Men Utd ft. The Absolutelys – ‘Man Utd Man’

10 May 1996

Now kids, you may find this hard to believe, but there was a time when Manchester United were winning the English league nearly every season. Yeah, I know! Anyway, in the ’90s Man United were a banter club for the right reasons. Here in Ireland, on 2FM every weekday morning Des Cahill burbled the sports news, chewed the fat with a pre-transfer Ian Dempsey, and became the king of the ABUs – Anyone But United. This pub singalong, written by The Saw Doctors and sung by Roy Taylor from Ireland’s 1988 Eurovision entry Jump The Gun, was part of that discourse. (I pause to clarify for non-Irish and non-football fans that lots of Irish people support an English club side, usually one that had star Irish players such as ’70s Arsenal and Leeds, ’80s Liverpool and Everton, and Man United from the days of George Best onwards. Often you can carbon-date an Irish person by their support for a briefly-successful outlier like Nottingham Forest or Aston Villa. I even have a family member who, because of a mid-’80s season when the team were in title contention, supports West Ham. Now read on.)

‘Man Utd Man’ has a shout-out to the ABUs and a mid-’90s reference to France as “the land of nuclear testers”, plus it isn’t open to the existence of Man Utd Woman, but apart from that it still sounds surprisingly relevant. “I’m at their merchandising mercy” is the true truth for anyone who supports a team in any sport. Man United fans of that vintage still wax lyrical about Keane and Cantona today. (Literally as I write this, I can hear someone in the nearby park shouting at their dog called Keano.) The rest of the song continues in that vein of good-natured mockery of the barstool football fan who refers to their team as ‘we’. “Often slighted” as a Man United pub-goer in 1996, when their team won the league and cup double, or a Liverpool one here in 2022 would draw a few scrapes from the world’s smallest violin. Anyway, this is relatively catchy and witty, and certainly better than any actual Saw Doctors single, though I suppose I would say that.