“I don’t care about his haircut at all,” Matheus Cunha said this week. “I don’t really look at other people if they need to go to the hairdresser or not,” Bruno Fernandes said at the weekend. Michael Carrick, for his part, said he was aware of the haircut issue. But the Manchester United coach insisted it would not factor into his team’s preparations for their game against West Ham on Tuesday night.
And so, here we are. Many games of football end up being remembered for reasons far outstripping their original significance: the 1914 Christmas Truce, the 1962 Battle of Santiago, the 2020 pandemic curtain‑raiser between Liverpool and Atlético Madrid. To these we can add the Haircut Game: a mildly arresting 1-1 Premier League draw at the London Stadium that posterity will nevertheless recall as the game when a man did not get his hair cut at the end.
The haircut overshadowed the buildup, the live commentary and much of the post-match analysis on TNT Sport, as well as a ground radius of about a metre around the haircut itself. On the video streaming platform Kick, a quarter of a million viewers watched a live feed of the unshorn Frank Ilett – now known as The United Strand – watching his beloved United going for a fifth consecutive win that would free him from his pilar purgatory.
As United conceded an early goal through Tomas Soucek, the camera would occasionally zoom in on Ilett, a lifelong United fan now fatally trapped, Janus‑like, between two countervailing faces of devotion. From the moment back in October 2024 when he pledged to avoid cutting his hair until United won five games in a row in all competitions, his viral fame, personal fortune and perhaps his very identity had become inextricably entwined with United being bad at football.
The worse they were, the longer his hair grew, the more Instagram followers he accrued, the louder the stampede of brands and corporate partners to his door. He now has a deal with a talent agency, a budding career as a content creator, endorsements falling out of his pockets.
On Monday morning he held a press conference attended by the Telegraph, CBS and L’Equipe. On Tuesday morning a press release dropped from Argos, announcing that it had signed Ilett as an Official Delivery Partner, and was poised to dispatch a shipment of trimmers and hair styling products to his home as soon as the curse was broken.
And perhaps this is the moment to take a step back. Why are we talking about the haircut guy? Because in a very real and very bleak sense, the haircut guy is a perfect parable for where we are as a species: scrolling onanistically through our smartphones, captives of the attention economy, consensually playing the very same game that enslaves us. Football in the year of Our Lord 2026: a sport born on the playing fields of 19th‑century England, codified into teams and leagues, and now essentially in thrall to a guy performatively not cutting his hair for the social media aura.
If this feels a stretch, then consider that in a Dazn interview this week Cunha said that the haircut guy was being openly discussed in the United dressing room, spoke of “the pressure of the haircut”, a phrase now destined to sit alongside “the weight of the shirt” as an actual, genuine footballing trope. Does content feed off football or does football feed off content? These days, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell the two apart.
There are really two questions that follow here. The first is: to what extent is football still primarily about the winning and losing of football matches? This used to be a cherishably simple question to answer. But in the age of the algorithm, when the arena and the media ecosystem that surrounds it have been reimagined as a kind of elite advertising space, where sporting products sell themselves on attention as much as success, it’s not so easy.
The most bankable boxer in the world is Jake Paul, an objectively terrible fighter. The most bankable female rugby player in the world is Ilona Maher, for whom it is only the merest inconvenience that she doesn’t actually play rugby any more. India are the powerbrokers of world cricket whether they win or lose. Does it really matter for the product if Wrexham are soaring through the divisions or plummeting back down through them? Has 13 years of incompetence made any discernible difference to United’s bottom line, their corporate shadow, their ability to generate views?
Certainly the spectacle of United being bad at football has provided a very handy living to a whole host of satellite characters: Ilett, Andy Tate, Mark Goldbridge, Ruben Amorim. On Tuesday Arne Slot explained that Liverpool simply must qualify for the Champions League because of the finances involved, rather than because, you know, it gives them a chance of winning the Champions League. The modern football club exists purely for the sake of existing, purely so it can continue to deliver its primary functions: generating content and buying players so they can generate more content.
The second question: what is the point of any of this? What is the end goal of life, in a world where exploitative structures and technocapitalist attention capture strip individuals of all but the most basic agency?
It’s easy enough to throw hand grenades at Ilett, a posh lad from Oxford who once lived in total anonymity and now appears on livestreams festooned in betting adverts. Recently he went to Old Trafford and had his hair pulled by a United fan. But in a world rewired almost entirely around social media clout and the tyranny of the algorithm, is he not simply navigating a hostile landscape in the only way he can?
This is all one feed now, and as grotesque as it sounds, everyone from the new Taylor Swift video to the starving children of Gaza to The United Strand is playing in the same space, by the same rigged rules, grabbing forlornly at the keys of the discourse. What did you all think influencers meant? Vibes, papers, essays? In his shameless grift and uncut locks, the United haircut guy is at least holding up a mirror to what we really are.
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