As Premier League clubs go, Manchester United are pretty much universally reviled.
Being a United fan it's something I've got used to over the last 15 years or so. I lost count a long, long time ago of the number of different reasons I've heard for this unnatural hatred, but the fact is they all stem from the same source: We've had too much success.
It's a curious thing, success. All teams want it, but as soon as you get it, everyone else thinks it's not fair and it should have been them. It starts out small, just a niggling feeling of injustice, but the more successful a club becomes, the more the general feeling of dislike from opposing fans grows.
It wasn't always like this for United. Before the 1990s, the odd FA Cup was all we really had to show for our efforts after the glory days of the '50s and '60s - and that was just fine by everyone else. There was no nasty feeling towards us - apart from the obvious rivalry with big North-west neighbours Manchester City and Liverpool. There was even a hint of respect from rival fans when we won our first Premier League title back in 1993.
The problems began when we didn't disappear and let someone else have a go at winning things. It's not just United it happened to. When Arsenal went through their ''Invincible'' season the universal praise at their wonderfully stylish attacking brand of silky football (not to mention the fact they had knocked the mighty Manchester United off their perch) started to give way to grumblings about the fact that the squad was too ''foreign'', and that their manager only saw what he wanted to see.
Then there's Chelsea, who went from being lauded for nobly challenging the big boys, to being hated almost as much as United when they looked like they might go on to dominate things thanks to Roman Abramovich's bottomless pockets.
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