Finding my religion: on the road with the martyrs of Bilbao

Here beneath the Basque sun I am suffering a terrible indignity: I’m on a Flixbus. The people in front of me are talking football. The people across the aisle are talking football. The Spanish driver is talking into the intercom. What’s he talking? Fútbol. The people behind are actually talking politics — the politics of Ruben Amorim’s team selections. We roll around the Bay of Biscay: Bilbao-bound. I feel as though we’ve been travelling for months. It's hard not to compare our collective plight to that of the medieval pilgrims who first walked the Camino de Santiago in this region in the ninth century: hair-vested Catholics dragging their blistered feet hundreds of kilometres to the tomb of St James (the Apostle) at the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral. Like Catholics, United fans are coming to hope that suffering is a pathway to salvation. But how many of those penitent peasants would have stuck it out on a three hour Flixbus with the prospect of watching Rasmus Hojlund at the end? 

The man next to me is called James (not the Apostle). He’s wearing a hair-vest of sorts: a United top. We’re talking football. “Get to many games this season?” he asks. “Not as many as I’d like,” I respond, which is a lie, because I’ve attended exactly as many as I’d like: none. He tells me about his journey down (flight from Manchester to Paris, train from Paris to Bayonne, Flixbus) and I respond with mine (train from Manchester to Kent, ferry from Dover to Calais, train from Calais to Paris, train from Paris to Bayonne… Flixbus). “The things we do for this lot,” he laughs.

James is a truer believer than I: he’s the sort of football fan who would make this journey regardless of circumstance. There could be no financial pit deep enough, no family funeral pressing enough, to prevent him. James speaks with disdain about the modern player (a cosseted coward) but with even greater disdain for the modern fan, a mercenary figure who he suspects will desert United in their present nadir. “We’ll be here long after they’ve fucked off,” he says. 

I check into the hostel and do a quick sweep of the dorm. On my wrist in biro ink: “We’ll be here long after they’ve fucked off”. The line stood out. It seemed that in this, the lowest ebb in the modern story of Manchester United, two spaces above the relegation and finding new ways to debase themselves on an almost weekly basis, the pilgrims who had travelled to Bilbao were doing what all movements do as power slips away: conducting purity tests and denouncing comrades. 

But how likely is this exodus? United retains a global fan base of 75 million — more than any other English club, by far. Despite its present helplessness at the game of football, this is still Manchester’s most significant institution: its great global export — the club that dragged English football into global capitalism. Fans in Punjab and Peshawar will soon be setting their alarms for the small hours to watch Wednesday’s match, bolted upright by the digiclock and the electrifying uncertainty of whether Diogo Dalot will be match fit. 

But James isn’t alone. Take Arnold, who sits outside the Mercado de Riberia with a very small beer in his very big hand. I sallow in his fag smoke as he litanies the injustices of the human experience, some of which involve his ex-wife but most of which focus on the biases of the Sky Sports punditry team. So drunk on his own sense of martyrdom (and also, in mitigation, drink) he actually uses the word “discrimination” at one point. Nonetheless, he’s been following United since his teens and is now in his late 60s. Quite the stint. “When I started watching, they were shite,” he explains. “Then they were good. Now they’re shite again.” But old boys like him have been here before. “Some of these younger lads haven’t — they can’t hack it.” Is it a very different experience following United now? “Well of course,” Arnold answers, “but you have to do it. There’s no choice. That’s what it’s all about: rain or shine.” You have to.

My first United game was at home, against Middlesborough. It was 2009 and I was nine years old. We won 1-0 (Dimitar Berbatov in the second half) and on the way back I marked the players with my Dad. This was the ritual, marks out of 10, half marks allowed but also qualifications: a generous seven or a lenient seven differed greatly from a 6.5. (A slight digression: we also did this after my games, which I was less thrilled about. One time, Craig, a teammate in the under eights, was sitting in the car getting a lift home. That’s handy I thought, with Craig sitting there we won’t do the marks. Wrong! Craig was marked 3/10 — his lacklustre defensive positioning and lack of gusto in his aerial duals singled out for particular criticism). We did this every week for years, but a couple of seasons ago I did the thing that, in Arnoldland, isn't a choice. I haven’t been to a home game for a season and a half.

United are at a weird crossroads. This could be an exciting time. The plans for a new £2 billion stadium and the promise of huge regeneration in the Trafford area are an overdue venture into the 21st century, finally building on the wasteland of abandoned lots that surround the club. And yet the mood in Bilbao is of the end times — a depraved last hurrah. Half the people I speak to have written the game off before it begins. I think about that Middlesborough game and what a 1-0 win felt like in 2009: a bit of a disappointment to be honest, or so par for the course it was nothing to be excited about. I was more invested in the gravy and chips. Once upon a time, winning was expected at United. Now vaguely lower league self-deprecation creeps in: Oh well, we’re shite. Ho hum let’s have an Estrella. 

