Manchester United was once a great football club. Today it is, in my view, a seedy money machine that profits from the exploitation and suffering of some of the world's poorest people. In that it is not alone, all the major clubs do the same, but it is, I would suggest, the most obvious example in British, possibly even world, football of the way the game has been hi-jacked by the disciples of greed.

I was sickened to read the words of the United chief executive, Peter Kenyon, who explained the reason for the club's current three match tour of Asia:

"The objective is to touch the fan base that we have in the Far East…"

[Yea, yea, Mr. Kenyon, so what's the real deal, come on, out with it…]

"...Equally, we are looking to develop Manchester United as a business and a brand and this is an opportunity to do that. The team coming here is a catalyst for meeting fans and developing business opportunities."

And there was me thinking it was about football. Manchester United is no longer a soccer team, it is a "brand" and the "brand" (i.e. the exploitation of fans and workers) now dominates the boardroom and, increasingly, the football decisions. I wonder how much longer United fans are going to sit back and watch their once great club descend still further into the cess pit of moral bankruptcy. I have highlighted many times in this column the sickening transformation of football from a sport to a "brand", but the situation is now so grotesque it turns my stomach.

Manchester United, like the leading clubs worldwide, are, from where I am sitting, a business empire founded on exploitation. The exploitation of fans who pay outrageous prices for gate admission and replica shirts, and, via their business partners, the exploitation of children and their parents in the sweatshops of Asia and elsewhere.

I understand that Alex Ferguson, the United manager, is a "socialist" (or at least a Labour Party supporter, which is not the same thing). I guess it goes with the man-of-the-people image of the Scot who never forgot his roots, eh? For me, however, it's just bullshit. Ferguson is in a unique position to campaign publicly for his friends, Tony Blair and the Downing Street spinner, Alistair Campbell, to end the importation of sportswear from Third World sweatshops. He is in an even more powerful position to speak out publicly against United's policy of accepting massive kit sponsorship deals from companies who use those sweatshops to reap fantastic global profits by making their products for next to nothing in the Third World while demanding high prices for them in the sport stores and club shops of Europe and the United States.

So why has Ferguson, this "socialist" man-of-the-people, not taken these endless opportunities to highlight the inhuman treatment of those who produce the brands that make Manchester United and other clubs so much money and have turned companies like Adidas and Nike into multi-billion dollar global empires? In the absence of an answer from the "great man" we can only take it that it suits him to stay silent. I am sick of these multi-millionaire sports people talking of the need to "care for the kids" and support the poor while making a fortune from the profits of their exploitation. The tennis star, Andre Agassi, promotes a charity called the Agassi Foundation and says:

"You start thinking about kids who don't have hope, or don't have opportunity. To provide hope and opportunity is like curing a disease."

At the same time, Agassi has been paid millions for promoting the products of global companies whose suppliers exploit children and their parents. Go figure that one. What have we come to when, as an ITV documentary by journalist John Pilger revealed last week, the golfer Tiger Woods is paid more per year to promote Nike products than virtually the entire Indonesian workforce is paid for making them?? For every pair of sport shoes selling for £100 in British stores, the Indonesian worker who made them earns 40 pence…40 PENCE!!!

While Manchester United players like Beckham, Scholes, Yorke, and co are paid so handsomely to wear the products of Nike, Mitre, Adidas, Umbro, Puma, Reebok and all the rest, the workers in the sweatshops of Indonesia and other Asian countries are earning 72 pence a DAY while working shifts of 24 hours and more. It's the same with the clothing brands like GAP. The tragic producers of famous "brands" live in disease-infested slums that stand (just) as a staggering testament to Man's continuing and gathering inhumanity to Man. Compare their abode and income with that of a Ferguson, Beckham, or the United chairman, Martin Edwards, and you will see before your eyes the stunning, mind-numbing, gulf between those who profit from these products and those whose suffering make such profits possible.

Football was once a people's game. Now it is just another people's parasite.

According to investigations quoted by various Internet sources: Adidas-Salomon footballs have been sewn by dissidents in Chinese prisons; Adidas shoes are produced in a Chinese factory by workers paid 19 cents an hour for working 60 to 84 hours a week and they are fined if overtime is refused. Adidas, Puma, Reebok and Umbro have sourced garments from a Bulgarian factory that pays 50% of the subsistence wage and requires employees to work excessive overtime. Shoes for Reebok have been made in a Chinese factory where the code of conduct is not honoured, pregnant workers are dismissed, and health problems are caused by the poor working conditions. At an Indonesian factory producing shoes for Reebok, there are 23 toilets for 4,500 workers and they are fined for using the toilet more than twice a day. In North India, children who hand-stitch footballs for Mitre receive 14 pence a ball while each one is retailed for £14.99. Children in Pakistan working 12 to 14 hours a day, receive 30 cents per hand-stitched ball destined for Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Mitre and Umbro.

