Hairdryer treatment: meet the Man United fan eyeing first barber trip in 493 days

“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.

- JAMIE BRAIDWOOD

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, 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.