth it again. There are easier clubs to follow these days, more efficient machines dressed up as teams. They can keep their efficiency.
I would not trade this turmoil, this history, this flawed and beautiful club, for anything.
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