I’m far from apathetic, which is why I’ve made the choice to take a break right now. I get absolutely enraged and downcast after a stupid defeat or a really inept performance, and it ruins my weekend. I only have my daughter half the week, and if I start the weekend with her by being in a bad mood after a shitty Saturday morning result (live stateside now), it makes it so much harder to be upbeat and energetic for all the things I want do with her.
Quality time with her will always trump my lifelong dedication to United, so I am just taking a pause from watching. Probably until the club is sold, the place is a rotten mess, top to bottom. I don’t put it on the manager. It’ll be the same under any manager. The infrastructure and strategic thinking just isn’t there. The club is hamstrung on an institutional level. And life is too short to ruin some of my best times tethered to the incompetence of a parasitic family of leeches.
I have supported United through thick and thin, since I was 5. It’s my only meaningful link to my late father, and was a beacon through a childhood filled with unspeakable trauma. My only happy memories as a kid, are of United. The club has meant more to me than nearly any single person, outside of the couple of key people who have all my love now. I’m in my mid forties, just to put that in context, and this is a hard decision to make, but make it I must. And I say hard, because of the force of breaking a lifetime habit. It’s not hard in terms of what I think is best for my happiness and mental health.
Good luck to all of you that stick it out until the club is sold. Cancelled my MUTV subscription this morning, removed the football section of the guardian from my favourites, cancelled my athletic subscription, and deactivated my peacock EPL subscription. Going to enjoy a football free year for the first time in my conscious life. The disgust I feel for the way the club is now run, the outing of abusers in our ranks, coupled with the absolute perversion of the game through state owned clubs like City, is making this an increasingly peaceful move for me.
The football forum has been ridiculously toxic for ages, and it’s nearly impossible to have a meaningful debate on the game just on the football merits, so I won’t miss that side of the Caf; despite the handful of intelligent and insightful posters who elevate the understanding of those around them. They are all too frequently drowned out by the rantings of the knee jerk, mouth frothing brigade. But that is society in general.
Luckily we still have the General forum. I genuinely hope that this season doesn’t get to some of you too badly. This club deserves so much better than what has happened to it since the Glazer’s took over. But nothing is going to change until they go. There will be good performances, okay ones, the odd great one, a whole host of bad ones, more scandals, and the odd humiliation. The only consistency will be the institutional rot, which means any manager is running up hill, ALL the time.