Manchester United claim to take the moral high ground in these issues in Article 1.6 of the club charter. This says that "Manchester United plc opposes the exploitation of child labour. No orders will be placed from suppliers employing child labour under the age allowed in the country concerned". First of all what an unbelievably meaningless commitment. If a country's laws say a child can work at the age of six or seven, then, that's fine under United's ludicrous "commitment" and under this charter it would be OK for United to be associated with companies who used those kids. Why not a minimum commitment to not associating with any company employing labour below the age of what their own fans would consider a child? Secondly, as usual, these so-called "commitments" are just solid gold bollocks. It's all bollocks. What checks on site do United make to ensure that they are not associated with companies who use virtual slave labour in the Third World? Exactly.

United's current kit sponsor is Umbro who, like all these brands, exploit the poverty and desperation of some of the poorest people in the world to keep their production costs to a minimum. When a new deal with Nike was rumoured, the United shareholders made representations to the club in the light of television revelations about that company's operations in Asia. United's group marketing director, Peter Draper, replied by saying that the club would not do anything which would breach their charter!! God, I am so relieved, what a caring club. He also told the shareholders that "…we have not got a deal with Nike." It was later announced that United had signed a 13-year deal with Nike worth £300 million to start in 2002.

As the BBC reported at the time, the deal will effectively hand control of United's global replica kit and merchandising business to the sportswear giant. The deal grants exclusive rights for Nike to sponsor its clothing, manufacture and sell its merchandise, and operate United's existing retail operations. Nike will form a wholly-owned subsidiary to control the club's global licensing and retail operations. Nike and United will each appoint half of the directors with Nike appointing the chairman, who will have the casting vote. In other words, United are joining forces with Nike in an extremely close association and it was even suggested that Ferguson would be offered a job as Nike's roving global ambassador. Very socialist. But we should have no worries about any of this because United's marketing director Peter Draper told shareholders that …"we work with people to ensure that their practices comply with what we expect to be reasonable." Phew, that's OK, then. But I wonder if Manchester United consider the following to be "reasonable"?

A long stream of organisations over the years, including the BBC current affairs flagship, Panorama, have exposed the appalling conditions suffered by children and adults producing Nike products, and those of other major manufacturers. In November, 1997, the Transnational Resource and Action Center in the United States released a secret, internal Nike document, produced by business advisors, Ernst and Young, which had been leaked to them. It made front-page news in the New York Times. A hard-hitting critique of Nike's Vietnamese sweatshops generated a series of scathing articles and columns on the business pages and sports pages of newspapers across the U.S. and around the world. The Multinational Monitor wrote: "For a whole year, Nike denied that its contractors in Asia abused and mistreated workers. The company said that the information was being sent out by fringe activists on the Internet...With the leak of an Ernst and Young report, the fringe became mainstream."

And don't let anyone kid you that such exploitation has been eliminated, indeed the Pilger documentary alone showed that it had not. Is this a company that Manchester United is happy to be so closely associated with? The answer very clearly is "Yes", no matter what shareholders may think. And for Manchester United read all the other leading clubs also. Money doesn't just talk in football, it screams from the roof of the bloody stand. It is all that anyone in control of our game seems to hear anymore. They know the price of everything and the value of bugger all.

Manchester United is no longer the club of its past or its fans. It is just another willing and enthusiastic tool of the global corporations who have turned the world into a gigantic labour camp. At one end they move production to poor countries, often under murdering dictators, where the people either work in the sweatshops or don't work at all. They use sub-contractors who exploit some of the poorest and most desperate people on earth to produce their products for a pittance. Then, at the other end of this global scam, they demand the highest prices they can get away with from European workers and their children for their famous brands and club-endorsed, sportsman-promoted, boots and replica shirts. The enormous difference between what they cost to make and what they cost to buy is the reason their profits are so obscene and why clubs like Manchester United can spend insane figures in the transfer market, thus making most of the clubs in the Premiership mere also-rans before a ball is kicked. Manchester United has long been a victim of this, ultimately fatal, greed-disease that has engulfed the game and will, without doubt, go on to destroy it. Indeed, in terms of a truly competitive Premiership it already has.

