Synthesizing support: analyzing Manchester United’s aestheticization of solidarity from an MCDS perspective

When Manchester United Football Club (MUFC) publicly announced the signing of Alexis Sanchez in 2018, it was done through a short video that purported to demonstrate the rich traditions and history of the club, its deep connection with its fanbase, and the strength of its support. However, locating this video within the broader social order where elite football clubs like MUFC essentially operate as for-profit corporations shows how it functions as an instantiation of the market-oriented discourse and rhetoric that has penetrated sport in general (and here, football in particular). Taking up a Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies perspective, and via an analysis of the semiotics of sound, intertextuality, and the visual, this article shows how MUFC positions itself sympathetically and in so doing conceals its pursuit of profit. It shows how values of solidarity, organicity, and camaraderie are communicated and associated with MUFC and how the viewer is structured into identifying with MUFC instead of supporters as a collective group. Finally, it discusses how these tropes are aestheticized whilst outwardly claiming to deny that very pursuit, thereby masking the reconstrual of club-supporter relations as fundamentally exploitative brand–consumer relations.