A Perfect Script? Manchester United’sClass of ’92

Abstract

The Class of '92 is a documentary film which features six Manchester United F.C. players who recount their time during a pivotal period for the club, English football and English society. The documentary claims to offer a commentary of Britain in the 1990s, but appears, without acknowledging the fact, to be a promotional vehicle to establish the six men as a brand labelled the Class of '92. Creating this brand necessarily involved presenting a selective account of their time and place with the film being little more than an advertisement, masquerading as an observational documentary. The film draws freely upon the symbolic capital held by the club and the city of Manchester and uses the Busby Babes/Munich chapter and the more recent 'Madchester scene' to forge a Class of '92 brand by editing out those elements that did not accord with this project. The paper argues that a more complete representation of '90s Britain, whilst disrupting the intended narrative, would acknowledge the significant structural and commercial changes experienced by the club, the sport and the city in the last decade of the twentieth century. We suggest that the Class of '92 invites the viewer to consider how the documentary film genre can contribute to brand development and promotion. IntroductionIn this paper we focus on The Class of '92, a British documentary released in 2013, which features six Manchester United F.C. players during the mid-1990s. We discuss specific themes within, and missing from, the film and locate it in a broader sociocultural context and identify those factors which are inextricably linked to the club, English football and the city of Manchester. Notwithstanding the antipathy of much of the United States populace and media to soccer (Szymanski and Zimbalist, 2006), Manchester United F.C. is one of sport's most recognisable clubs, a global and highly valued brand and subject to extensive academic attention by those researching the consequences of English football's economic neoliberalisation (Andrews, 2004;Millward and Poulton, 2014;Porter, 2015;Rofe, 2014;Szymanski, 1998).The Class of '92 (hereafter CO92) documentary is built around key moments, a tactic common to the sport documentary genre. It begins in 1992 and closes in 1999 when Manchester United F.C. (hereafter MUFC) won 'the treble' comprising the FA Cup, the Premier League title and UEFA's European Champions League. The documentary purports to offer a sociocultural commentary on Britain in the 1990s orientated around six individuals: David Beckham, Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs, Gary Neville, Phil Neville and Paul Scholes. This paper examines the representation of these six players and film's links with the iconic 'Busby Babes'. We contend that the film exploits the Busby Babes/Munich tragedy and the more recent 'Madchester scene' in an attempt to forge a Class of '92 brand by editing out those elements in the history of the club and city that did not accord with CO92 project. We consider the aesthetic style found in specific segments, identify what was ...