GABY made a rite of passage by becoming the fourth generation of our family to become a Red, after taking her place on the Stretford End to watch Manchester United.

The way the beautiful game has evolved over the 95 years since her great-grandad first passed through the turnstiles reflects the changes that have transformed the country.

The rampant commercialism that now grips top-level football has created a fundamentally different relationship between spectator and player. But what lies at the heart of the game is still firmly rooted in the past and that offers hope that money’s influence can be beaten even where its control appears most secure.

At the time that George Ridgway first walked down Warwick Road to Old Trafford during the interwar years, the paying punter was king. Now for the majority of top clubs, fans have been relegated to the subs’ bench, as their economic clout has dwindled in comparison to the cash gushing in from the corporate world.

Before we begin, let’s tackle the first issue head on. It’s easy to cry “foul” and spot the hypocrisy of my position. Since Alex Ferguson catapulted the Red Devils back to national dominance, United fans stood accused of being “glory-hunters.” Being a genuine fan who is also politically conscious, and — let’s say — to the left of Tony Blair, supporting the most corporately run club in Britain carries a contradiction.

In my defence, I call on Eduardo Galeano: “There are two things a man cannot choose: his mother and his football team.”

The die was cast for my family in 1920, when the first Division One season was hosted following the end of World War I. Born in Rusholme in 1907, George opted to pocket his bus money and walk to school so that he could afford his United tickets.

The stadium was designed to pack in as many as possible into its three uncovered terraces and tiny seating area. It sported no corporate boxes, no revolving hoardings marketing Chinese lager and none of the division’s grounds were named after airlines based in Dubai.

George was representative of the cloth-capped crowd that clocked through the turnstiles every Saturday at 3pm to follow their team’s trials and tribulations.

Having left school aged 13, he worked in insurance. On the wage he earned, economically he wasn’t a million miles away from with the men he was cheering on. Footballers were restricted to a top wage of £8 per week for much of the period, a fact that helped spur the growth of the players’ union that was to became the Professional Footballers Association.

George passed on his love of the game to his daughter Joyce — my mum. She first stood on the Stretford End aged eight, in 1951.

Gaby’s description of her first match-day experience to Joyce probably wasn’t too dissimilar from the emotions gran tasted half a century before.

“Grandma, I sang and clapped when everyone else did. I didn’t shout when Rooney scored but I smiled because he is my favourite player. I like the big man with lots of hair too.”

Rooney’s estimated weekly wage is £300,000, without add-ons. Football is one of the few areas where exceptional workers have exceptional earning power. I’m not blaming Rooney for this — especially if he keeps scoring — because we live in a neoliberal society in which obscene wealth is lauded. He is a product of it, not a cause. But it’s abundantly clear how far removed this is from 1920.

I accompanied my parents from the age of eight. Like most my age, I sat on the red bar at the front of the Stretford End. I experienced the tail end of a football before the corporate takeover, signalled by the arrival of Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV in 1992.

My vivid early memories are of returning home from the match and mum glueing our ticket tokens onto the family’s token sheets. Back then regular attendance gave you priority for away tickets, so that loyalty was rewarded.

Now away tickets are practically impossible to come by because the club’s ticketing structure reflects the new hierarchical stadiums. Precedence goes to those who buy Old Trafford’s executive suites and boxes, a depressing reflection of modern society.

I remember standing with 20,000 on the terrace and being part of a oneness that created a noise that induced tinnitus. These days, that level of participation is reserved for rare occasions and many of those I once stood with have been priced out of the game.

BBC Sport’s Price of Football study this year revealed the average ticket price has risen at almost twice the rate of the cost of living since 2011. Tickets have increased by 13 per cent.

Modern football isn’t all bad. One can argue the quality of the sport has reached new heights, the package is compelling and hooliganism has been all but relegated to a bygone era. But the sport’s stratification and the dominant role of money has redrawn the game in a way that George would have found incomprehensible.

For example, for this year’s FA?Cup semi-finals more than 17,000 tickets were allocated to Club Wembley, a corporate scheme which gives priority to its members.

