IT WAS as predictable as a sunset, which in a sense is what it is. With Manchester United's welcoming response to a takeover bid from BSkyB, the last traces of the romantic light cast on English football by its long traditions seem to be fading. Even if the dawn of corporate reality proves to be less cold and grey than many fear, it will reveal a landscape of the game in which some of us can never feel entirely at home.
Sadness is understandable. Shock is not. Takeover activity was inevitable from the moment of the first club flotation on the stock exchange. And who could fail to foresee television's interest in strengthening its financial hold on a sport that has already committed so much of its destiny to the requirements of the small screen? Sky's intervention at Old Trafford, however dramatic and regrettable it may be, is merely another stage in the money-driven revolution that has been transforming the national game throughout the Nineties. Once the newly formed Premier League decided in 1992 to spurn the mass audiences of terrestrial TV and grab the satellite channel's lavish transmission fees, everything that has happened in the past week was a script waiting to be acted out.
Football has long been ripe for a commercial explosion, since it is one of the few areas of business that give scope for the legal exploitation of addiction. Fans, by definition, are largely captive customers. That is why talk of a Manchester United supporters' protest solid enough to make a significant dent in the club's revenue was always fanciful. Addicts don't boycott the stuff that feeds their habit. Most Russians may have trouble paying for food as they cope with an economy in turmoil and a plunging rouble but tobacco sales in the country are not suffering. All the justified complaints about how United's endless production of new strips was gouging unaffordable sums out of their working-class followers did not prevent queues from forming every time the Old Trafford merchandising machine went up a gear.
Such behaviour hardly indicated a propensity for mutinous anger and Martin Edwards, the United chief executive who guaranteed himself nearly £90m by steering the pride of the Premier League fleet into Rupert Murdoch's harbour, was never in danger of receiving the Captain Bligh treatment when he attended the home League match with Charlton last Wednesday. If Dwight Yorke had not inspired an impressive win by performing with sufficient brilliance to make a £12.5m transfer fee look like a bargain price, there might have been more than the negligible ripple of dissent that showed. But not much more.
The resentment of the takeover voiced by many supporters was more than balanced by speculation from others about the funds the new owners might make available for the recruitment of expensive talent. Apparently they could bear seeing tradition trampled underfoot so long as United were marching towards European domination. It was a jolting reminder that Edwards and his allies on the plc board at United always had good reason to assume that the romantic nostalgia of the fans would represent only the flimsiest obstacle to their plans.
Manchester United will never be just another football club. Sir Matt Busby's visionary greatness as a manager, the tragic slaughter of the gloriously gifted Babes in the Munich air crash, the style and verve of subsequent teams, from the era of Law, Charlton and Best to the recent renaissance brought about by Alex Ferguson - all this has created the sense of a national institution with a spiritual dimension. But the passive, often acquiescent reaction of their supporters to last week's happenings demonstrates the depth of change affecting the ethos of football in the Nineties. Even in the cheap seats there tends to be a cheerful acceptance that the ruling power of the modern game is money.
Thus far, this adjustment of public attitudes has ensured a comparatively easy ride for Martin Edwards. So much so that he has been encouraged to forget that in the Eighties he was prepared to sell United for less than a fiftieth of the £623m put up by BSkyB. He has started talking as if his stewardship since the club was first quoted on the stock exchange in 1991 has been mainly responsible for the historic run of success in the ensuing years. Listening to such assertions, Ferguson may be inclined to ask himself what contribution he made to the winning of four League championships, three FA Cup finals and the European Cup-Winners' Cup.
When he looks at the amounts of money being promised to the major shareholders of United by the takeover, he must also think ruefully of the frequent, sometimes unsuccessful struggles he had to persuade the United board to release the finance needed (as buying price and wages) to go after players he coveted. More personally, he may relate the telephone numbers bandied around the boardroom lately with his own remuneration since he went to United in 1986 for a payments package that was less than the annual total he had been earning at Aberdeen.
Most outsiders would rate Ferguson the principal asset of the business now sought by BSkyB but it is only in the last two years that his salary has been remotely commensurate with that status. Even now an educated guess would place him perhaps fourth on the salary list among Premier League managers - and that is after having his wages tripled in 1996 as a result of determined negotiating. Earlier in the Nineties, at a time when he had already turned United's fortunes around and was raising his team towards unchallenged supremacy in England, Ferguson was earning half as much as his friend George Graham was receiving at Arsenal.
