Last Sunday’s decimation of Man United by Man City completes the gradual changing of the guard that began with 2011’s 6–1 defeat to City under Alex Ferguson. For nearly 15 years, one club has quietly but diligently constructed a footballing operation driven by best-in-class operators at every level, where recruitment is meritocratic, and standards are sky high. This is thanks in no small part to the blank cheque provided by connections to ethically dubious Emirati funding, but it has been spent on the right things, nonetheless.
The other club, once the dominant force in English football, grew flabby, cosy and complacent in the latter years of Alex Ferguson’s reign as he delivered silverware year in and year out. Once the Glazer family acquired a majority share of United, the club elected to stand still as overseas funding poured in from Middle Eastern, American and Russian investors keen to replicate United’s success. With these other new owners came huge financial investment, new ideas, new stadia, higher standards and a hunger that gradually faded towards the end of the Ferguson era. United clearly drew the short straw when choosing new ownership.
Ferguson’s success and sheer force of personality evidently managed to constrain the damage that could be done by having owners lacking any experience or interest in running a football club properly. Once Fergie retired, and experienced CEO David Gill was replaced by rookie investment banker Ed Woodward, all of the footballing expertise in the building walked out the door, and the true consequences of the Glazers’ ownership were thrown into sharp relief.
With these owners, the club’s priorities changed from winning trophies to sweating the brand, capitalising on past success by pumping out nostalgic content on social media to satisfy Ed Woodward’s obsession with “clicks”, or re-appointing club legends to contrive links between the club’s successful past and the mediocre present. The Glazers meanwhile laughed all the way to the bank as they became the only Premier League owners to regularly take dividends out of their club, while the on-pitch performances suffered.
Meanwhile, United lurched from one bad managerial appointment to another, while apparently letting social media dictate transfer policy, resulting in them regularly getting taken to the cleaners by clubs asking and getting well above-market value for overhyped transfer targets. For many of these new recruits, their time at United was a blot on their CVs from which they’ve yet to recover. Consequently, the club garnered a reputation for being something of a graveyard for players.
Scouting seemed to involve little more than playing fantasy football in real life, going for the most obvious, marketable and expensive players, rather than finding diamonds in the rough and polishing them once they arrived.
Recruitment above the playing staff looked from the outside like a matter of appointing compliant rookies instead of the most qualified candidates. Solskjaer, Kieran McKenna, Darren Fletcher and Michael Carrick were all unproven coaches given the keys to one of the highest profile clubs in Europe, and the consequences of that are still being revealed today as Erik Ten Hag struggles to find the right motivation for his squad, which is an unbalanced hodge-podge of players accumulated under different managers.
Solskjaer’s tenure seems to have been the most damaging, as his lack of experience or skill for such a high-profile position, coupled with his reliance on “vibes” and trying to be the players’ friend rather than their manager, ultimately led to his downfall. In particular, his favouriting of the under-performing British players at the club like Maguire, Shaw, Wan-Bissaka and Rashford sowed a mutinous atmosphere where resentment divided the players and led to some of the worst United performances we’ve seen in the modern era. The parachuting in of Ralf Rangnick to steady the ship had no such effect, although in spite of their worst efforts, the team somehow limped to a sixth-place finish last season and scraped a Europa League place.
The departure of Ed Woodward and Erik Ten Hag’s recent appointment as manager were signs that finally, the club was starting to learn from its many recent mistakes. For the first time since Ferguson retired, United have a coach on the ascent with a proven track record, albeit in a weaker league, and a ruthless willingness to bench Solskjaer’s pet players, some of whom would appear to be coming to the end of their Manchester United careers. Noises around the Glazers selling up as fan unrest becomes harder and harder to quell, are also positive steps in the right direction.
Unfortunately, all of this means that United are now, for the foreseeable future at least, the new noisy neighbours in Manchester. A mixture of negligence, incompetence and greed has destroyed what was once a seemingly unassailable footballing heritage and should serve as a cautionary tale to other football clubs, especially Man city who are currently enjoying their own “Ferguson era” with Pep Guardiola. The obvious truth is that a reliance on dining out on past glories will always be unsustainable in the long-term, because no matter how hard club owners try to delude themselves otherwise, a football club’s main product is and always will be what happens on the pitch today.
