Contrary to what some commentators might have you believe, a passion for football and a passion for the arts are not mutually exclusive by any means. For instance, four of our finest writers – Sarah McDonald Hughes, Lindsay Williams, Ian Kershaw, and Andrew Sheridan – are all committed fans of either Manchester United or Manchester City (although I’m not going to tell you who supports which team).

Now the four of them have come together for the world premiere of By Far The Greatest Team at the Lowry. Four new Manchester stories by these outstanding Manchester writers will explore and celebrate what it means to be a football fan in Manchester, while the production will see The Lowry’s Quays Theatre transformed into a football stadium.

But it’s not just an entertainment for football fans, insists Sarah, a member of the Manchester Theatre Award-winning Monkeywood Theatre Company, Associate Artists at the Lowry, who commissioned the piece. The brief was that, irrespective of whether the piece was “about” United or City, each new play should be rooted in the truth about people’s lives and challenge the usual stereotypes about football.

“They’re stories about identity, community, and belonging, trying to get to the heart of why the beautiful game has such an impact on our lives, season after season,” she says. “We’re trying to look at what being a football fan means to people, to get past all the distractions that surround the game, especially these days, to the purity of what if feels like to be a fan and really caring about something.

“Outside of the stadium it can be difficult to remember what it feels like, but when you’re watching a match it really, really matters.”

That feeling of belonging, of a community outside of most of our day-to-day lives, would be just as recogniseable to fans of, say, The Smiths or Oasis, to pick two Manchester musical examples. But, for millions of people around the world, Manchester is still most recogniseable for its two football teams, United and City, while within the city itself, there’s been fierce, mostly non-violent, rivalry between their fans for many years.

“When we each wrote the pieces, although there was obviously some awareness that we were each fans of a particular team, we did it quite separately and didn’t really know what the other writers were going to write,” explains Andrew. “But what emerged when we read them was that, yes, they were all about football, but above that they were all about relationships and people and how that sits within that world of being a football fan. Without, hopefully, sounding too wanky, they’re all about being human.”

Through the stories themselves, the structure of the evening reflects the ebb and flow of a match, even with a half-time (a.k.a. the interval). But Sarah emphasises the importance of getting football fans and non-football fans “to come and sit together, experiencing the same thing in the same room, as you would at a match.

“Behind all our work as Monkeywood, but specifically with this piece, is the thought that we want people who don’t think theatre is for them to come and see it. From the windows of The Lowry, you can see Old Trafford and there must be thousands of people of people going past here on match days who don’t think the theatre welcomes them.

“Theatre needs to change and it needs to allow audiences to change.”

*By Far The Greatest Team is at The Lowry from 17-20 September.