THE TIDE IS TURNING

Watching the tv scenes from Old Trafford last Sunday, I got a real sense of the tide turning against a decade of corporate football. Outside the ground, the backlash against the 'football plc' was unleashed as campaigners against the attempted takeover of Manchester United by Malcolm Glazer - who has no history of interest in the sport - spoke up for fans everywhere, in angrily rejecting that their 'club' bend to the brutal logic of the market. Inside it was fitting that a match hyped as 'the game of the decade' should be turned by a dive from a player whose transfer has intensified the unpleasant stink around the modern game.

Football has always had a ruthless, commercial side. But, for Evertonians at least, Wayne Rooney's move was a watershed. Many of our supporters don't earn a great deal. They fill away ends week after week at great expense because they hold on to the belief that the legend 'Once a blue, always a blue' means exactly that.

It hangs together - just - when this loyalty is seen to be reciprocated even to a small degree by players, manager and directors. But it all falls apart spectacularly when supporters get the sense that they are being laughed at by players and their parasitic agents.

Rooney's move and the circumstances around it epitomise all that is wrong in a sport poisoned by an unseemly money culture. A curious sequence of events involving a 'surprise £20million bid' for Rooney by Newcastle - whose chairman is close to Rooney's agent, Paul Stretford - led to Manchester United signing the English game's brightest talent in years for less than expected and Stretford earning £1.5m before the August transfer window closed. However you look at those events, the damage to football cannot be denied.

On Merseyside, young fans were left confused and let down. What happened to loyalty then? From now on, they will be that much more cynical about football and its machinations. This transfer also took £1.5m out of football and tucked it in the pocket of one man. Can that be right when some of England's oldest football clubs are on their uppers?

You might think that, somewhere in all this, there are grounds for an inquiry by the supposed guardian of the sport's good name. Sadly, the Football Association have long since run up the white flag on financial regulation.

For how much longer will fans trek down the M6 to pay £49 at Stamford Bridge for a poor view of an almost certain defeat? This bloated game is beginning to smell and even the non-footballing public are getting a whiff. They read about the symptoms of excess and do not like it.

But, for all its ills, football can be fixed relatively easily. The big three will not like the solution - but that probably means that it is good for the rest of us. We need a return to more redistribution of resources, tighter regulation to prevent profiteering and fans taking more control of their clubs.

The first two points fall to the football authorities.

From professional football's origins in the late nineteenth century, the FA were always conscious that unbridled market forces would destroy the game. Over time, systems of revenue redistribution were developed, such as transfer fees, sharing of gates and, in more recent times, broadcasting fees. Coupled with this, there were rules to stop profiteering and the ransacking of clubs: directors could not be paid; grounds could not be sold for private profit. These systems served the sport and its supporters well for more than 100 years, creating a balanced competition where all fans could realistically nurture a dream of success.

Such systems urgently need to be reintroduced.

Our own Premier League make decisions on a two-thirds majority. It is clearly in the interests of 14 clubs in the league to vote for a more even split of TV money across the league. The big three will inevitably threaten to walk off to a European Super League. It is time to call their bluff. Their fans, like those of the rest, want competitive domestic football.

Regulation is the FA's job.

Is more regulation and redistribution likely to happen if football continues to behave as it does now? Probably not. That is why more supporter ownership is vital. It is the only one that fans can implement acting alone. Shareholders United struck a blow for all fans last week in helping to see off the Glazer bid. It is evidence that a supporters' trust, a not-for-profit mutual society, can wield real influence at Premier League level.

This success coincided with the fourth annual conference of Supporters Direct, a government-funded initiative to help the development of supporters' trusts. In a little more than four years, 120 have formed, 60 with a substantial shareholding in their clubs and 40 with boardroom representation. Supporters' trusts control three Football League clubs.

Football is in a depressing state, but there are signs of hope that, after a decade of corporate madness, supporters are dragging it back to where it began.

Andy Burnham was special adviser on sport at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport from 1999 to 2001. He is the Labour MP for Leigh and chairman of Supporters Direct