Today, on the 28th day of February, 2010, a significant historical event will take place, the full repercussions of which, only time will tell. But make no mistake, history is in the making. Today, at Wembley Stadium, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Manchester United football supporters will make a highly visual protest at the corporate play-thing their once proud community football club has become. Across the globe, football fans will witness the first substantial attempt by fellow football fans, to wrest back the ownership of their club from the cold, corporate world of global finance.

Of course, the true groundbreakers of this movement were the Wimbledon supporters who refused to follow their club owners to Milton Keynes, but what is special about the Man United protest is the real possibility of success. The financial figures needed to buy out the American based Glazer brothers are mind- boggling, but football finance expert Keith Harris claims he has 1billion in place to buy out the Glazers. (The Observer, 28/02/10) What is at stake here is not simply the potential community buy-back of a football club, but rather the spectacle of ordinary citizens spontaneously mobilising against corporate power. If it can be done in the field of sport, why not in the larger arena of the national economy?

In case you may think that I overstate the significance of the protest, let me add that Liverpool and United supporters are thinking the unthinkable. Luke Bainbridge and Ed Vulliamy report in today’s Observer that, there is even speculation that United fans and those of their arch-rivals Liverpool are considering joining forces against their respective American owners when the two teams meet on 21st March. The impact of a joint demonstration by supporters known for their fierce animosity towards each other would be bound to generate fresh headlines around the world. Quoting from a popular online Liverpool forum, Bainbridge and Vulliamy cite a comment from a Liverpool supporter who argues, The two biggest clubs in the land with the two best fan bases in the land have been sold down the river to a bunch of no mark Yanks, intent on stealing money from our vast sources of revenue.

Of course, it matters little about the nationality of the corporate owners, what is at stake is the level of community control of our community sports clubs. British corporate ownership of United or Liverpool would solve nothing if the supporters were not in democratic control of their clubs. It is they who should have the final say on ticket prices and it is they who should determine what proportion of revenues go on stadiums, on players and on administration. Underlying all this should be a simple principle: sporting clubs should be constituted as not for profit organisations. As for player wages, these must be capped and regulated by the governing bodies, in this case FIFA, Uefa and the FA. As in the case of the banking industry, self regulation has proved to be a case of self delusion. Capitalism is inherently incapable of self regulation and be under no illusions, football has been totally embraced by the capitalist juggernaut. Ask the Portsmouth fans if you have any doubts about that.

I sense the tide is turning and being forever an optimist I see big oak tress growing from little acorns. One such acorn is the tone and quantity of anti corporate journalism springing up not just in the broadsheets but in the tabloids as well. Portsmouth FC falling into administration has certainly focused minds in a way that even the banking collapse did not. Take for example Simon Kuper in The Observer 28/02/10 who declares in banner headlines, Football in not about corporations. It’s about clubs and communities. Of course what we really need to read in our newspapers and other media is the headlines: Life is not about corporations, it’s about people and communities. Perhaps when the banking sector collapses again, as surely it will, and this time with no tax-payers money left to bail them out, we might finally get to read those lines. Still, we must be grateful for humble little acorns, so let’s savour what Mr Kuper has to say.

The perfect symbol of debt-ridden Britain is debt-ridden Portsmouth Football Club. Pundits are busy berating Portsmouth and football in general for its profligacy. However, that’s a bit rich (as it were). The spendthrift clubs are simply ourselves writ slightly larger. Portsmouth owes 60 million, almost as much as its annual turnover. Well, the McKinsey Global Institute calculates that total British public corporate and private debt is about 4.7 times bigger than Britain’s annual economic output. That is definitely a recipe for future economic disasters of which the recent bout may be considered nothing but a dress rehearsal. This time some big corporate giants went broke. Next time around it could be entire countries; perhaps dare I say it, the entire global economy. Still, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Clubs have begun cutting down. Most have abandoned transfers. Just possibly, player’s salaries will fall too. But clubs need to go further, and rethink what they are. And this is the really important bit. They don’t exist to make money. Rather, their job is to make people happy. Football clubs fill a peculiar hole in British emotional life. Many people get ritual and community chiefly from football. For some their club’s stadium is more a home than the house they live in. Kuper continues in full poetic flow. Football, once the working man’s ballet, has become the joy of all classes and ages, of women as well as men. It exists to serve the fans. That’s why for decades the Football Association forbade club owners from profiting from their clubs. Directors couldn’t get paid and dividends were capped. If such rules still existed, they might have stopped the rapacious owners of Liverpool and Manchester United from burdening these clubs with a combined debt simply to finance their takeovers.

The phrase I find most refreshing, even revolutionary, is Kapur’s notion of something like a football club existing, to make people happy. When finally we outgrow our fixation and fetish with material wealth, we will wake up to the most simple of all equations: all human activity should be, in the end, directed at human well-being. The greatest good for the greatest number. Utopians have had this dream for millennia. However, I am savvy enough to know that ruling elites do not disappear by merely wishing them away. They are swept off the historical stage, kicking and screaming, only when they have absolutely nothing left to offer, ideologically and more importantly, materially. Could the embryonic protests against corporate control of our football clubs presage something more profound developing in the collective human consciousness? Is the age of global corporate plunder reaching both its zenith and, paradoxically, its nadir?

To pose the question in another way: what stands in the way of humans organising themselves rationally and humanely across the entire planet? We certainly have the technology to do the job. The answer is so obvious yet few these days dare to speak the words; the irrationality of an economic system that insists on putting personal profit before common need. In short, our much heralded free market capitalism. Could it be that football supporters, not normally championed for their socialist ideals, have stolen a march on the intelligentsia and rediscovered the ugly truth about capitalism: that it works for a tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority. And the statistics show that the minority is getting ever smaller and richer, and majority ever larger and poorer.

And by the way, where is the great working class hero from Govan when we need him? Has Ferguson become so entwined in the corporate world that he cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with his fellow United supporters? To lead this struggle for democratic control and against corporate control would be a greater legacy than even that of his football managerial genius.