By Mariam Jooma Çarikci
Twenty years ago, no one would have predicted the spectacular demise of Manchester United. A club that, under the legendary Sir Alex, was no less royal than the Queen herself is now a shadow of its former self. As an adopted Geordie, Newcastle United are my team of choice—if for nothing else than the very fact that they are indeed the underdogs. So, when the Toon’s team annihilated the Red Devils in a 4-1 defeat in early April this year, it was clear that something was deeply awry.
Manchester United was not just a football club; it was an aspiration of all things British. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was a global cultural brand—a red empire that swept through Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. It represented excellence, aspiration, and power—exactly how the West branded itself through its political institutions, media, and economic frameworks. Fans in Kuala Lumpur and Klerksdorp wore Beckham jerseys the same way their parents had consumed BBC and believed in the World Bank’s promises.
Today, that world is no more.
As the former champions face loss after consistent loss against lesser-known teams in South Asia in a bid to raise funds for the debt-laden club, I can’t help but see their unbelievable decline as a metaphor for the slow but steady fall of Israel and its Western allies.
GAZA – Bending the Rules of Morality and Statecraft
As Gaza’s children are bombed to pieces while seeking food and journalists are burned alive in tents simply for reporting on the sheer horror of their lives, the centres of power in Brussels, London, and Washington maintain their duplicitous support for the fascist state of Israel. Like Man United, which seeks to exploit their Asian fans while literally giving them the middle finger, the Israeli regime continues its sadistic war on innocents, trespassing all international norms of humanitarian law—even as it seeks to portray itself as the victim of terrorism.
The dual identity of the Zionist occupying state as both Western and Middle Eastern depending on the context allows it to play both sides of victimhood: as the only Western “white” state amongst a sea of hostile Arabs, or as a minority being persecuted by other supposedly non-Semitic peoples. Israel is the only non-European team that plays in the UEFA league, while its neighbours don’t qualify to be considered in the same tournament, having to play in the Asian league instead.
This year marks twenty years since the American Glazer family took over MU, setting it on a path of debt and financial strangulation. As Xavier Greenwood reports on the team’s long slide into irrelevance, at the time of the sale, MU had zero debt. After two decades under the Glazers, not only is it saddled with almost £1 billion worth of debt compared to the £45 million invested in it, but it also led to the creation of an offshoot team by fans tired of the exploitation of the club.
The staunchly Zionist family opposed the sale of the team to Qatari Sheikh Jassim Al Thani, Chairman of the Qatar Islamic Bank, who had promised to pay its debts, improve infrastructure, recruit new talent, and restore its former glory. Like the Glazers, who have been unresponsive to the demands of long-time fans, Netanyahu finds himself sidelined from direct talks between Hamas and the US, as Gulf investments pledged to Trump pass the trillion mark.
Two decades of fan protests have not moved MU management to make choices that benefit the supporters who drive the success of any team. Instead, the club has ossified into hard positions on what and who gets to be represented at the matches—banning fans from entering stadiums with any pro-Palestinian symbols and even revoking long-standing season tickets from those who do. In contrast, teams like Celtic United and the latest UEFA title holders, Paris Saint-Germain, have a long history of fan support for Palestine, openly displayed during their games. At the devastating win over Inter Milan on Sunday, PSG fans unfurled a massive tifo banner urging an end to the genocide in Gaza—made all the more defiant as the match was played in the heart of Munich, in a country whose foreign policy is unwavering in its support of the Zionist project.
How did we go from blind allegiance to Israel and Western exceptionalism to a global revolt against their moral bankruptcy?
The answer lies in the sea change within two critical areas—global civil society and the international political economy. Today, young people in the West are rejecting the disgusting defence of the indefensible. Unwilling to accept the murder of babies, pregnant women, the disabled, and the elderly on the pretext of ensuring Israel’s security, American and European citizens are staging protests, embarking on hunger strikes, and boycotting products that fuel the Zionist regime. They know that post-WWII guilt is not absolved through genociding Palestinians, and this basic moral clarity is a line in the sand.
Equally important is the rapidly growing understanding that the relentless war economy that drove US hegemony for the past century is not only unsustainable but bears no benefits for ordinary Americans. With spiralling homelessness, lack of quality healthcare for those unable to afford private care, and an increasingly polarised political system, the war on Gaza is not a foreign war but a battle against the very people in whose names imperial terror is meted out.
Workers are refusing to handle Israeli goods, consumers are boycotting products grown on stolen land, and the authorities in previously hallowed institutions like Harvard and Columbia are being challenged by students less concerned about their careers than holding power to account.
The stadiums of Western hubris are collapsing, and in their place are new theatres of power—once considered client regimes by the US and Europe. The United Arab Emirates’ record on human rights is appalling, its anti-democratic domestic power structures no model of representative statehood, and yet it is not only exerting influence over the US and Europe in their foreign policy decisions but outright shaping the field.
It is this tension between a new economic behemoth in the Middle East—one that, through its sovereign wealth funds, owns and operates critical Western infrastructure and government debt—and the rise of unapologetic citizens of the global South and within the West who are not just challenging the system but calling for its destruction.
As Israel proves to be an economic and political liability for its Western allies, moves to future-proof the careers of those who defended Netanyahu are underway—rhetoric that is too little, too late.
Yet beneath the apparent betrayal lies a deeper strategic paradox. The UAE’s alliance with the US is not necessarily rooted in ideological kinship but in what Emma Soubrier calls ‘Riyal politik.’ This Gulf elite, dripping in oil wealth and now compounded by their ownership of key infrastructure in Western capitals, are not seeking revolution—but absorption. Through banks, ports, football clubs, tech ventures, and defence procurement, they are buying into the very structures that once colonised them.
It may be another form of what Malcolm X observed of US politics following JFK’s assassination, when he said: “the chickens are coming home to roost.” In doing so, the Gulf states may yet fracture the U.S.-Israeli axis not by confronting it, but by slowly hollowing it out from within—owning its assets, reshaping its markets, and diluting its loyalties.
But this economic stealth stands in sharp contrast to the raw and discontented energy of the global justice movement, who fill the stadiums and know exactly who the villains are—unafraid of booing them off the pitch.
Mariam Jooma Carikci is a Senior Researcher at the Media Review Network (MRN) in Johannesburg, focused on the politics of Africa, Zionism in Africa, and Türkiye’s evolving role in the Middle East and Africa.
