The Official Manchester United Muslim Supporters’ Club (MUMSC) has been pushing hard for the removal of the club’s chairman, Brexit supporter and chemicals tycoon Sir Jim Ratcliffe, in recent days, for having the temerity to express views that a large share of Britain’s population already believes: that the country is “on the slide,” that mass immigration has changed it beyond recognition, and that no one in power has been “tough enough” on border control or benefits claimants.
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For MUMSC, the language was “completely unacceptable,” “playing into populist tropes,” and cause for both Sir Jim and the Glazers—the Jewish family who are Manchester United’s majority owners—to resign. Crucially, the group is not some private prayer circle. It is an official supporters’ club, given access and prominence by the club, and allowed to play a role in organizing club Ramadan feasts and in establishing a “multi-faith prayer room” suspiciously bereft of any religious items except Islamic prayer mats at its Old Trafford stadium.
When MUMSC tells Ratcliffe to resign, it is using Manchester United’s name to police a political argument the club chairman should be perfectly entitled to make. Yet while Man U might be chagrined that MUMSC is biting the proverbial hand that feeds by engaging in partisan lobbying against the club’s leaders, it should not be surprised, given its co-founder’s record.
Manchester United opened a new multi-faith room at Old Trafford for fans of all faiths.
The team worked closely with the Fans' Forum and Muslim Supporters' Club on the space, which can accommodate up to 20 fans at any given time. Prayer mats have already been provided by the… pic.twitter.com/I9Ff0RvvJr
— ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) March 3, 2025
The Man Behind MUMSC.
Ghulam Haydar, alias Ghulam “Esposito” Haydar, is a Senior Policy Lead in NHS England’s community pharmacy team, a prescribing pharmacist, and a General Pharmaceutical Council clinical advisor and inspector, paid by Britain’s socialized healthcare provider to help shape national pharmacy policy. However, far from being a neutral community liaison, he is an activist with a decade of posts and articles attacking Britain as a colonial plunderer, railing against British air strikes against Islamic State jihadists, and treating “internalised love for white / superior” attitudes as a moral disease, as The National Pulse revealed on Wednesday.
Now, further research has revealed Haydar as having volunteered for groups later flagged in government extremism assessments, lobbying for anti-terror legislation to be dismantled, and even arguing that French military strikes against the Islamic State were “no different” from the terrorist massacres the group carried out in Paris in 2015.
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Haydar is not a back-office pharmacist who once liked a tweet. He is a national policy lead with a history of open political factionism. In 2015, he posted, “Hate this guy.. Nigel Farage,” referring to the then-UK Independence Party leader, who now stands a strong chance of becoming Prime Minister at the head of Reform UK. Meanwhile, he has made public appearances with Manchester’s left-wing mayor and Britain’s future Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, describing the Labour Party politician as “my old buddy” in 2022—albeit while chastising him for pronouncing “Ghulam” incorrectly.
Haydar’s hatred of Farage appears to extend to Britain and the British people more generally. The National Pulse has already reported on Haydar’s posts accusing Britain of having “ransacked, pillaged & destroyed India,” and urging future generations of British Muslims to resist “the narrative of the coloniser.” Subsequently, posts have been uncovered expressing this hostility in much blunter terms, including one from the Euros football tournament in 2016, seething, “The sooner England get knocked out, the better.”
Minimizing ISIS.
Some of the most revealing statements regarding Haydar’s worldview are not in old social media posts, but in signed articles. On November 20th, 2015, just days after Islamic State terrorists had murdered 130 people in Paris, Haydar wrote for 5Pillars that he could not “differentiate between the reaction of the French government and the ISIS claimed attacks in Paris.”
The West, Haydar argued, could not retaliate against the caliphate “simply because your innocent were taken.” In fact, doing so was “stupidity and madness,” not least because, in his view, the West was no better than the Islamic State: “What France and many other countries are doing is no different to ISIS,” he argued, adding (in case there was any doubt) that “Both are unjustifiable.”
A year prior, Haydar had equivocated on the beheading of American journalist James Foleyby ISIS (“It goes without saying that the killing of innocent civilians should be met with utter contempt, but…”), positively citing CAGE as suggesting the shocking execution was not really any different from the unintentional civilian casualties in U.S. drone strikes in the region. This opinion piece, written for Islamic21c, chose to describe ISIS as a “resistance group” rather than a terrorist organization, critiquing it chiefly for the “damage” it was causing to the “overall resistance” to then-President Bashar al-Assad.
The CAGE Connection.
The approving reference to CAGE was not a one-off. In 2017 post on Facebook, he had hailed the conviction of CAGE’s international director Muhammad Rabbani as somehow a “victory for CAGE” for supposedly exposing “flaws in the terrorism legislation.” In a 2014 article, he had defended CAGE outreach director and former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg as a supposed whistleblower crushed by an “Orwellian state,” after he was hit with multiple ultimately dropped terrorism charges related to trips he made to Syria in 2012–13.
Infamously, CAGE described ISIS executioner Mohammed Emwazi, better known as “Jihadi John,” as a “beautiful young man” and blamed Britain’s MI5 intelligence service for his radicalization—a markedly more generous attitude to a notorious terrorist than Haydar was willing to extend to Sir Jim Ratcliffe.
Haydar also proudly declared in 2016 that he was a volunteer with MEND (Muslim Engagement and Development), which was later listed by then-Communities Secretary Michael Gove among organizations giving “rise to concern for their Islamist orientation and views,” and called on Allah to bless Ali Dawah, a Muslim YouTuber accused of harassing Jews in London’s Golders Green neighborhood and defending marrying underage girls, as “an asset to the ummah (Muslim community” the same year.
With Friends Like These.
The list of articles and social media posts from Haydar that might be described as “totally unacceptable” is seemingly endless, extending far beyond those listed above. In 2017, he amplified arguments that “Terror laws should be scrapped.” In 2018, he complained that then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid describing Pakistani Muslim pedophile gangs as “Asian” was “racism.” In 2013, he smeared opponents of the niqab as “dirty” and “sleazy.” And the list goes on.
The question is why Manchester United affiliated with and given status to a man whose public record puts him so much farther beyond the pale than Jim Ratcliffe could ever be. These were public posts, signed articles, visible to anyone with a mind to look for them.
United did not have to make MUMSC an official club. Doing so has given a man who has branded Britain a colonial pillager, cheered for England to be knocked out of the Euros, volunteered for MEND, promoted CAGE, and written that the West and the Islamic State are “no different” standing to call for their chairman’s head, for the crime of expressing views on immigration held by millions of Britons, doubtless including many United supporters.
Similarly, NHS England did not have to put Haydar in national policy. Patients in that system include the families of people murdered by the jihadist networks whom he spent years minimizing as products of Western policy, and girls abused by the grooming gangs he believes it is racist to name.
Hopefully, both will learn a lesson from this on the need for better institutional vetting. Because with friends like these, who needs enemies?
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