Manchester United, ‘Come On You Reds’: How Man U became pop icons

The Manchester United Football Squad
‘Come On You Reds’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number One on May 21, 1994

1. Come on you reds

The 1992 European Football Championship was one of the strangest tournaments in the history of sports. Eight countries had qualified for the tournament. But, by June 1992, three of those countries didn’t exist.

Reigning world champions West Germany were no more, following reunification in 1991. Instead, Euro ’92 marked the debut of a brand new team: Germany. The Soviet Union had been runners-up in Euro ’88 and hoped for a rematch with Holland, but the USSR’s collapse forced them to rebrand as CIS, or “Commonwealth of Independent States National Football Team”.

Yugoslavia had also ceased to exist, and planned to compete in 1992 as FR Yugoslavia. However, the intense violence in Balkans led to UN sanctions, and UEFA ejected them from the tournament. UEFA invited Denmark to take Yugoslavia’s place and the Danes accepted—even though they only had two weeks to prepare.

The rest is one of football’s most famous fairytales. The Danish players were all on summer holiday, but they abandoned their families and rushed to join the tournament. Somehow, they battled their way past the other sides (including a dismal England) and became unlikely European champions.

But one crucial detail is often omitted from the fairytale. Denmark were horrible to watch, a dull, negative team that relied heavily on backpasses. Whenever a Danish player was in any kind of trouble, they would send the ball straight back to their towering keeper, Peter Schmichel. Schmichel would hold the ball in his hands until his teammates got into a better position.

As a tactic, this was effective. As a televised spectacle, it was awful.

Thankfully, this was the last time the world would ever see this kind of football. Big changes were about to happen, and they would have consequences far beyond sports.

2. Just keep your bottle and use your heads

Italia ’90 is fondly remembered for many things, but the quality of football is not one of them. The world’s biggest football tournament was often quite tedious, with negative tactics, timewasting, and constant backpasses.

This was a problem for the sport’s leadership, who felt that football was underperforming commerically, especially compared to American products like the NFL and NBA. Americans always said that soccer is boring because there aren’t enough goals. And so, the football authorities though… why not change the rules and encourage people to score more often?

The first big change was the offside rule, which was adjusted in 1990 to make life easier for attackers and harder for defenders. The next big rule change took effect right after Euro ’92: backpasses were banned.

Suddenly, goalkeepers couldn’t just pick up the ball and stop the game. If one of their teammates passed it back to them, they would have to control it with their feet. Like a normal football player.

It’s hard to overstate what a catastrophic event this was for some players. Some of the world’s best goalkeepers didn’t know to control a football with their feet. Some defenders had spent their whole lives learning to pass it back to the keeper, and now they couldn’t.

Chaos ensued, predictably. Arsenal, famous for their rock-solid defence, were a shambles after the new rule. On the opening day of the season, Arsenal captain Tony Adams went to intercept a Norwich pass, which normally would have dealt with by knocking it back to the keeper. Instead, he hesitated, tried to control it, slipped, and gifted the ball to the opposition striker. Arsenal lost 4-2.

Other teams were just as shambolic, but the one goalkeeper who thrived in this brave new world was, ironically, Peter Schmeichel. He had never been a fan of the old method in the first place, once saying of his Euro 92 team:

Every time we got into the German half and couldn’t find someone to pass to, players would turn around and pass it to me, and I would pick it up. How can you win football matches like that?

Schmiechel happened to be a pretty talented footballer in his own right, and in later years he would be known for running up the pitch and scoring the odd goal. He was happy to take the ball and keep it moving, which allowed Manchester United to start play a fast-flowing style of attacking football. And it looked great on television.

3. For ninety minutes we’ll let them know

Another, much bigger change happened in the summer of 1992.

England’s biggest football clubs had devised a plan to form their own new league, giving themselves a bigger slice of the TV broadcasting rights. It was a hugely controvserial move, but the clubs got their way. On August 15th, 1992, the new Premier League was born.

Premier League matches found a new home on Sky Sports, a premium subscription service on Rupert Murdoch’s ailing satellite company. Murdoch bet the house on Premier League football could save Sky, paying over £300 million for exclusive broadcast rights. For context, the world’s most expensive player in 1992 was Gianluca Vialli, who had just sold for £12 million.