Back at the hostel, I speak to an older man called Nick, who tells me he’s retiring to bed early because he’s “too old for all the drinking”. Despite this handicap, he seems to have managed a fair amount of it, a fact evidenced when he offers me his daughter’s hand in marriage after five minutes of conversation. Then through the dorm door comes a Northern Irishman, Colmy, with a taxi waiting outside for any “brave enough” to return to the frontlines. Nick was too old for all that, he said again (and presumably too busy locating his daughter’s ideal suitor in one of the other dorm beds) so I hop into the cab with Colmy and we head for the square.

It soon transpires that Colmy is the only Northern Irishman in Bilbao who isn’t a United fan — a fact borne out as he whisks me towards the most aggressively Spurs pub in town. An extremely short man called Gaz approaches me outside: “You Spurs through and through then son?” he asks. My answer shifts the mood irredeemably. Short Gaz stares me through. “What do you think’ll happen to you in there if I tell them you’re United?” he asks. “You’d be strung up.”

Strung up? Standing beside Short Gaz is a taller man called Ste (Tall Ste) whose jaw had absconded the control of his Central Nervous System and roamed freely across his face as he spoke. Tall Ste has short Gaz’s back. “Do you know who he is?” he remarked, gesturing (down) at Gaz. I didn’t (besides the obvious: he was Gaz) and this gap in my knowledge only further enraged Tall Ste. “We should have known you was United from those queer shorts,” he snarled, fixing his gaze on my dinky orange swimmers.

Fearing the worst after a volley of similarly menacing and homophobic remarks (it transpires the Spurs hardcore are keen to subject me to some gruesome medley of battery and bondage), I muscle my way to the back of the bar. But within a few minutes who should re-emerge but Tall Ste, who — already a gormless apparatchik in his own right — had two minions in tow. Since our last encounter Ste’s jaw had confidently ventured forth and was now looking vaguely Hapsburgian. “You need to go mate,” he said. I explained that I was charging my phone. “If you don’t fuck off now mate I’m gonna let them know you’re United, and then what’s gonna happen?” he said back. So off I went! 

The following day, fuelled by a solid 45 minutes of hostel sleep and feeling twice the price (it might have been more but for Nick, who snored so powerfully he almost started levitating) I make my way to the fan park, where Liam Something of Courteeners fame is tickling his acoustic at an uninterested crowd. At a newsstand I lock eyes with one of the top dogs of Bilbao’s police force, hemmed in between Pope and President, warning the English to be on their very best behaviour. Too late! News of an “ugly street brawl” involving United and Spurs fans the previous night is already circulating. The Mail is reporting “scenes of anarchy” and accusations that the two sets of fans have “destroyed Bilbao”. The Telegraph notes that the Spanish are “fuming”.

I spend the day bouncing between bars speaking to fans, each one more excited to detail their journey down than the last. There was a couple who went via Rome. Loads who flew into Madrid. One connecting flight in Istanbul. A 36 hour ferry from Portsmouth. A man who came in via Morocco. Some impressive feats of hitchhiking. Many had no accommodation for that night — surcharging had driven hotel prices in Bilbao to a £500 average. Some had not slept the night before either — slumping instead on station floors, in parks, or on random knolls and verges. The more ludicrous the journey the better, it seemed: watching United was no longer a luxury and the whole experience had to reflect that. United was now a cause you suffered for.

As if surrendering to the new age of United martyrdom, calamities start compounding around me. My phone packs in, taking with it the key code for the hostel and all my train tickets, following which my finger becomes infected, creating the vague prospect of post-match sepsis. Oh well, I think, all colour for the piece (in this case an unpleasant puss-yellow) but then comes the real clincher…. Rasmus Hojlund rumoured to be starting.

Kick-off nearing, I settle into a bar not far from Bilbao’s San Mamés stadium, and seat myself next to a trio and a banner: ‘Alderley Edge // Man United’. The trio consists of Grandad Bryan, Dad Archie and the young son Oskar — his first European trip with United. Bryan travel-logs the great European cities he’s visited with his son. “That’s how it ought to be,” Archie says. “We’ve seen half of Europe together — some of the best times of my life.” Bryan looked genuinely touched. 

“I feel sorry for the young lads having to watch this bunch,” Bryan continues, and we all take a moment to solemnly contemplate the bunch in question. Little Oskar sits with his Cola, blissfully unaware of the miseries that lie in his future. But Bryan qualifies his statement — “It's about more than football anyway, of course,” he says. Clearly this was the case for most of the United fans making this journey. No one sane would book a layover in Tangier purely because they were that confident in this United side bringing it home. But as the great tide of success recedes, the local takes on an even greater significance: the pre-match rituals; the community; the punch ups; the next generation handed the baton… the Oskars.

Oh yeah, the match. They lost obviously. I spent the night huddled on the sticky floor of the bus terminal waiting for my 7am coach out of town — surrounded by a sea of other bodies, protectively prostrate over their rucksacks. I arrived back in Bayonne in the late morning and — unable to call my Dad since my phone ceased to function — instead prepared the marks in my head, as ritual dictated. There were one or two 6/10s. A lot of 3/10s. Generous 3/10s.