He is now on a four-year contract due to expire in July 2000, and there has been no offer to extend it. Instead, several weeks ago the chairman of Manchester United plc, Professor Sir Roland Smith, approved the staging of a testimonial match and Ferguson had been on the point of announcing plans for that when the Sky story broke. He was immediately assailed by doubts about the possible effects of such an announcement. Of particular concern to him was the risk that - although he knew nothing of the takeover proposals until they emerged in a newspaper, long after the testimonial arrangements had been agreed - fans alarmed by the Sky deal might feel he was selfishly indifferent to their fears.
That would be a strange suspicion to attach to Ferguson. Not for the first time, I find myself remembering something he said to me in October 1989, when two-and-three-quarter years in the manager's chair had failed to bring a hint of worthwhile success and his pain had just been intensified by a 5-1 humiliation against Manchester City: "Every time somebody looks at me I feel I have betrayed that man. . .But that's only because you care, care about the people who support you. At Manchester United you become one of them, you think like a supporter, suffer like a supporter." And, as is true of supporters, the passion of his commitment can render him vulnerable to the pragmatic forces of the modern game.
Because he identifies so closely with all he has built at Old Trafford, Ferguson had little hesitation in turning down Inter Milan when they made two serious attempts to woo him to Italy in 1996 and 1997, and the same consideration of loyalty and emotional involvement was one of several factors behind his polite refusal of the England manager's job before it went to Glenn Hoddle. Similarly, when he was sounded out by an intermediary last Sunday about his willingness to go to Juventus, should Marcello Lippi leave at the end of a contract that is approaching expiry, his first thought was of how hard a separation from United would hit him. Obviously that feeling would present just as much of a problem to Alan Sugar, who has twice recently suggested to Ferguson that his future should lie with Tottenham Hotspur.
As for the future of Manchester United, it might be premature to assume that everything has been decided irrevocably. Although the plc board's enthusiasm for the BSkyB deal is clearly odds-on to be decisive, further acts of the drama could yet unfold. The possibility of counter offers to buy out the club should certainly not be discounted. If Mark Booth, the 41-year-old American who is chief executive of BSkyB, is given anxious days during the weeks between now and the scheduled conclusion of the takeover, they are likely to be caused by such challenges from rivals rather than any inquiries conducted by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.
Laymen may feel that it is patently undesirable for the television company that has exclusive rights to live coverage of the Premier League to own the biggest attraction in that league. Equally, many question the advantages the takeover will give BSkyB if the Restrictive Practices Court rules next year that the Premier League's collective negotiation on TV contracts is a cartel arrangement and that henceforth clubs must negotiate individually. In that case, Sky's dealings with United would be somewhat incestuous to say the least. But, however deep the misgivings on these and related issues, most legal experts agree that there is nothing in the proposals to warrant direct governmental action, especially as there are comparable precedents strewn across Europe.
For some of us, uneasiness about the way football is moving extends far beyond a reaction to last week's news from Old Trafford and from Highbury, where Arsenal acknowledged that they were engaged in preliminary talks with Carlton Communications, who were reported to have made an offer of £275m for the club. Arsene Wenger may have concerns about the takeover but nobody should believe that any stand made by genuine football men can halt the trend towards ever-increasing domination of the game by TV and the power of money it represents. We can expect changes far more basic than the revamping of fixture lists and kick-off times.
More and more, what occurs on the field will be judged as fodder for the box and (there is an obvious connection) in terms of how it affects share prices. The process may be unavoidable but so is death and few of us welcome that. A glimpse of the joys ahead was provided by the original format suggested by the proposers of a European Super League. They wanted the invited elite to be guaranteed membership for a substantial number of seasons, free from the danger of being dumped to a lower level because of inadequacy. In short, they were thinking not so much of a competitive league as of a repertory company, such as might be assembled for a long-running soap on TV. If that is the future of football, I'll settle for its past.
Around 10 o'clock on Thursday morning, at The Cliff, Manchester United's training ground, Alex Ferguson interrupted our conversation in his office for the excellent reason that a schoolboy footballer from London had arrived with his father and was keen to meet one of his heroes. "When are you going to start growing?" Ferguson demanded in mock rebuke as the 11-year-old came through the door with a shy smile on his face and a special light in his eyes. When he left, the boy appeared to be walking a foot above the floor.
I wonder what kind of game football will be by the time that lad is in his prime. I wonder and worry.
