Before long, however, the great juggernaut of United came to life, rolling over Chelsea in a series of searing, irresistible attacks. Inevitably, the favorites scored, and now it was time for United’s fans to go wild. Bastards. The game ended up a tie, which was supposed to be some sort of victory for Chelsea. United, after all, currently holds an unassailable lead at the top of the Premier League table — champions-elect with a third of the season to go. Chelsea, meanwhile, sits in eighth place. United, it has to be said, sucks.

Sound familiar?

Chelsea is the Boston Red Sox of English football: a team of unflagging underachievers. Manchester United, meanwhile, is our New York Yankees. They win, we don’t; so it is, so it was, so it will be.

It seemed grimly fitting, then, when United and the Yankees recently announced a multimillion-dollar marketing contract, a mini-merger that will enable the two clubs to flog each other’s merchandise, share TV revenues, and irritate the crap out of the rest of us with talk of “consolidation” and “branding” and “outreach.”

A February 12 article in Slate magazine called these clubs “the Tokyo and Berlin of the sports world” who had forged an “evil axis.” This might sound like hyperbole, but it isn’t. Take the clubs’ top brass: Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, known as the most hated man in baseball, who once called one of his own players “a fat pussy toad”; and United chairman Martin Edwards, an insufferable sleazeball who, the London tabloids say, has a thing for Brazilian prostitutes.

But never mind all this. The real reason to hate these clubs is that they are sucking the lifeblood out of sports. With the United-Yankees merger, football — okay, soccer — and baseball became honest-to-goodness global products. Even before the deal, you were as likely to see an ass-backwards Yankees cap in Moscow as you were in New York; you were as likely to be burped upon by a member of the Man U fan club in Kuala Lumpur as you were in Manchester. This deal simply seals the teams’ status as brand names.

The Yankees and United have other things in common: they suck, of course, and they are both incredibly rich (worth $600 million and $900 million, respectively). Both teams have massive fan bases, arrogant and tasteless people willing — no, eager — to shell out big money to don the latest ticky-tacky team jerseys. And both teams illustrate a modern adage: in today’s sports, cash spells success. The Yankees have won four of the last five World Series. United has won six of the last eight league titles. And now that they are pooling their fat-cat resources, what hopes are there for second-fiddle clubs like the Red Sox and Chelsea?

Maybe that’s it. Maybe those of us who hate Man U and the Yanks are just jealous. Or maybe we are afraid. Or maybe we are just annoyed. At one point, near the end of last week’s United-Chelsea game, the red-clad posse at the front of the bar started singing Mancunian ditties. Shortly after this, they snickered at Chelsea’s attendance (around 35,000, roughly half the attendance at United’s home games). This kind of smarmy hubris I can take. But not brand-imaging. Not global marketing. Please. Anything but that.