This article explores the establishment and development of fan-owned association football club, F.C. United of Manchester. It does this by drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews, observations and an analysis of multiple texts, such as fanzines, web-based and media reports materials and discusses this using Herbert Blumer's theory of collective behavior. As such, the article addresses two research questions: first, what the empirical case example of F.C. United of Manchester offers to the critical understanding of Blumer's theory and second, what the theory can give to the understanding of twenty-first century protests in popular culture. Therefore this article contributes to contemporary debates on association football fandom, social movements and the theories of Herbert Blumer.

This chapter analyses urban economic transformation through fieldwork among a group of football fans, who in 2005 formed a breakaway club ‘FC United of Manchester’ in response to a transnational debt-leveraged buy-out of Manchester United Football Club. Notions of locality and community had become increasingly politicised amongst these fans in recent decades. With Manchester United’s ability to trade in many different markets and with a fan-base across the country and internationally, it was perceived that Manchester United no longer necessarily needed a relationship with its local fan-base. In response, these fans increasingly articulated a moral claim about Manchester United’s responsibility to its local ‘community’ which the analysis relates to anthropological theories of gifts and commodities. This analysis contextualises the subsequent formation of FC United and its enduring reciprocal obligations to its ‘community’.

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