Glazer’s ownership of Manchester United has been one of the loudest stories in English sport in recent years.
Sections of the club’s supporters have long opposed Old Trafford’s top-down structure, but as protests mount in Manchester, it has become a particularly big story in modern English football.
Yellow and green (or gold and green) scarves have become synonymous with ‘Glazer Out’ protests by United fans over the years, while rivals from competing clubs ridicule the color scheme and compare to the Red Devils with the similarly equipped Norwich.
Scarves aren’t a new element of United fan hatred for the Glazer family, though, so here’s the backstory of why you’ll see them at every game.
Why do Man Utd fans have yellow and green scarves?
You wouldn’t have seen yellow and green scarves at Man Utd games before the Glazers took control of the club in a leveraged buyout in 2005. However, it took a few years before the scarves started to gain popularity.
Hatred of the Glazers became more pervasive in 2010, when the green and gold protests really began. There is a famous image of David Beckham wearing a green and gold scarf when he returned to Old Trafford with AC Milan in the Champions League. Similarly, this season, there was a moment when Erik ten Hag picked up a green and gold scarf to return to a fan with a smile on his face. Needless to say, Ten Hag has been interpreted as wanting the Glazers gone, which he can decide.
The reasoning behind the color of the scarves is that before Manchester United became Manchester United, the club was called Newton Heath Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Football Club. Founded in 1878, their kits were green and gold and the club would become United in 1902.
The scarves are used primarily as a reminder to the Glazers, but also to other members of the club, of the core values on which the team was founded. As the name suggests, it was the railway workers who founded the team.
Why do Man Utd fans hate the Glazers?
Hatred of the Glazers has existed among a section of the fan base since day one, in 2005. The Glazers bought Man Utd in what is known as a leveraged buyout. Essentially, they borrowed the money needed to buy the club, and the debt from that loan was placed on the club.
It was controversial then, and it was the first thing the Glazers did to anger United fans.
United had almost no debt between 1931 and 2005. Overnight, with the Glazer takeover, it rose to an initial £550m and then skyrocketed to over £700m in 2010, while the owners they restructured the finances in such a way as to keep the club going. while earning money.
United has been paying interest and dividends to the Glazer family ever since. United had paid an estimated £743m in interest through August 2022, all on debt the club did not owe before the Glazers. No other Premier League club makes dividend payments and United’s payments have averaged around £22m since 2016.
All that financial strain, coupled with the fact that no interest has been shown in the sports side of the deal, means the fans really hate the Glazers. They have appointed investment bankers to do the work of football professionals and have allowed standards on and off the Old Trafford pitch to slip year by year.
