Alan Brazil's comments about Man United Women were grim - but they may reflect club's own approach

Wouldn’t it be nice to go just one whole day on the internet without being exposed to the sight of a bloated old man with a strangely-hued complexion bellowing out absurdities? Just one day? It’s wishful thinking at this point – after all, if it isn’t Donald Trump’s latest insane screed we’re being exposed to, it’s Alan Brazil. There are times when it’s hard to figure out which is worse.

Paying attention to what Brazil has to say is not an especially profitable course of action, but he has that frustrating habit of finding ways to force you to hear his opinions anyway, like that odious uncle at Christmas dinner who won’t let anyone else get a word in edgewise. This time, the former Scotland defender and TalkSport pundit has decided to have his say on women’s football, with suitably depressing results.

Whatever Alan Brazil says, people care about women’s football...

The topic of discussion was Manchester United and their ‘Mission 21’ plan, a vision for the future which aims to draw up how the club will lift its 21st Premier League trophy, and its sister ‘Mission 1’ plan for the women’s section of the team to top the Women’s Super League for the first time – and Brazil made it abundantly clear that he only thought one half of the plan worthy of discussion.

“When you talk about Man United, it’s only the men’s [team], the Premier League, we’re talking about here, it’s not the women’s… People around the world are not bothered. I’m telling you they’re not. In the bigger picture they’re not… Manchester United fans want to see Manchester United in the Premier League, challenging… [The women’s team] is not that important.”

In truth, it’s hard to pull quotes which convey the full grottiness of his comments from his rambling, semi-coherent discourse, which was largely devoid of salient points or any attempt at a meaningful argument beyond repeating the word “not” over and over while refusing to let a woman talk, but hopefully the gist is there. It came across as nasty and demeaning.

Whether a majority of people watch or are invested in the women’s game isn’t really the point, of course. With people like Brazil, you mostly just wonder what drives their apparently innate desire to verbally defecate over the source of other peoples’ enjoyment. Millions of people give a damn about women’s football, but heaven forbid they be allowed to do so in peace without an old man telling them they’re wrong and that they don’t actually matter.

Brazil is welcome to have no interest in women’s football, of course. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being disinterested or simply preferring the men’s game. But there is something very wrong when, instead of letting other people have their fun or even finish a sentence in a workplace environment, you feel the need to shout “NOT!” over them like an especially intransigent six-year-old who refuses to listen to a counter-point from their classmate.

On the receiving end of his latest eye-roll inducing grumblings was presenter Shebahn Aherne, who not only dealt with her colleague’s utter lack of professionalism or decency with grace but managed to put the case against Brazil as clearly as was remotely possible under the circumstances, which included her being repeatedly shut down before she got more than a few words into a sentence. She at least found a tiny pocket of opportunity to call him a “proper dinosaur”, which was about the most generous verdict as he deserved. There were some four-letter descriptions available that would have been more apt.

It will be a wearyingly familiar scene for women everywhere, most of whom will have experienced some equivalent of a male colleague talking over them every time they try to make their voice heard, but Brazil’s petulant take on the form was particularly rancid. It was like the bellowing voice of a schoolyard bully whose word must be law. And on this occasion, that word was the belittlement of women’s football.

I really can’t recommend that anyone actually watch the video and certainly wouldn’t suggest that anybody look at the comments on social media. As rage bait goes, it was highly successful, and that is perhaps the reason that Brazil remains employed by TalkSport despite this deeply unpleasant behaviour. He surely isn’t on the air for his footballing insight, seeing as he comes across as not having taken any new information on the subject on board since about 1985.

...but Manchester United themselves may not be among them.

The really sad fact, though, is that Brazil didn’t just speak for the broader constituency of embittered old men with a subscription to The Daily Express – his views also seem worrying close to the strategy of Manchester United themselves. Yes, Aherne was right that their stated mission plan includes a goal for the women’s team, and Brazil was entirely wrong both in gainsaying her and in claiming that nobody cares about them, but he may not be far off the mark in asserting that the club themselves appear less than bothered about their own women’s team.

It’s worth remembering that when the Glazers re-founded the women’s team in 2018, they were one of just two Premier League teams left who didn’t have one, the other being Southampton. It never felt as though the owners really wanted to bankroll a women’s team, but rather only did so because of the PR pressure placed on them – but at least the team was belatedly built, funded and ultimately quite successful.

The reconstituted women’s team won its first major trophy last season, thumping Tottenham in the FA Cup final 4-0. Worryingly, however, Jim Ratcliffe – the Ineos owner and the man now in charge of sporting affairs at Manchester United – couldn’t be bothered to show up. It turned out that a precedent had been set.

“Our focus has been on the men's team,” Ratcliffe later openly admitted, describing them as “the main issue”. The ‘Mission 1’ goal of winning the WSL by 2028 was originally outlined by chief executive Omar Berrada last year, but a December report from The Athletic claims that no strategy existed at the time to achieve it, and that an Ineos spokesperson had admitted that the company’s impact on the women’s team, a year after they took charge, had been “limited”.

This season, the women’s team have been forced to use portable cabins to get changed at Carrington because the men’s dressing rooms were being renovated at a cost of £50m – the men got given the women’s facilities, the women the bare minimum. There are, to the best of our knowledge, no plans for their own facilities to be upgraded down the line.

Meanwhile, key players like Katie Zelem and England goalkeeper Mary Earps have left the club on free transfers, with lifelong United fan Zelem outspoken after her departure.

“You like to think when you’re in a professional women’s team, in the first team, that you are a priority. But unfortunately, at Manchester United over the six years I was there it didn’t always feel like that,” Zelem told Manchester World, adding. “Since INEOS has come in, the reducing budgets… it is usually the women’s team that feel the brunt of that, and I think it’s something that needs to be sorted”

In other words, Manchester United’s ownership seem to view women’s football through much the same lens as Brazil – as beneath notice, an afterthought, and certainly subservient to the men’s team. And as long as people think like that, women’s sports will continue to face the uphill battle that it’s already endured quite enough of. Getting rid of such antiquated and narrow-minded views isn’t easy or perhaps even possible, of course… but we could at least not have those who espouse them blaring away on the radio. Public discourse would be far better, and far kinder, without it.