Last Sunday, Man United’s board finally shot Bambi. Then they let him go on TV to express his appreciation for the opportunity to be shot. Sacking Solksjaer was the right decision, but as is usual under the current ownership, the club went about it in the most insipid, cack-handed way they could, nearly two months after results began an alarming nosedive, and four months after renewing his contract for another three years on foot of finishing second in the Premier League and reaching the final of the Europa League.
Whatever you think about Solksjaer, his appointment and subsequent sacking are the culmination of years of reactive and incompetent governance at board level by outgoing CEO Ed Woodward and his boss, club owner Joel Glazer. United are on the cusp of appointing their fifth “permanent” manager in the eight years since Sir Alex Ferguson retired, and have won a League Cup, a Community Shield, the Europa League and an FA cup in that time. Remarkably, the club’s commercial revenue has grown from around €460m in 2013 to nearly €800m in 2019, reaping big financial rewards for the ownership despite the drought of silverware during that period. This is instructive as to where the owners’ priorities lie.
It’s clear to see that Alex Ferguson and his CEO David Gill kept a lot of the Glazers’ complete lack of footballing expertise hidden from view in the first 8 years of their ownership of the club, by delivering silverware year after year, almost uninterrupted. The simultaneous retirement of both Ferguson and Gill in 2013, and the installation of Ed Woodward, the architect of the Glazer acquisition of United, as the new CEO, was extremely damaging to the club. A huge amount of experience and knowledge walked out the door, only to be replaced by a rookie former investment banker.
Woodward sees United through the lens of their commercial potential, rather than as a historic sporting institution deserving of competent stewardship. United are bigger than any ownership, who are merely custodians of a proud footballing heritage. However, thanks to Woodward, the tail now wags the dog, and the footballing component of the club plays second-fiddle to the need to acquire noodle partners, broadcast partners and shirt sponsors, all in an attempt to commodify the club’s increasingly distant past successes for financial gain.
Man United’s main product these days is nostalgia, not sporting excellence. The club almost fetishises certain milestones from its past in an attempt to drive social media engagement and convert it into sales of tickets, merchandise and matchday audiences. It’s a bit like drilling for oil. It’s an unashamedly short-termist approach whose intention is to extract maximum value from something they had absolutely no part in creating, to enrich a remote and indifferent elite at the expense of everything else.
Recruiting Solksjaer and re-signing Ronaldo are all examples of this business plan working as intended. Any positive impacts seen on the pitch are of secondary concern. It also reveals the United hierarchy’s complete lack of understanding of what it takes to build a successful football club. It’s as if they thought that they could simply put people who won them trophies in the same room as their current squad, and it would magically rub off on them through osmosis or some other invisible force.
The amount of money the club wastes is frightening. Expensive footballing decisions seem to be made based on hope, magical thinking and fan sentiment, as well as the achievement of what should be stepping stones, not end goals. Jose Mourinho and Ole were both given contract extensions after finishing second, not first, in the league. Mourinho was sacked eleven months later, and Solskjaer was booted out after four. The severance packages for those two managers amounted to nearly £26million combined. David Moyes was given a six year contract, because his career bore a very superficial and tenuous resemblance to Alex Ferguson’s i.e. he was Scottish and had managed a club for a long time. He was sacked within 10 months. Paul Pogba was given a contract extension despite disappointing and inconsistent performances, alongside the histrionics of his agent Mino Raiola. It’s all illustrative of the reactivity and poor planning at the highest levels within the club, along with the gradual erosion of its aspirations. Qualifying for the Champions League is now the benchmark, whereas winning the Premier League annually was a few years ago.
You also get the sense that the upper echelons of United’s governing bodies are very cosy indeed, more like a country club than a football club. Ed Woodward, incoming CEO Richard Arnold and Director of Transfers Matt Judge are all Bristol University alumni. Woodward has never faced serious pressure despite a string of failed managerial appointments and 8 years of sporting mediocrity. Alex Ferguson seems to still yield a huge amount of influence despite retiring eight years ago, and is approaching his eightieth birthday having had a stroke in 2018.
What has been truly painful for United fans is watching their nearest rivals eclipse them in recent years, becoming a footballing superpower in the space of a decade while United stagnated, coasting along on the successes of the past, struggling to find a post-Ferguson identity. Regardless of whether or not you believe that Man City are a plastic, manufactured club who took shortcuts to success thanks to ethically dubious Emirati funding , the fact is that they are an extremely “well-oiled” machine. They have footballing expertise at every level of the club, from Pep Guardiola to his director of football Txiki Begiristain and CEO Ferran Soriano, all of whom worked together at Barcelona. They have been extremely savvy in their recruitment, and as a result, have been the dominant force in English football for the last 10 years.
While Man United have spent almost the same amount of money as City in that period — an eye watering €944 million — the outcome has been drastically different. Bruno Fernandes is probably the only signing who you could call an unqualified success, while their record signing Paul Pogba has failed to live up to expectations and it likely to leave the club for free for the second time next summer. Some signings like Alexis Sanchez and Radamel Falcao were expensive disasters who completely disrupted the club’s wage structure, and were signed either because they became available at the last minute or because City were in for them as well.
The net result is that Man United have gone from being synonymous with success and excellence, to being a laughing stock in world football. The club resembles a slow-motion car crash or soap opera, continuously lumbering from crisis to crisis. It’s painful to be so negative about the team I’ve supported since I was 9, but it’s hard to see how it’ll get better in the near-term. My only hope is that these “impostor” owners as Gary Neville referred to them will move on sooner rather than later and sell the club to ambitious, forward-thinking and ethically sound buyers who elevate the club back to the top where they belong.
