IT’S rare for events on the pitch to mean less than what takes place off of it. But that was very much the feeling as an emotional home crowd ushered in a new era for supporter ownership in Manchester on Friday.

“This is our club, belongs to you and me. We’re United, United FC,” echoed movingly at regular intervals around the virgin Broadhurst Park ground to the tune of Ewan MacColl’s Salford tribute Dirty Old Town.

Because that is what FC United of Manchester is all about, reclaiming football for the fans.

It’s 10 years since Manchester United supporters waged a campaign to save the team they love from the final clutches of big business owner Malcolm Glazer.

But as the Glazer family’s hostile takeover pulled Old Trafford into debt and further away from the working-class fans, whose loyalty its decades of success was built upon, enough was enough.

Many fans would baulk at the prospect of walking away from the club that they and generations of their family had invested money, time and undying passion into.

But for the Red Devils who took to the Apollo Theatre on May 30 2005, watching as the soul was being sucked from the game, that historically brought together working-class communities up and down the country, was worse.

Building a new club run by and in the interests of the lifeblood of football — the fans — became the project.

The club they built from scratch sees fans who pay £12 a year to take ownership deciding every minute detail from shirt design, the inclusion of safe-standing facilities at the new ground, against shirt sponsorship, offering pay-what-you-can season tickets to the ground’s name itself.

In a decade, having won four promotions and on the anniversary of when Manchester United beat SL Benfica in 1968 to lift the European Cup, FC United christened their £6.3 million fan-built ground against a SL Benfica B side.

An impressive 4,232 people filled the Moston ground manned by a crew of dedicated volunteers to welcome the sides for the historic event that felt all the more poignant in the wake of the Fifa corruption scandal.

Diogo Goncalves may have not read the script — as the announcer cheerfully pointed out — as he swept home a late winner for the Portuguese champions but nothing could have dampened the mood of the cool Friday evening.

Club pioneer and general manager Andy Walsh, who received a standing ovation before kick-off, told the Star after the game: “It was a fantastic evening and a great honour for us that Benfica came — one of the longest established supporter-owned clubs in the world.

“It’s obviously a historic date in the Manchester United calendar and to have the ground packed with 4,000 passionate people with smiles on their lips and joy in their eyes was a truly wonderful occasion, brilliant.”

Paying tribute to the hard work of the fans, Walsh explained that “the supporters have physically built this ground. You look around here, we’re stood next to these hoardings, built by our supporters, the TV gantry, built by our supporters. Their money has gone into this but also their sweat, toil and skill has gone into this as well and that’s a very beautiful thing.”

Commenting on the week’s explosive international events — which earlier drew a chorus of boos from the excitable fans in the Saint Mary’s Road End terraces constructed using steelwork from a former Northwich Victoria stand — Walsh said: “It says a lot that today Fifa is enwrapped in scandal and here our fans are enwrapped in joy.

“It shows what ordinary fans can achieve if they’re given the opportunity. We were told that we wouldn’t last six months and here we are 10 years on with a £6-7m facility, football stadium, community pitches, artificial pitch, classrooms, medical rooms, function room — the future is supporter-ownership.”

Speaking passionately about what the fan-ownership model they have championed means, the general manager added: “For us here, this is about ordinary people doing it for themselves. You empower ordinary people and they will achieve extra ordinary things.

“Here it’s about including people in the decision-making process, it’s about giving people the opportunity to express themselves, about giving them the opportunity to contribute to something they care about and you see the result here and it’s hard work but when you see so many people who feel a real part of something like this it’s a movement.”

And this is why, regardless of its Manchester United ties and your own allegiance, FC is a club that every fan should be rooting for and every fan can support, because it stands against the commercialisation of the people’s game, because it offers an alternative, because it champions us.