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Liverpool FC 20, Manchester United 10

4:45pm Thursday, 7th May 2009

Football is a very difficult thing to define. And it looks as though it should be easy. It's a game isn't it? Played, at the top of the pyramid, by professionals in clubs; paid for by those who love it (the fans); and run as a business with investors; commercial directors; media partners and all the rest.

But everyone knows it's not just a 'business'; who spreads their grandfather's ashes down the aisles of Tesco's? It's not just a 'game' either; one thinks of Bill Shankly's 'life &death' quotation, 'It's more important than that'. So what heck is it in total? We suspect you might all define it in different ways.

Some recent comments from a Presbyterian Minister in Belfast make interesting reading. In an article entitled, 'Latest Score: Liverpool 20, Manchester United 10', Mr Gibson tells us about a strange piece of research he conducted in an Irish graveyard:

'I took a couple of hours and surveyed the headstones in the main cemetery in East Belfast. This cemetery serves a mainly urban population, largely but not exclusively Protestant, and with a wide socio-economic range. I looked at well over three thousand headstones, almost all of which were less than ten years old.'

The Minister found that around 1.5% of the headstones directly referenced football in their inscriptions. (Incidentally, the total number of attendances each week at FL and PL games represents a similar percentage of the total population in England.) Of the forty nine headstones with 'football' inscriptions, only one failed to name a specific Club. The 'immortal' league table in Belfast looked like this:

Liverpool (20)

Manchester United (10)

Glentoran (the local, East Belfast, Irish League team) (5)

Glasgow Rangers (5)

Glasgow Celtic (2)

Manchester City (2)

Arsenal (1)

Chelsea (1)

Newcastle United (1)

Nottingham Forest (1)

The Minister suggests that what relatives usually put on a headstone expresses the closest relationships the deceased had. Things like, 'A loving mother'; 'Greatly missed brother'; 'Much loved husband' etc. Inscriptions also try to capture the essence of who the dead person was. Some in the Belfast cemetery even had miniature figurines of a team player, with the name of the loved one written on the back in every case. One headstone had an almost iconic picture frame attached, edged with flowers, depicting a Manchester United crest radiating beams of light.

And Gibson asks the question: 'Can it really be that so many people actually want to be remembered, first and foremost, as the supporter of a football club?'

The answer is clearly, yes. For many, their relationship with their Club is like 'family'. 'Faithful unto death' - and even beyond, it seems. That makes running a football club both much easier and much harder than running a less profoundly complicated business, doesn't it?

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