That's the bitter reality confronting millions of lifelong supporters of Manchester United, the world's most famous sports franchise, this week in the wake of the takeover of the club by American financier and Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer.

At a cost of roughly $1.5 billion, Glazer has acquired over three-quarters United's shares, enough to take the club private and bring in his own front office team. Fans fear that legendary manager Alex Ferguson may leave the club at season's end in response to this stunning set of developments. (Ferguson, who has deep roots in the Scottish labor movement, had been unambiguous in his opposition to Glazer's bid, though he now claims to be keeping an open mind about the new regime.)

Disgruntled United supporters have already taken direct action, staging protests outside the club's stadium and burning replica jerseys and ticket renewal forms; more protests are expected this weekend at the FA Cup Final between United and bitter rivals Arsenal. For months these fans have expressed overwhelming opposition to any Glazer takeover, yet in the end neither that opposition nor the reported 18% of the club's shares held by supporters proved sufficient to fend off a determined takeover.

United fans' anger about the deal is rooted in both pragmatics and principle. Many supporters of the "Red Devils" have expressed alarm at the estimated $500 million of debt assumed by Glazer to finance this deal, debt that will be transferred to the club. That debt level might seriously constrain the club's ability to keep pace with free-spending Chelsea (the newly crowned English champions) and its Russian billionaire owner, Roman Abramovich. There is no salary cap in European soccer, and competitiveness on the field is directly related to financial muscle off of it; any constraints on United's spending power is sure to be reflected in the league standings in years to come. At a minimum, United fans can expect sharp rises in ticket prices to help offset the new debt.

Anger at Glazer's takeover runs to deeper concerns as well. English soccer culture has long been premised on the idea that at bottom the clubs belong to the local communities which they inhabit and the loyal fans who support the clubs year in and year out. Like players and coaches, owners come and go, but the fans are the unchanging lifeblood. The American notion of the professional sports franchise, movable from town to town at will and unambiguously the property of the private owner, is viewed with revulsion by the vast majority of English soccer fans. United supporters thus find it particularly galling that an American investor with or little or no understanding of soccer, who has never seen a game at venerable Old Trafford stadium, suddenly has control of what is seen as "their" club.

The consternation lifelong United fans feel at seeing a cherished institution being torn from their grasp is wholly understandable, and it will be fascinating to track to what degree the initial militant hostility to the Glazer regime translates into sustained resistance. Yet other English soccer fans, fans of the other clubs United has so regularly humbled in the past 15 years in winning title after title, will wonder if United fans are not guilty of wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

After all, the club's extraordinary success since the early 1990s rests on two quintessentially capitalist features, the very same features which have now made it possible (and desirable) for an outside figure such as Glazer to step in. First, United formed a publicly traded holding company that went public in 1991, immediately raising some £10 million to fund a stadium renovation. The PLC has provided a convenient way for the club to raise capital in subsequent years, inspiring a number of other fund a stadium renovation. The PLC has provided a convenient way for the club to raise capital in subsequent years, inspiring a number of other clubs to go public themselves.

Second, United has boosted its revenues by aggressive marketing of merchandise on a global level, ranging from the standard replica kits to subscriptions to the club's own satellite TV station. No club has been more successful in positioning itself as a globally known brand than Manchester United, and it is the strength of that brand name which has helped inspire Glazer's interest in the club.

Both those financial innovations helped give United a financial leg up on their rivals, an advantage which combined with Ferguson's shrewd management and a fortuitously timed crop of young talent (including David Beckham) helped the club win eight league titles and one European Cup between 1993 and 2003.

But those same financial innovations have left the door open for a hostile takeover like Glazer's. United fans are learning the hard way that capitalism rarely permits commodification to go halfway. Once the club made the fateful decision to organize itself as a for-profit company rather than a traditional soccer club, it was only a matter of time before market forces melted the once-solid United tradition into air.

The sad part is, it never had to be this way. Numerous other major soccer clubs in Europe, including German champions Bayern Munich and Spanish champions Barcelona, are nonprofit organizations owned by supporters. (The NFL's Green Bay Packers employ a similar ownership structure.) At Barcelona, over 100,000 fans have voting rights in the club, and elections of top club officials are held periodically. In England itself, a handful of lower division clubs are owned predominantly by supporter's trusts.

These alternative ownership structures prevent a club from being turned into a mere profit-maximizing instrument of an outside investor, and lend substance to fans' views that they are not mere consumers of a product on the field, and that they should have a voice in the clubs they devote so much of their lives to. As Barcelona President Joan Laporta puts it, "Football is not a business; it is our sport, our emotions, an expression of our feelings on life."

In the long term, as many British soccer journalists have warned, moving clubs to alternative ownership arrangements is an indispensable imperative--not only to save the Manchester Uniteds from hostile takeovers, but to preserve the integrity of the sport itself. Already analysts have predicted that Glazer's profit-maximizing United will seek to ally with other super-rich clubs to form a breakaway elite league that would allow the biggest clubs to keep a larger share of television revenues, leaving smaller and moderate-sized teams in the cold. Alternatively, the very threat of a breakaway might force the existing leagues to make financial concessions to the bigger clubs, widening the chasm between the elite and the rank-and-file.

It's not (yet) too late for that outcome to be averted. Preventing it, however, will require a determined insistence by supporters' groups, soccer governing associations and government itself that the sport must belong to its fans, not to the logic of the market.

Thad Williamson (thwilliamson@earthlink.net), is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard and a collective member of Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice. He is also author of More Than a Game: Why North Carolina Basketball Means So Much To So Many and (with Gar Alperovitz and David Imbroscio) Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era.