Great reply to a great post.
You've hit on something that's always interested me, which is that some areas of Manchester, likes some of Liverpool, are awful. Poor housing, high crime, poverty etc. Which means that if working class Mancs are singing this stuff then they have no self awareness at all. If more middle class Mancs or middle class tourists are singing this stuff then they are massively insulting the working class locals and displaying breathtaking ignorance of the social problems in their City/City they visit for football.
Bottom line is that in terms of deprived areas, there's not much between the 2 cities. In fact virtually every team that comes to Anfield comes from places with social problems, that rely on and accept foodbank donations. So why is it OK to sing about scouse poverty?
I posted this a few months ago, this was originally posted on here over a decade ago, someone found it on a Utd forum
Park’s song is a United favourite. One that everyone can sing because it contains no expletives. It’s a song those in South Stand can sing knowing they’re not going to offend any of the priests sat around them or the old dears that Busby’s young players lodged with.
But it’s not ok to me. It’s not even ok to that goony part of the brain that forced me from my seat two or three times a season to proclaim in no uncertain times how much I knew “Johnny” was “gonna score”. It’s symbolic of everything that it is wrong with United seven years down the line from waiting and seeing how loading the club with £700m worth of debt would work out. It hasn’t worked out, clearly, given that it’s absolutely fine in the minds of 70,000+ United fans to sneer at a Thatcher-ravaged city just 35 miles from our own Thatcher-ravaged city.
It goes like this, for those of you who might not know what I’m on about – “Park, Park wherever you may be. You eat dogs in your home country. But it could be worse, you could be Scouse, eating rats in your council house”. It’s shit isn’t it? I mean, it’s generally shit but it’s shit on a specifically shit level. It’s not the “you eat dogs” bit, which is bad enough but on balance just ignorant. It’s the “eating rats in your council house” part which upsets me and brings into focus the drastic change in United’s support.
It represents a class of United fan that has crept towards Old Trafford, using a number of arterial routes from Cheshire and the leafier parts of Greater Manchester and of course includes those from all over the country that day-trip to Old Trafford because they want a piece of the United brand. Oh and before you start to pen a reply as a disgruntled out-of-town Red, this is not about YOU, this about THEM. Those clueless “ha ha Scousers live in council houses” knobs, who have a United season-ticket as much for their own vanity as out of any love for MUFC and who think they have to tick certain boxes to validate their United-ness, like hating Liverpool without any knowledge or understanding of the historical significance of the two cities dislike of each other. And if you are a Bramhall, Macc, Boden or Marple Red and you understand the Manchester and Liverpool rivalry and it’s proud working class origins then this sweeping generalisation of mine excludes you.
What gets me is that they are the sort of people who really don’t get the Manchester Liverpool rivalry. You might be from Essex or Carlisle or Hull or wherever but if you do get the Manchester Liverpool rivalry then you’ll know that it is a rivalry between two proud working class, Tory-fighting, London-bias opposing cities. It’s not a rivalry built on who may or may not rely on the oft-failing state for support versus those who can afford their own Barrett Home in the sticks or their BMW saloon which enables them to commute to and from their middle-management job.
I’d say it was a betrayal of their working class Mancunian roots to revel in the “eating rats in your council house” line of this shit song but the truth of the matter is that too much of United’s support (not all) neither have Mancunian or working class roots because too many of those who do have been pushed away from the club. Too many decent people have been forced out of their long-held seat at Old Trafford because the price or the experience of going to the match is better suited to the sorts of people whose first job of the any matchday is to roll out their official United scarf along the parcel shelf of their car so everyone else on their well-to-do street knows they’re off to the game at “The Theatre of Dreams”.
The people who stood or sat until the 90’s where you’re forced to sit at Old Trafford in 2012 would be ashamed of you. They’d most probably give you a posthumous slap for travelling in to our city from the suburban safety of your quiet, leafy street in your shared car with three other middle-management, been-into-footy-for-years-had-a-season-ticket-since-’06-let’s-laugh-at-people-who-live-in-council-houses knobheads and acting like a c*nt. And you’d fucking deserve it an’ all.
You’d deserve it for going along with the Manchester Liverpool rivalry because you think that that’s what you have to behave like in order to be recognised as a proper United fan. You think you’re better than Scousers. You know a few verses to the “Massive Club” song but hate Arsenal and Chelsea more that City because no one talked about City in the office when you started getting really into footy, which coincided with United season tickets being more readily available after Glazer took over. You have a pint in the Bishops Blaize and Tweet that you’ve just had your photo taken with Jimmy Nesbitt.
