Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 2, 2022 - May 8, 2022

Never before has a football manager tackled a mission so loaded with impossibilities. You feel that even Tom Cruise might have turned down Manchester United in its current state.

It’s encouraging for the club, therefore, that portrayals of it as a “monstrosity”, “Muppet Show”, “shattered ruin” and being “in need of open-heart surgery” did not deter boss-to-be, Erik ten Hag. In fact, they are why the no-­nonsense Dutchman, in a welcome sign of realism, gave his job interviewers a virtual dressing down for having allowed things to get this bad.

The scale of the club’s epic fall was glaringly exposed just 48 hours before Ten Hag was appointed. Liverpool had toyed with United yet again to underline the gulf in class between the two erstwhile rivals. 

With neighbours Manchester City enjoying similar superiority, the season’s aggregate score for United against its traditional foes is 1-15 with zero points. As Liverpool and City joust for supremacy in Europe as well as England, United have all but given up being anywhere but among the also-rans next season.

Every new managerial appointment is a potential watershed moment, but the level of scrutiny has never been this forensic or the criticism this excoriating, and some of it is from within the club.

On the abject surrender to Liverpool, interim boss Ralf Rangnick said: “We didn’t dare to attack. It almost looked that we were afraid”, while England international Jesse Lingard admitted, “The dressing room is a disaster”. Ex-skipper-turned commentator Gary Neville concurred: “I’ve never seen it as bad as that. The players are broken. It’s a mess.”

Much has previously been made of the club’s ability to brush off the downturn on the field and remain a commercial behemoth. Throughout its trophy drought, it has still been able to broker mega deals and top the Forbes wealth table. “Too big to fail” was the message when the share price hit a record high of US$26.20 on Aug 31, 2018. 

Two weeks later, unimpressed by that “success”, fans paid for a banner to be flown over Burnley’s Turf Moor stadium during United’s match there, calling commercial mastermind Ed Woodward “a specialist in failure”.

Now the price is half that heady peak — US$13.42 on April 22 — which suggests the club may not be too big for prolonged failure. United are enduring their worst trophy drought in 40 years and this season’s win rate of 45% in all competitions is their lowest since the1989/90 campaign. 

What will also worry the hated owners, the American Glazer family, is that the value of the squad has plummeted £230 million this season — more than any other club in the English Premier League.

According to data from the International Centre for Sports Studies Football Observatory, United’s players were worth a combined £652.8 million on April 1, 2022, compared with an estimated £880.9 million on Sept 1, 2021. It’s a 26% drop, well below the EPL’s average of 9%. Marcus Rashford alone has crashed 43% to £64.7 million. 

And top players no longer want to join. Today’s hottest properties, Kylian Mbappe and Erling Braut Haaland, have barely given United a second thought as they negotiate eye-popping contracts with Real Madrid and Manchester City respectively.

No matter how bad things got, the club’s fans had never turned on their own players — until now. Club captain Harry Maguire has been singled out for vilification and received a bomb threat that was taken seriously enough for his family to be moved to a safe house: a graphic symbol of a broken man at the head of a broken club.

“Helplessness, frustration and fear: the picture of modern Manchester United” is how The Guardian described it. The Times wrote: “A rotten club that’s too dysfunctional, too divided and the fans too disaffected to believe that it’s just a football restoration job. It’s much more than that.”

No one knows where to start. Both stadium and dressing room leak, players go there for their careers to die; no one knows who’s in charge; decisions take forever and have to be referred back to Florida, with a five-hour delay to Joel Glazer, who is allegedly calling the slow-release shots. If the gym needs a new dumbbell, it has to go to him; what more a new £100 million central midfielder whom he’s probably never heard of?

Not a penny has been spent on the once-fabled Old Trafford since their execrable leveraged buyout in 2005. If Spurs boast a spaceship for a stadium, United has the Titanic. And all we have seen since Sir Alex Ferguson retired has been the rearranging of the deckchairs. 

The Glazers run one of football’s great institutions like a sundry shop, the six siblings comprising the board. They have taken well over £1 billion out of the club in interest and help-yourself dividend payments, but have wasted a similar amount in dud transfers.

Woodward, the now departed banking wizard who engineered the takeover, was rewarded with the executive vice-president’s job. But, without a football background, he should never have been allowed to choose players, let alone managers. His preference for big names with big social media followings is one big reason for the current stasis. 

His scattergun approach suggested he was making it up as he went along — in excruciating contrast to Liverpool and Manchester City. When he interviewed Jurgen Klopp, he sold United as “Disneyland” not on its holy trinity of Law, Best and Charlton. The German was not impressed.

The presumption is that they will be back because they are a big club, and it is undeniable the modern game is tilted heavily towards the Big Boys. Liverpool eventually won a Premier League title after 30 years while Arsenal is inching towards a Champions League return. And unlike that other fallen giant Barcelona, United don’t need to borrow — they just need to spend more wisely.

But from the conundrum of Cristiano Ronaldo, on £490,000 a week at 37, to the enigma of Paul Pogba, to dealing with the ineffable Glazers to imposing an identity, Ten Hag has an almighty task. 

Since WW1, all United’s principal trophies (the League and European Cup/Champions League) have been won by just two managers — Ferguson and Sir Matt Busby. Ten Hag will need help, time and patience, but in one of the world’s most scrutinised goldfish bowls, will he get it?

Compatriot Louis van Gaal warned him against it as “it’s not a football club but a commercial club”. As a recipient of the poisoned chalice, he knows. Such is the magnitude of the job that UK media expressed genuine fears about what United might do to Ten Hag, a rookie in the biggest of the big leagues.

His interview for the Spurs job was a bit of a disaster, with one report claiming the club found him “weird”. There is a Dutch word — wereldvreemd or “world strange” — someone so focused on one subject (football in this case) that he doesn’t know anything else. That might be an asset at United. Chosen because of his success at Ajax Amsterdam and belief in youth and attacking play, he deserves credit for accepting the challenge. If he can refloat the Titanic, he will deserve a statue.


Bob Holmes is a long-time sportswriter specialising in football

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