The Funeral of George Best

In death, as in life, George Best was setting records galore at his funeral. On a filthy Belfast day where it rarely stopped raining, hundreds of thousands of people turned out to say one final farewell to their most famous son.

For one day at least this secularly divided society was not green, nor orange, but quite decisively, red, the red of Manchester United Football Club, the club where Mister Best imperiously strode the world’s football fields for ten glorious years.

In scenes eerily reminiscent of Princess Diana’s funeral, the crowds threw flowers and football scarves on to the hearse, and scarves from dozens of different clubs too, Celtic, Rangers, Liverpool, Everton, Manchester City, some of United’s fiercest rivals among them. The driver was frequently forced to stop to clear the windscreen.

And the funeral service that was held in the Stormont government building was the first ever funeral to be held there. Some 32,000 souls were allowed into the grounds, to watch the service on giant screens standing in the rain, and an uncountable number lined the streets outside. The flags on that vast sombre building flew at half-mast, the first time this has ever occurred for a commoner, for this was, in all but name, a State Funeral.

Like everything else during the day, the service was memorable. The songs and hymns were beautifully sung and included the Beatles, “The Long and Winding Road”, so appropriate as George was known as the "fifth Beatle", Don MacLean’s “Vincent”, where the last line was predictably amended to “I could have told you Georgie,” the huge Westlife single, the band from the Irish Republic, “You raise me up”, and all topped off with the football hymn “Abide with me.”

Dennis Law, the Lawman himself, and one of Best’s colleagues in the 1968 European Cup winning side, and himself a European footballer of the year, gave one of the readings, and after that the coffin was driven away through the still waiting crowds to a private family burial where all cameras were barred.




And did the Glazer family from Florida, the club’s new owners, choose to attend the proceedings? Well of course they did not, for they are not football people, and they would not understand what George Best meant to the supporters, or the people of Northern Ireland, or that George Best was instrumental in raising Manchester United above ordinary football clubs. Their ground is known as the Theatre of Dreams, and George Best is one of the primary reasons for that. Manchester United FC is worth the three quarters of a billion pounds the Glazer family paid for it, because of people like George Best and Dennis Law, and Bobby Charlton, and those kids who died in the 1958 Munich Air Disaster, and the top players who led United to that unforgettable treble in 1999.

The Glazers made a big mistake in not attending the funeral, nor the minute’s silence held at the ground against West Bromwich Albion. This was a poor decision, and at best they have been badly advised. The family have signally failed to win the trust and approval of the massive support, and they have a lot of work to do, if they aim to achieve this.

In a land that has witnessed far too many funerals, this was the biggest ceremony ever to be held in the Province, and it will be long remembered by all who saw it. And yet this funeral was quite different. There were no shots fired over the graveside, there was no religious division, because George Best truly represented everyone in Ulster. He was above sectarianism and would have no truck with it. George Best will be remembered for as long as people who follow the game remain alive, and for as long as future generations are able to watch the old grainy pictures. George Best, the greatest footballer Europe has ever produced.

By David Carter