Tickets for a sixpence, financial scandal and a chemical stink, how things used to be for Man United supporters...
THEY arrived in their tens of thousands that Saturday, wearing caps, ties, extravagant moustaches, some standing behind the freshly-painted white picket fences, others sprawled out across the high, turfed bank overlooking the pitch.
And though fans with accordions provided the music, admission was a sixpence and the match programme a penny, the jealousies and rivalries of football were as evident then as now.
It was not quite so personal between United’s and Liverpool’s players on February 19, 1910. But there was bad blood between the two cities when the teams met at 3.30pm that day, for what was Old Trafford’s inaugural fixture.
The Manchester Ship Canal, built in 1894, had bypassed Liverpool’s port trade, reducing revenues for its merchants and costing jobs. Liverpool’s backlash included pantomime and music hall jibes about the rival city.
Liverpool would probably also have subscribed to the view taking hold that United were the ‘moneybags’ team, flaunting their new-found wealth in an unappealing way. United’s Jim Ratcliffe equivalent figure back then was John Henry Davies, heir to the Manchester Breweries, a United chairman with drive and dash, who spent so much money on the club that the disapproving FA held an inquiry and found the club was ‘extravagantly run’.
There were no 10-point deductions back then, but the FA found Davies was receiving £740 rent for 14 acres of land which the club did not even own. United were stigmatised for being ‘a private monopoly’. They could not care less, because the club had thrived through Davies’s aggressive spending and willingness to open his chequebook.
The innocuous looking individual pictured at the bottom of the match programme for the Liverpool match was the ultimate manifestation of that.
He was Billy Meredith, football’s first superstar — a mercurial Welsh winger who would probably have never played in United’s red had not his previous club Manchester City, in another vaguely familiar plot line, been charged with illicitly breaking financial spending rules.
The FA found City were paying him and other stars nearly double the maximum £4-a-week that their rules allowed and hit them with three-year bans. So United coolly bought the best of them at auction. Meredith was back playing again by the time Old Trafford had been built, flying down the right wing to supply his friend Sandy Turnbull, another of the City refugees.
Those two acquisitions, both starters against Liverpool, had been instrumental to United winning their first championship title in 1908. So had Harry Moger, the flat-capped, cardigan-wearing goalkeeper so vividly pictured with the brown leather ball in his hand during the Liverpool game, against the backdrop of the imposing Kilvert’s Pure Lard building.
Moger arrived in 1903 from Southampton, as one of dynamic manager Ernest Mangnall’s early acquisitions. Centre half Charlie Roberts — No 5 on United’s team sheet against Liverpool, though the jerseys carried no numbers, was also a pivotal £400 buy from Grimsby Town.
In 1910, as now, United wanted to consign a tired old stadium to the past, though their difficulties were more toxic than their 2024 home’s leaky roof, cramped corridors and outdated press box. The pitch United played on before Old Trafford was built lay to the leeward side of 30 chimney stacks belonging to a vast chemical plant. It stank.
The new stadium, built for £60,000, brought the modernity and scale that Radcliffe’s dreams of a ‘Stadium for the North’ now conjure. United commissioned the greatest stadium architect, Archibald Leitch, who designed Anfield’s main stand in 1906. His Manchester brief? ‘Create the finest stadium in the North.’
The Liverpool match programme provides a clue that the name ‘Old Trafford’ had not been dreamt up by that February day. The thought at that time was that it would be the ‘Warwick Road Arena.’
IT was, in one journalist’s words, ‘a wonder to behold’, with a billiard room, gymnasium, massage room and plunge bath. It had a capacity of 80,000 and attendants to lead patrons up to five-shilling, theatre-style seats from the tea rooms.
The quality of the surface struck many players when the game kicked off. ‘It is like a tennis court,’ Meredith later observed in his newspaper column. And Turnbull’s performance befitted the occasion. He headed home on the half hour, delivering United the first goal on what would become such hallowed turf, minutes before team-mate Thomas Homer, sent a ball in just beyond the grasp of Liverpool keeper Sam Hardy, for a 2-0 half-time lead.
One of the new stadium’s stands had a strange effect, Meredith also reflected in his column. ‘It caused a strong wind to eddy and swirl round the ends on to the ground. The ball curled and twisted all over the place, and you never knew what it would do next.’ Excuses? Perhaps. The newspaper reports describe a ‘disastrous’ United capitulation after the break, with ‘the Anfielders’, as they were known, scoring four times to win 4-3.
Liverpool’s great goalscoring servant Arthur Goddard, signed from Stockport County for £260, pulled a goal back.
Then Charlie Roberts’s struggle to cope with Liverpool striker Jack Parkinson — a railway clerk, yet to turn professional at the time — saw the visitors score three goals in the last 20 minutes to win. Moger was at fault for at least one of them. Liverpool’s Goddard and Jimmy Stewart, a Scottish inside forward, both scored twice. Turnbull cut his mouth badly straining for an equaliser near the end.
The defeat proved there are no guarantees in football, even when wealth pours in and a new stadium is built.
It was a temporary blip for United, who did not lose for a year in the stadium which became Old Trafford. Villa took the title in May 1910, with Liverpool runners-up, but it was United’s the following season. Old Trafford did become a prototype Stadium for the North, hosting an FA Cup and internationals.
Yet the wonderful talents of Turnbull were snuffed out all too soon. He died at Arras in 1917.
Meredith, too old to serve during World War I, was haunted to the end of his days by the loss of his old friend. His own best days were behind him. After 1911, it would 41 years before the championship trophy returned to Old Trafford.
United basked in their glorious arena while they could. In his report on the Liverpool match, the Sporting Chronicle’s reporter declared this to be ‘the most handsome, most spacious arena — unrivalled anywhere in the world’.
Precisely the response Ratcliffe anticipates for a new United ground, a few years from now.