Michael Sandel best describes the forces at play in his book What Money Can’t Buy, which illustrates how we have moved from being a society that has a market economy to being a market economy that has a society. Ultimate power resides on Wall Street.

He writes: “Market values have come to govern our lives as never before” and he uses sport as an example, lamenting the “skyboxification” of stadiums. No longer do people — irrespective of class and background — sit together, in a move that reflects the gated communities of the modern world.

For Sandel, markets have a moral effect on the goods that are traded in them. Football is a marketable product par excellence and Manchester United is a global brand, used to pedal all manner of goods to global markets.

United’s fortunes epitomise the way in which football has developed over the years, and so a look at the club’s history helps describe how the game became so marketable.

The club broke records during the interwar years, but for all the wrong reasons. In 1931 they lost Division One’s first 12 games of the season — a losing streak which still stands as the worst for the top division — and ultimately got relegated. United fell to their all-time nadir in the final game of the 1934 season.

They faced Millwall in a relegation decider to see who would drop to the bleak depths of Division Three, but won 2-0. They turned their fortunes around before promotion back into Division One in 1938.

One striking similarity with their current incarnation is debt. United — which had been a profitable plc throughout the 1990s — was bought by the Glazer family in 2005 and saddled with the debt they’d used to purchase it. Today, the arrears stand at £380.5 million.

During the 1930s the club flirted with bankruptcy until they were saved by James W Gibson’s £30,000 investment, which enabled the players to finally pick up their pay.

By 1938 the club sported Johnny Carey, Jack Rowley and Stan Pearson — men who became the bedrock of Sir Matt Busby’s first league-winning team, the team which began to make the club a household name and which therefore led to it becoming a recognisable brand.

Tragedy intervened to reinforce this process, as the Munich air disaster killed several of Busby’s star players in 1958. His ability to rebuild a team which lifted the European Cup by playing a vibrant, attacking football wrote a narrative which captured hearts across the world, and which heralded the arrival of the club as one of the continent’s top draws.

It’s no coincidence that the club was the first to realise the potential of installing private boxes in the ground, which took place in the 1960s.

To conclude the story, Sir Alex Ferguson’s unparalleled managerial exploits — 38 trophies during 25 years — occurred as football shed its 1980s clothing and was thrust into living rooms via Sky TV, which next season will be coughing up £11 million to televise each game.

As the Premiership injected a new kind of commercialisation into football, United were at the peak and therefore reaped the rewards.

Gaby, who got her ticket as a sixth-birthday present, loved the game. The thrill she got from seeing tens of thousands flock to the Theatre of Dreams and her delight at seeing Rooney score was priceless. And therein lies the germ of football’s attraction. Business thrives on the ability to turn the joy football can create into profit, and the modern game reflects the contradiction between the business fetish focused on enriching shareholders and what the game means to those who go.

But the profound irony of this season’s Barclays advertising slogan — using the “you are football” hashtag — reveals a striking truth. In spite of fans being dubbed consumers and treated as such, of clubs becoming brands, of television dictating kick-off schedules and of money creating chasms between clubs, football still rests upon genuine supporters continuing to fill stadiums, generate the atmosphere and provide the sport’s lifeblood.

Some of the reactions to this contradiction, such as fan-owned clubs like AFC?Wimbledon, FC?United of Manchester, AFC?Telford and Chester City, show that grassroots opposition to this corporate takeover is strengthening. Each club also sports fan-based organisations fighting to retain the club’s identity, such as the Manchester United Supporters Trust.

But even more striking for me is that the fanaticism, loyalty and solidarity exhibited by fans continues to shine, and remains undimmed by money’s hegemony. This illustrates that the human traits necessary for a fairer society can flourish in the face of the fiercest corporate takeover, and that this story shows alternatives are possible.

Germany leads the way in this regard. Bayern Munich is 75 per cent owned by its fans, ticket prices are kept low and this is typical of how the sport is structured.

Today’s Manchester United is a far cry from the team George supported until his death in 1980, but he would still recognise what it means for his granddaughter to be a fan and he would see in that something more precious than money.