Summary: Barcelona - Manchester United 2:2 (Sport1)
Over the years the sports fan develops suppression skills.
It's a defense mechanism that already works smoothly and continuously: a person can be bored for a whole week by the events surrounding the game, and as soon as the opening whistle blows, everything is forgotten and pushed aside.
For example, this week we sat down together with hundreds of millions of other fans to watch Manchester City's battle against Arsenal, a few days after the publications about the accusations against the team, and as if nothing happened.
According to the suspicion, City's management has been fraudulent for many years, embezzling money, inflating budgets, paying from the side with double contracts, doing everything to gain more and more power and players in violation of the laws of "financial fair play" (hah), but you know how we are, people of principles: From the moment the game starts, concentrate only on the game.
Maybe because the memory is short.
Maybe because everything is corrupt anyway, in all areas.
Maybe it's an informed, logical decision by sports fans who want to leave a clean corner in life, clichés about "pure love".
Either way, we have already learned to close our eyes, to put up with the shortcomings, to convince ourselves of all kinds of truths.
There is no doubt that we are tired.
we gave up.
We have exhausted the corruptions and the disgust.
Sometimes all one wants is to put one's feet on one's feet at 5:30 in the afternoon and watch the best footballers in the world play.
What have we asked for?
De Bruyne and Odegaard, Holland and Sack.
Let us have social injustices.
I wonder who he will support.
Beckham (Photo: GettyImages, Jean Catuffe)
Of course, the proportions also change.
Everything is twitching.
City is seen as the big devil, and next to Arsenal is the underdog, the small and humble team fighting the giant.
The same Arsenal, owned by billionaires, who have spent 600 million pounds in recent years on acquisitions, the team whose management made the lives of their fans miserable. But the football fan likes to sell himself all kinds of stories about romance, heroism and real sport to hide the principles of the business and how it is run Over the years, he learned to shut his nose and adapt. Even the organizers of the World Cup in Qatar knew that the public discourse around human rights would be forgotten as soon as the mesmerized audience got what they wanted: an image of a white ball moving on green grass.
Now it's hard not to "feel sorry" for Manchester United fans, or at least for those who have a shred of integrity, decency or values left in them.
According to the reports in England, the group will be sold to one of the two offers submitted for purchase in the tender: either that of the billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, or that of Sheikh Yassim bin Hamad Al Thani, the chairman of the Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB), the son of the prime minister former.
Even United fans now have to shut their noses and be quietly disgusted.
As mentioned, to repress.
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The game begins, all is forgotten.
City (Photo: GettyImages, GLYN KIRK/AFP)
It is likely that many United fans took a critical and angry look at what was happening in Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City.
Since we are dealing with football, the clichés are removed, therefore the team "sold itself to the devil" after "losing its identity".
Before that they underestimated Paris Saint-Germain's get-rich-quick, teased Newcastle and the Saudi buyers, but now they are already fantasizing about the Qatari owner coming "and bringing Manchester United back to Manchester", as he put it.
It has already been reported that he has been a fan of the team since the days he studied in England, and he intends to restore the team's identity, invest in the children's departments, nurture both the men's and the women's teams, and of course buy the hearts of the crowd with promises to renovate Old Trafford, with a deal that will keep the club clean debts.
How can you refuse it?
On the other side is Ratcliffe's proposal, and of course Ratcliffe's proposal plays with that of the Qataris and is contrary to it in substance and spirit, because his advantage over the Qataris is clear: he is local, white, non-Muslim, and therefore puts forward "a British proposal, which will turn the club into a beacon of modernity, progress and an ownership approach where the fans are at the center."
Ratcliffe presents himself as an old fan of United, since his youth, claiming to have been in the stadium in the match where they beat Bayern Munich in the famous Champions final.
But the truth is that he also owns Nice in France and Lausanne in Switzerland, and actually tried to buy Chelsea in the past.
Greenwashing.
Ratcliffe (Photo: Reuters)
The fight is also an image of course, in the opinion of the public, in an attempt to win the hearts of the fans.
It is likely that soon former players and club members will come up and show support for one of the proposals, who knows why and how much.
And here in the media it is already claimed that Ratcliffe, by virtue of being the owner of the chemical company INEOS, is trying to greenwash and clean up his polluting image by investing in sports.
And of course the Qataris are doing sportswashing as usual, investing in sports in an attempt to enter into a consensus and be perceived as modern successful businessmen and not part of a dark country.
And in the middle again the fans.
Gary Neville, for example, who criticized Qatar and its treatment of foreign workers, and now may agree to compromise a little on principles after the promises to upgrade Old Trafford and the training facilities (hoping that as few will die during the renovations, of course).
Questions arise as to who exactly among the Qataris will manage the team, whether there will be joint ownership of PSG (the Al Thani family), and whether their tendency for immediate and flashy investment will harm the positive "process" started by Eric Ten Haag.
Something positive has already started.
Ten Haah and United (Photo: Reuters)
Ratcliffe talks about identity, but in England it is claimed that the British billionaire's offer is funded by the Wall Street giants JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, and mentions the allergy of United fans to American businessmen after the experience with the Glazers.
Either way, every proposal sounds like a moral compromise, something that will be accepted with a crooked nose, with the understanding that "everything is already rotten anyway".
Immediately after that, the well-known phenomenon of "whatabautism" will arise, with an attempt to reject the criticism and cancel the claims, with the help of proof that in fact the actions of the critics contradict their claims, that the business is also dirty and alienated for them (which is probably true), and so in fact every time there is a change in ownership As such, the game is flooded with accusations of hypocrisy, corruption and vested interests, another reminder of the real world.
That's exactly why United fans have no choice but to wait for everything to be over, to be out of the headlines, and they can continue to suppress, like the rest of us, just sit on the couch and watch some fine football.
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