Hated Adored Never Ignored

Why Manchester United Are the Most Hated Club in English Football

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There’s a phrase United fans love, because it perfectly sums the club up: Hated, Adored, Never Ignored.

In other words, even if Manchester United are the most hated club in English football, people will always talk about them. This is a club that is impossible to ignore.

For decades, Manchester United dominated English football on the pitch and off it. While we may not be dominating on the pitch these days, we still seem to be dominating the minds of rival supporters. In fact, we live in their heads rent free. The venom still directed towards Man Utd and the fans, even though we haven’t won the league since 2013, is astounding.

So why is it that no other English club attracts such consistent hostility? It would be easy to write this off as mere jealousy, and although that’s a big part of it, I think there is plenty more.

Our club culture, spending power, the characters who have played and managed here, the huge fanbase, and the global profile help Manchester United tick every box required to make everyone else hate us.

Success Breeds Resentment

Manchester United Trophy Room
Kskhh, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Let’s get the obvious one out of the way: Man Utd are one of the most successful clubs in the history of English football. If you want to stick to recent history, the club is the most successful, and by a long way too.

Thirteen Premier League titles, countless cup wins, and two Champions Leagues left an entire generation of rival fans wondering if they’d ever see their teams lift a trophy again. Quite frankly, United ruined millions of childhoods. While we were running around the playground wearing our Cantona, Beckham, and Ronaldo shirts, kids supporting other clubs looked on in envy. It was worse for the likes of Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Man City fans, because they were rivals, and some even got a taste of success before United swept them away again.

This kind of dominance breeds resentment, and often excuses. Refs are scared of us, the league is biased towards us, we cheat, we’re bullies, we’re time wasters, and on and on it goes.

This ingrained bitterness doesn’t go away just because United stop winning. If anything, a drop in form encourages more of it, because now rival fans can get some revenge. And so the wave of hate rushes on.

Glory Hunters

Success also attracts something else: glory hunters, or glory supporters. People who only follow the club because they are doing well. Fairweather friends.

It would be nonsense to pretend there aren’t millions of United fans like this across the world, and that makes the club an easy target for criticism. No real fans, plastic United supporters, etc.

Even now, the glory hunter stereotype sticks. Jokes about there being more Manchester United fans in London than in Manchester are still common. Never mind the fact that Old Trafford is full to its 74,000 capacity every week, so much so that Jim Ratcliffe wants to expand to 100,000 due to demand.

Nevertheless, it’s a cheap shot that rival supporters are quick to use against us.

We may not be winning much at the moment, but Man United are still the biggest club in the world, because many of those glory hunters have stuck by the club and become lifelong fans.

They Think We Are Arrogant

United are arrogant

Manchester United have long been accused of being arrogant. On every level.

The way the fans behave, the way certain players behave, the way Sir Alex Ferguson behaved, even the way we went about buying and selling players. There’s some truth to it I think, but a little bit of arrogance is no bad thing, especially when you can back it up on the pitch.

The club projected an aura of superiority for a long time, whether that be through Fergie’s ruthless standards he expected of his players to the way they conducted themselves on and off the pitch. The club culture at United was elite for a long time, and the phrase “This is Manchester United” was born from that. People still use that phrase, especially Gary Neville, and rival fans hate it.

The truth is that the belief in Manchester United’s special status was part of the reason behind our success, but also part of the reason behind other people’s animosity towards us. When opposition teams visit Old Trafford, they aren’t just facing 11 men on the pitch, they are facing an entire institution. Ex-players continue to back the club to the hilt, and there is a real sense of unity between all those who have done well here. Rarely in football do you see bonds like those between the Class of 92 and the players they worked with during the glory years. It’s a case of “if you hurt one of us, you hurt all of us”, and that’s powerful.

When it comes to arrogance though, one man has got the label more than any other: Sir Alex Ferguson. The hatred he faces from rival fans, especially those of Liverpool and Arsenal, is topped only by the love he gets from Manchester United fans. His mind games with other managers, his sneaky tricks to get the best players to sign for him, and the myth of Fergie Time (proven myth, look it up) made him the ultimate villain outside Old Trafford.

The way he handled the press didn’t help either, even though we all loved it.

Financial Clout and Global Commercialisation

This one really made people angry. Although there is less complaining about it now since many of those who used to complain about our financial advantage have since had massive cash injections from new owners.

Not a problem for them anymore though, is it?

Manchester United are still one of the richest clubs in the world, and during our era of dominance, this was used as another reason to hate us. United only won because we bought success, we had sold out. Never mind the fact our squad was (and still is) peppered with academy graduates, something we are world famous for.

Still, we could outbid most other clubs in the hunt for the best players – in fact, overspending on bad signings one of the things that led to our current financial issues – and that annoyed all the right people.

Part of the reason for this was the successful commercialisation of the club. From the late 1990s onwards, Manchester United became a brand as much as a football club, worth millions in shirt sponsorships and global marketing deals. For traditionalists, Manchester United represented everything wrong with the modern game, and they still blame the club for the corporatisation of football.

Now everyone is doing it, there is less noise, but the idea that Man United ‘bought’ success is ludicrous. We are big spenders who also produce our own talent, and that seems to confuse rival fans a bit, bless them.

Hated, Adored, Never Ignored

So there you go. Some of the reasons Manchester United are the most hated club in English football.

But while people might hate us, they can’t stop talking about us.

Hated, Adored, Never Ignored

Never has a phrase rung more true than this one, and that’s why I love it. Manchester United are the biggest club in the world, and it winds people up. So they find reasons to justify their jealousy, and throw endless hate at us. There are online groups dedicated to hating Man United, someone has even written a book called “Stand Up If You Hate Manchester United” – it’s on Amazon.

But that is just proof of how big Manchester United is.

What other club could go from dominating the league to finishing 15th after 12 years without winning the top flight trophy, and still be the most talked about club in the country?

Up the Reds.