This is the One One

On 14th June 2005, FC United of Manchester was born.

It’s another year and we’re still here. 11 years ago today, on 14th June 2005, FC United of Manchester was officially registered as a football club with the Manchester County Football Association and barely a week later we were holding trials for players. A month later we were playing our first ever match. This was the one we’d been waiting for….. FC United had arrived to take our place in football history.

This week a few miles down the road from Broadhurst Park, the Stone Roses will be playing four gigs at city’s stadium. The history of our football club has featured many Stone Roses-like attributes as, so often in Manchester and the north west, football, music and fashion have been intertwined.



It’s apparent in the spirit of Mancunian defiance that formed the club, in the Roses’ lyrics that are emblazoned on banners around the ground (I Don’t Have To Sell My Soul and Ten Storey Love Song in particular), in the way that you either instinctively "get" what FC are about or you don’t and in the way that, like the Roses were about more than simply the music, FC United is considerably more than just a football club. A former member of the Stone Roses, albeit temporarily, the guitarist Aziz Ibrahim even played a spell binding set at the pre-match “club night in the afternoon??? Course You Can Malcolm a few years back.



Back in the day you either instinctively got what the Stone Roses were about or you didn’t. Critics may point to their relatively slender back catalogue but it was always about more than the music with the Stone Roses; the youthful swagger, the clothes, the Jackson Pollock influenced artwork, the Mancunian rebelliousness - they summed up a time and a place possibly as well as any other band in history.

1989 was a bleak year to be a United fan but the Roses and their eponymous debut album wrapped its love around us and made us believe again. Many bands have tried to imitate them but haven’t got anywhere close to touching the sound produced by Ian Brown’s psychedelic vocals, John Squire’s guitar genius, Mani’s bass and Reni’s drums.

Eleven years after their formation the Stone Roses released their long awaited second album the Second Coming in late 1994. It was very different to their debut, more rocky, more bluesy, a bit funkier (Love Spreads, Ten Storey Love Song and Begging You stood out) but it still sounded ace. It may have taken them more than five years to release that second album but the Roses undeniably stuck to their core values and continued to do things differently to other bands, famously eschewing the national press to do an exclusive interview with the Big Issue. It summed up what they were all about.

Eleven years after the formation of our football club, and as we prepare ourselves for an extraordinary General Meeting on 25th June, we are hoping, if not for a Stone Roses style Second Coming, at least for the club to make a fresh start, heal the rifts that have developed over the last year and remain true to our core principles that were conceived in a curry house in Rusholme.

Like any anniversary this one offers a chance for us to briefly pause and reflect on everything that the club has achieved in its relatively young history and look forward to the future after a tumultuous year.

The signs are encouraging; a record nineteen members have put themselves forward for election to the board and the number of members voting at the recent general meeting was the highest ever signalling a reassertion of the democratic principles on which the club was founded. In addition there has been a terrific response to recent calls for members to get involved in several volunteer-led working groups - ordinary supporters giving up their time and talent and skills to get this club back on course and ensure that it stays true to its founding principles.

There is a sense that after a period of soul searching and acrimony that Love is once again Spreading around this football club of ours.

Happy eleventh anniversary. It’s a beautiful thing.