VIVA LA REVOLUTION

Horrified at the Glazer family's impending takeover two decades ago, a group of Manchester United fans went to church. FC United was their divine inspiration, a phoenix club born at the heart of the community

- Ed McCambridge

Revolution can spark in the most unlikely places. John Lennon knew that. The former Beatle and wife Yoko Ono needed only an Amsterdam hotel room to stage their 1969 protest over the Vietnam War.

Lennon's decision to start a revolution from his bed would later be immortalised in the lyrics of Oasis' Imagine pastiche Don't Look Back in Anger.

Fully 36 years after that legendary 'bed-in', a group of football supporters chose an equally unlikely venue to kickstart their own revolution. Outraged by a hostile takeover of their beloved Manchester United, and fed up with where football appeared to be heading in general, they convened in May 2005 to discuss a notion that would send shockwaves through the English game.

The meeting place: Methodist Central Hall in Manchester's Northern Quarter.

"There was a buzz in the air," explains Jules Spencer, a lifelong Manchester United fan who attended the event and had taken part in other protests. "We'd fought against change before, including Rupert Murdoch's attempted takeover.

But this was the final straw."

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Back in 1999, the United Kingdom's Competition Commission had blocked Murdoch and BSkyB's £625 million bid for Manchester United, the government's reasoning that the acquisition would have "hurt competition in the broadcast industry and the quality of British football". The next major power grab would not be so easily thwarted, though.

Malcolm Glazer, an American business tycoon and owner of NFL franchise the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, had first bought nearly three per cent of Manchester United in March 2003. Through a series of incremental buyouts, that stake neared 30 per cent by October 2004 a threshold above which Glazer would have to launch a formal takeover bid.