“Do it for Frank” is unlikely to form part of Michael Carrick’s team talk as Manchester United head to West Ham this evening. But perhaps it should. It is clear that when fan Frank Ilett vowed not to cut his hair until his team had won five games in a row, he did not expect to be approaching 500 days without stepping into a barber’s, or for his look to have grown quite so ridiculous, or to have accumulated more social media followers than some Manchester United first-team players. After four consecutive wins, though, he is extremely close to his self-inflicted ordeal finally being over.
Ilett’s challenge began on 5 October 2024 and amid the club’s worst-ever start to a Premier League season. It was a bit of a joke, the 29-year-old said, with the hope of “spreading some humour and positivity” and helping the club’s supporters get through the “dark days” – United had saved a wretched season the year before by winning the FA Cup, but it was clear all was not well. By the end of the month, manager Erik ten Hag had been sacked and the promise of the smiling Ruben Amorim arrived. At the time, the idea of a rejuvenated United going on a run was hardly inconceivable, but then the nosedive started. Under Amorim, United stumbled through the rest of a doomed campaign, finishing 15th in the Premier League and losing the Europa League final.
As the losses mounted and United’s slide worsened, Ilett’s hair ballooned and the size of his audience did too. His various ‘The United Strand’ accounts, across Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube, gained hundreds of thousands of followers, with his daily updates accumulating millions of views. At the centre of each video was, of course, the hair, which with each passing month not only grew longer but became more ridiculous, expanding outwards in every direction, bobbing on top of his head and hovering around the back of his neck like a thick shrub of floating gas. United’s dismal end of the season consigned Ilett to a whole summer beneath this absurd, dense, bushy cloud. That the Oxford-born Ilett now lives in sunny Spain added to the weight he was under.
Throughout it all, Ilett has remained positively upbeat and endlessly optimistic that United’s fortunes could turn. In doing so, he has also raised money for the mental health charity Mind and, when he surpassed his previous fundraising target, the Little Princess Trust; when Ilett is eventually sheared, his locks will be donated and turned into wigs for young cancer patients dealing with hair loss. Even as United have been so woeful, this has, at least, been an entertaining sideshow. While it has been as notorious in this particular spell of the club’s steady decline as Old Trafford’s leaky roof, Amorim’s 3-4-2-1, big Sir Jim’s cuts and Roy Keane’s rants – it is one that will, in the end, bring some good into the world.
And yet, for some, Ilett’s hair is an overgrown reminder of the depths United have fallen to, and a case study into the often divisive impact of the viral online fan/content creator. It was the toxic atmosphere that consumed the final years of Arsene Wenger’s legendary reign at Arsenal, for example, that proved fertile ground for the growth of Arsenal Fan TV. Back then, a fuming post-match monologue outside the Emirates following the club’s latest heavy defeat to Bayern Munich would be guaranteed to slap, racking up millions of views across digital platforms. As content, AFTV was an unbelievable success. But to the loyal, match-going supporter, AFTV were accused of gleefully feeding on the embarrassment and eating up the hits. Arsenal are far from the only Premier League club to have experienced this split between factions.
Ilett has not yet required a police escort when leaving away grounds, or had Old Trafford collectively chant “get out of our club” for inadvertently highlighting their shortcomings. But that is not to say his challenge has not been without incident. In September, a grim clip of Ilett being assaulted in the concourse while attending United's home match against Chelsea was widely shared online - with his hair grabbed and forcefully yanked downwards by another supporter, who was later banned from Old Trafford. Ilett told the Manchester Evening News that he had been called an “attention-seeking c**t” but reported that 99 per cent of all other reactions were positive. Since then, his following on Instagram has tripled from almost 400,000 to over 1.2m and thankfully, perhaps for everyone, the end is in sight.
As head coach, Amorim said he hoped United would find the form for Ilett to get his hair cut as soon as possible. Yet it was the Portuguese’s departure in early January that proved to be the turning point: with Michael Carrick at the wheel, United have beaten Manchester City, Arsenal, Fulham and Tottenham in consecutive games and head to West Ham tonight bidding for five wins in a row. It will have been 493 days since Ilett began his challenge and the excitement is palpable: Carrick’s teenage children, naturally, are followers and have made sure their dad is aware. He joked he would not put undue pressure on his players by letting them know what is on the line at the London Stadium, although they too have been peppered with questions about Ilett whenever they win a couple of games in a row.
“I can understand what’s going on with it and it does make me smile, but it won’t have an impact,” Carrick maintained. A win for United would continue their resurgence and march towards a return to the Champions League; for Ilett, it will bring the end of a light-hearted stunt that has, in more ways than one, grown out of control. He will have his five minutes of fame. He will give the same interview on his round of breakfast TV couches. Someone will have paid an inordinate amount for the money shot of the barber’s clippers running through the tangled mess, and Ilett will feel a whole lot lighter.
What does this all say about the sense of entitlement that appears to be seeping into modern-day fandom? Perhaps it will inspire copycats: a Liverpool fan from Southend on hunger strike until they sign a defender, a Tottenham supporter in Cork handcuffing themselves to a park bench until Thomas Frank is sacked. But ultimately, if all goes to plan, the winners will be United, and the players who would no longer have to be reminded of their part in this woeful chapter.