The People's game is the people's no more. It has been stolen from us. It has gone the way of everything else - controlled by the few for the enrichment of the few at the expense of the rest. Let's not avoid the truth here which stares us in the face. The fantastic, utterly absurd, wages paid to famous players and officials like Campbell, Zidane, Veron, Ferguson, Edwards, ad infinitum, comes, ultimately, no matter what the apparent source, from the pockets, toil, and exploitation of the masses. In the case of the Third World, often the death and disease of people resulting from the conditions they have to endure. Follow the money back from the final receiver and you will see that this is true.

It is a game in which the many fund the few to a level that beggars belief and, as always, the many go on playing the mug week after week instead of saying enough is enough. The real power is in our hands, but only if we act collectively and boycott matches and the club shops and therefore stop funding our own exploitation and the destruction of our own game. But will we? I shall not hold my breath.

As I write, the Manchester United "brand", masquerading as a "team", is attracting phenomenal crowds in Asia, the very home of exploitation by the multi-national sportswear corporations. Yet the exploited masses scream and cheer hysterically for those who make a fortune from that very exploitation of themselves and their fellow Asian workers. As always, our worst enemy is ourselves and until we snap out of this hypnotic state this tragedy will go on. Or rather go on getting worse. In Pilger's documentary he revealed that General Motors now has a bigger economy than Denmark, Ford a bigger one than South Africa, and that just 200 corporations account for a quarter of the world's economic activity. What he didn't know, or perhaps didn't say, is that those 200 corporations are, in effect, the same ONE corporation controlled by the same force. You think you are free? You must be joking. What is happening to Asian workers today will be happening to you tomorrow if we don't wake up from our terminal apathy.

Another reason for moving production to Third World sweatshops is to destroy the manufacturing base of countries in the "West", so creating an employment crisis for workers there. This, in turn, means that they, too, are faced with working on the system's terms (and wages) or not working at all - just as they are in the so-called "developing" world.

Police raids have been supported by Manchester United officials on producers of counterfeit replica shirts in the Asian countries where the "brand" is currently visiting and, apparently, occasionally playing football. These fake replicas are also made in sweatshop, slave shop, conditions, but at least they have the benefit of being affordable to far more kids than those of the United "brand". I wonder if those same officials will call for police raids on those contractors who produce for United's sponsors and business partners? Nope, don't think so somehow.

Defending the brand is far more important than defending the exploited masses of Third World countries. Business is business, mate. What do you think this is, a game?

Football R.I.P.

For more on the background to the exploitation of "Third World" peoples by the major global corporations, see the following:

http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/nike

http://www.caa.org.au/campaigns/nike

http://www.saigon.com/~nike

http://www.uniteunion.org/sweatshops/newsthis

http://www.igc.apc.org/dissent/archive/fall98

http://humanrights.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsi

http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR0427

http://jamescook.tripod.com/nikeu.html

http://www.cleanclothes.org/companies/nikelin

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/523

http://www.now.org/issues/economic/48hours.ht

http://www.bennettoons.com/nike.htm

http://www.nikeworkers.org/

http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/conferences/nikeJ

http://humanrights.miningco.com/cs/sweatshops

http://stopthesweatshops.com/

http://www.planeteugene.com/philnike/

http://www.erols.com/kmdavis/gb6.html

http://www.globalexchange.org/economy/corpora

http://www.feminist.org/news/pr/pr102897.html

http://www.daily.umn.edu/daily/2000/04/03/edi

http://www.angelfire.com/ak/AntiNike

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=92

http://webdev.maxwell.syr.edu/merupert/Politi

http://www.cord.edu/faculty/moewes/topics/swe

http://www.ncpa.org/pd/trade/pd030601g.html

http://www.heureka.clara.net/gaia/global02.htm

http://www.cjonline.com/stories/092197/chinan

http://www.globalexchange.org/economy/corpora

http://www.sweatshopwatch.org/swatch/headline

http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/world/asia-

http://www.coolrunning.com/newscol/new0928.ht

http://www.coopamerica.org/sweatshops/ssshoes

http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/nike/mexico.html

http://www.spp.umich.edu/rsie/acit/Documents/

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~xiuqin/strategy/n

http://www.american.edu/projects/mandala/TED/

To name but a few!!!!!

Link URL for websites
http://www.davidicke.com/icke/articles3/manchester.html