Cod Almighty | Diary

Thanks for the memories

18 July 2025

Bosses at Manchester United would like their players to want to hang around in the afternoons after training instead of zipping/zooming/zapping away as soon as the cones are away, the balls are bagged and the mowers are on. To encourage this, the club has invested £50m in its training ground, Carrington, making it the newest, snazziest and most American-football-ist (Brailsford did, of course, visit the training grounds of grid iron grunters for inspiration) facility in the country. The likes of Leicester can no longer lord it over their rivals in the training ground tech-wars.

Yep, the Red Devils were behind the Foxes in keeping-up-with-the-Joneses and feeling the weight of Ronaldo's dismissive comment about them being "stopped in time" after he realised that the swimming pool was the same as when he had left the club in 2009. The same swimming pool! The shame of it. No wonder the players want to be off.

How will this groundbreaking new facility encourage the players to hang around and be pals? They have a barber! Or barbers' stations. Or barbers and their stations. The minutiae are unclear, but safe to say the bosses have seen that barbers and stylists have become famous by cutting players' hair, so 25 players on a rotation system means a video each day, with defenders and midfielders doubling up and forwards flying solo in the chair. Man U will have cracked the mega-influencer code!

All very interesting, but why, you ask, is your A46 Diary telling you about this? It's the Football Governance Bill. This week our veracious vice-chairman and all-round good egg Jason Stockwood returned to his columnist duties in the Guardian to celebrate the bill's latest victory in Parliament. It looks like the bill will pass into law and that there will be real safeguards, preventative and curative, in place for the benefit of the smaller clubs. The bigger clubs, however, are not so keen. Karren Brady, she of the House of Lords and West Ham board, says that competition is only kept alive by risk, the risk taken to achieve and the willingness to fail, or, as she puts it, "brutal meritocracy". If the risk is bankruptcy and extinction then that's not sport, that's dog-eat-dog capitalism.

It's a familiar political argument: does survival outweigh aspiration or vice-versa? Does focus on one mean the rejection of the other? Can we trust those who claim to be able to deliver both? Trust is exactly what we do. Again and again, we trust that individuals have the collective's best interests at heart while allowing for other individuals to rise above the masses. We trust and we are let down. Ask fans of Mancher United how they feel about open markets and meritocracy since the Glazers' takeover and see how many might swap a new swimming pool for the debt-free ownership model of the past. The bill's promise to raise vetting standards alone should make it worthwhile. Would our friends across the river like to reverse the decisions of their last two owners or at least have had them scrutinised more closely? Perhaps. But, you might argue, the success they've had will live long in priceless memories.

Priceless is a word thrown around with exuberant abandon. What wouldn't we give up to keep our Town memories alive? Outside of our families there's not much, not much at all – and I'm sure we've all got a cousin or an uncle we'd swap for the 2022 play-offs! But would we give up the club? No, of course not. So why do we struggle to disagree with the idea that we should leave that decision to the ones who spend £50m because their pool was the wrong colour or shape or the water wasn't wet enough? Clubs who can commit to £2b for a new ground and still bid £70m for a forward from Brentford two years after paying £73m for a forward who isn't good enough?

Keep politics out of football, we say, but it's here, has always been here and is here to stay. And that means allowing some the power to make decisions – or at least oversee decisions - that we feel would benefit as many as possible without removing aspiration; a balance that many governments have failed to achieve, but does that mean we have to give up? Should that mean handing over power permanently to an authority based solely on strength? That way lies Trump, of course, and Johnson and Orban and European Super Leagues. Or should we try for something better, something fairer, something stronger?

Ask yourself what you would sacrifice? What does 'priceless' mean to you? And who would you rather make those decisions?

Rochdale away tomorrow. Goals have been hard to come by in pre-season so far, so a few of those would be nice.