When arguably the world’s most popular athlete, Cristiano Ronaldo, took the pitch this past weekend for arguably the world’s most popular soccer club, Manchester United, two truly global sports brands were reunited on the legendary pitch at Old Trafford. The same iconic stadium, that months earlier, was literally stormed by Man United supporters who were fighting against the globalization of the sport they love.
Wright Thompson, who was there for Ronaldo’s return to the team he played for more than a decade ago, takes us inside the fight for the soul of Manchester United, and explains why it’s a battle that’s about much more than just a soccer club.
ON THE MORNING of Cristiano Ronaldo’s return to Manchester, a small crowd filtered into an enormous stone and marble church for Mass. Most were old. A few still spoke with a faded Irish lilt. The priest read from the gospel about the folly of building on a foundation of sand. Once there were enough sinners in this parish, as many as 50,000, to need all six of the confessionals. Now only a few thousand remain. Few things feel more melancholy than a huge beautiful house of worship left without worshipers, a dying parish hanging on after the neighborhood it was built to serve has vanished.
The neighborhood is Collyhurst, a name which evokes for Mancunians a black-and-white movie reel of a bygone way of life. Two players on Manchester United’s 1968 European Cup-winning team went to church here, Brian Kidd and Nobby Stiles. The mailing address for the church is 2 Nobby Stiles Drive. Stiles also won the 1966 World Cup with England. His teammate, Sir Bobby Charlton, called him “a dog of war,” by which he meant a fierce, often brutal defender whose tenacity and violence made possible the beauty of Charlton, Denis Law and George Best. He’s my favorite old United player, and after Mass, his boyhood friend and teammate Brian Kidd met me for tea.
Kidd told me a story about being 15 and a youth player for Man United, assigned the job of cleaning the boots of the main squad players. All these muddy spikes would get tossed in a wicker basket and Kidd would drag it out the tunnel at Old Trafford to the maroon wooden benches, and he’d sit there and clean and look around at the towering empty stands and terraces, dreaming of when his time would come. He laughs a bit at how silly all this sounds.
“I’m not being melodramatic,” he insists.
He can still see the green grass and the rising tide of concrete seats, and he remembers imagining his own feet on that field, swelling with longing, with respect but most of all, with reverence.
“I’d be cleaning George Best’s boots,” he says. “Nobby Stiles’ boots.”
Nobby’s father ran the Catholic funeral home around the corner from St. Patrick’s Church. Whenever somebody would get shot on the screen down at the local theater, someone would call out from the seats in the dark, “Send for Charlie Stiles!”
Sometimes as a young boy Nobby would accompany his father to funerals and wakes. Once they walked into a house and Nobby realized he’d come face to face with the family of the great Jimmy Delaney, whose signing in 1946 made the city ripple in much the way Ronaldo’s signing has in 2021. One of Jimmy’s United jerseys hung on the wall. Nobby stared in awe. His father quietly asked Jimmy’s niece if his son might, for just a moment, be able to wear it. The woman smiled, took the shirt off the wall and slipped it on young Nobby Stiles. He later said he could feel himself changing, a Bushido handshake, or as he put it, “a passage of the warrior robes of my tribe.”
