'The Stretford End will suck the ball in for you’: The discursive (re)construction of the myth of Manchester United

Manchester United is a mythic football club. It is mythic in the sense that what is taken to be ‘reality’ and ‘norm’ are, in fact, shaped by a group of myths. These myths are a combination of facts and stories told by different social institutions. The Munich disaster, the rise from a local club to an international super-club, and the 38 trophies it claimed during the Ferguson years are all discursively constructed as myths of Manchester United. Just as myths can provide a basis for a nation and strengthen the sense of identity of its people (Seng, Yjin & Chia, 2017), they can also do the same in any organisation. This is also one major reason why Manchester United has become one of the most successful clubs.Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement marked the end of a highly successful era of Manchester United. In the first half of the current season of 2018/19, Manchester United only won seven games out of 17. Under the backdrop of neoliberal marketisation of football, results of an international football club like Manchester United could have significant social economic impacts. Hence, the myths of the club are important in sustaining the identities of the players and supporters, as well as the ideologies of the football club, by connecting the past to the present, and also project the future under such crisis signified by such poor performance.This study applies Discourse Mythological Analysis (DMA), a model developed by Kelsey (2014) by combining Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Wodak’s discourse-historical approach, to analysis the (re)construction of the myth of Manchester United after the sacking of Jose Mourinho on 19 December 2018. The data used in this paper consist of interviews conducted with the current manager, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, and players, including pre- and post-match reactions and conferences, and articles from newspapers.As Van Dijk (1997) states, discourse is socially constructed, this paper aims to find out the answers to the following research questions:1.How the myth of Manchester United is co-constructed by representatives of the club and the media; and 2.How the socio-economic context shapes the practice of both the organisational discourse, in this case, Manchester United, as well as the media discourse. This study aims to offer insights to the field of discourse analysis by studying the language used by one of the high-performance sport teams in (re)constructing their myths in order to shape identities and ideologies. It also aims to show that the discursive construction of myths is reminiscent of archetypal stories.