Sky Sports plagiarised everything from popular American formats, even naming their flagship show Monday Night Football. Pre-match sequences included cheerleaders, fireworks displays, and live performances by chart acts like The Shaman.

Cheerleaders were soon abandoned, presumably after failing the “can they do it on a cold, rainy night in Stoke?” test. Fireworks were also quickly scrapped after one stray rocket almost blew up a petrol station in Southampton. Musical guests soon also vanished for reasons that should be obvious in this video:

Fortunately for Sky Sports, audiences didn’t want any of those bells and whistles. They just wanted to see entertaining football, and Manchester United were starting to become a regular source of such entertainment.

As well as Peter Schmiechel and his new-wave goalkeeping style, United had two big stars who would come to define football’s identity in the 90s.

The first was Eric Cantona, one of the greatest antiheros in any sport. Cantona was everything people say he was: a mercurial genius, a dirty bastard, a poet, a visionary, an annoying douchebag. He scored some incredible goals but his most famous moment was a two-footed karate kick on a fan. If you weren’t a United fan, you hated him. Many people became United fans just so they could be on Team Cantona.

The other big star was Welsh teenager Ryan Giggs, the first prodigy to emerge from United’s stellar youth academy. With his floppy hair and razorblade cheekbones, Giggs looked less like a footballer and more like the lead singer of an indie band. He began to attract an audience that admired him for more than his silky on-the-ball skills.

Giggs was the first of a new wave of football players who were good-looking in a way that was briefly known as “metrosexual”. Over the next few years, this would become a core part of the sport. We would get Liverpool’s Spice Boys and David Ginola’s L’Oreal commercials; Freddie Ljungberg’s underpants and Thierry Henry’s Va-Va-Voom. And all of this paled in comparison to football’s most famous face (and Giggs’ fellow Manchester United Academy graduate), David Beckham.

Football academic David Goldblatt says that “English football for the last 30 years has been one long, plaintive, sorrowful, nostalgic goodbye to industrial working-class England.” He believes that old-fashioned English football died somewhere between Euro 96, which was Paul Gascoigne’s last tournament, and David Beckham’s debut at the 1998 World Cup.

Personally, I would pinpoint the exact moment of death for Old Football as the 17th of August, 1996, at around 4.45pm.

Manchester United were playing Wimbledon and cruising at 2-0. Everyone was waiting for the final whistle. David Beckham picked up the ball on the halfway line, deftly flicked it forward, and sent it sailing the length of the pitch, right over the Wimbledon keeper’s head.

In football terms, this wasn’t a big deal. The game was effectively over, so Beckham attempted something risky and got lucky.

But in television terms, Beckham’s goal was pure Hollywood. It was an action movie set-piece on a par with Neo dodging Agent Smith’s bullets. People who don’t know anything about football, who couldn’t care less about sport, were still dazzled by this clip, and dazzled by the movie-star good looks of the person who scored it.

Beckham’s wondergoal was the catalyst that helped turn Manchester United into a major global sports brand, bigger even than the L.A. Lakers. Red jerseys started appearing everywhere from Seattle to Singapore, not because United were the best team in the world, but because they were the best team to watch on TV.

4. Who’s Man United, here we go

English football used to have a lovely tradition that saw the year’s FA Cup finalists each release a single before the big match. The singles were usually rubbish, but the fans seemed to enjoy them.

‘Come On You Reds’ was United’s song for the 1994 FA Cup final. It consists of several United players singing terrace chants over an old Status Quo song, and it is rubbish. Also rubbish is Chelsea’s ‘No One Can Stop Us Now‘, which is the same basic idea as ‘Come On You Reds’ except that it sounds a bit like New Kids On The Block’s ‘Hanging Tough’.

‘No One Can Stop Us Now’ peaked at Number 23 in the UK charts, which was typical for an FA Cup song. But ‘Come On You Reds’ did something unprecedented—it went to Number One. For two weeks. It outsold ‘Inside’ by Stiltskin on the first week and ‘Love Is All Around’ by Wet Wet Wet on the second.

Manchester United were dominating Match Of The Day and Top Of The Pops at the same time. Here is, perhaps, the first real clue that this team were going to become a major force in 90s pop culture.

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