There's been an entirely new bunch of people running Manchester United for ten months now, but things don't look that much different at Old Trafford now to how they have for most of the last decade.
This isn’t what the glorious revolution was supposed to look like. The new manager was in place, results had improved, and then…on Saturday evening Manchester United put in yet another of those performances with which we’ve all become so familiar over the years, a goal conceded clumsily from a set-piece, a comeback which led to that familiar Old Trafford “WE’RE BACK” noise, the sound of tens of thousands of people reaching back to an increasingly distant past when there was an inevitability aboutthis sort of thinghappening.
And then, as if from out of nowhere, the fog descended again. Two goals in the space of eight minutes early in the second half left them suddenly and desperately chasing the game, and while they were able to pull one goal back, even having half an hour plus stoppage-time wasn’t enough to haul completely their way back into it.
Unexpected Delirium is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Forest won 3-2, the Theatre of Dreams became the Theatre of Sullenness yet again, the YouTubers turned puce with rage, and with getting on for half the season now having been played Manchester United remain moored in 13th place in the Premier League table, only two points closer to a Champions League place than they are to a relegation place.
It doesn’t take much for recent events to start to take on a slightly different hue to before. Ruben Amorim arrived with a reasonably creditable draw at home against Chelsea, but the next three unbeaten games came against three of the Premier League’s bottom six, while they were pretty much completely outplayed by Arsenal before whatever on earth that was supposed to be about Nottingham Forest.
After Saturday’s match Amorim said that, “We need to improve in a lot of aspects of the game and continue to do the same things tomorrow in training” and that losing back-to-back matches is “not a surprise”. Well, Ruben, United supporters have been saying this for more than a decade now, and nothing really seems to have changed. As ever, everybody knows that they need to change. It’s just the actual changing that seems to be the issue.
The following morning another story broke, and this one spoke of another set of problems that the club seems to face. Dan Ashworth will now be leaving the club after just five months in his position as their Sporting Director, completing what may be a unique position of as much time on gardening leave following his contentious departure from Newcastle United than he actually spent in the job.
So, what happened here? Sporting Directors are supposed to be a long-term solution, not short-term fixes to be jettisoned after a few months. As recently as February, Ratcliffe himself was describing Ashworth as, “clearly one of the top Sporting Directors in the world.” Was it just some form of clash of personalities? Did United—because it does seem to be them who have instigated this, rather than it being the “mutual” agreement usually preferred in press statements at this sort of time—not consider what this might be like at such a critical point of their season?
It remains the case that Manchester United expect ‘best in class’ in every position on the football side of the club, but how likely are the very people that they wish to attract going to feel about the way that they’ve treated Dan Ashworth? Ashworth was arguably the highest-profile sporting director in the Premier League. What he achieved at Brighton remains arguably the League’s greatest success story of the last ten years.
This led to him being poached by Newcastle, and they were loath to give him up after just a couple of years and, while correlation does not necessarily equal causation, that team has been in a marked decline since he left. His departure for Old Trafford was extremely high profile and drawn out due to the ructions between the two clubs over his move. What could have gone so disastrously wrong that he could only last five months in the position?
All of this turns attention back to Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS, and the way in which the club is being run. They’ve been in position for just ten months, but in that time they’ve managed to give the manager a contract extension on the basis of winning a trophy that very few actually cared about, spending £200m on a rebuild, and then sacking him a few months later. And the slew of “inside stories” that have emerged regarding Ashworth over the last 24 hours or so have all felt strangely incomplete, although we can at least fill in the blanks with ‘Manchester United are doing Manchester United things again’.
They’ve trodden the women’s team down, making their lack of prioritisation for them shamefully clear. They’ve pushed ticket prices through the roof and removed reduced prices for concessions. They’ve chucked 250 people out of work through redundancy. And their men’s team remains marooned in the bottom half of the Premier League, looking precisely no better than they did last season, and in several respects a bit worse.
Had, say, Andre Onana repeated his form from much of last season this time around, they may be in an even worse position than that in which they find themselves today. As things stand, in the 28 Premier League matches played since they took control of the running of the club, Manchester United have taken just 35 points. It’s obviously fair to say that not all of the blame for this can be laid at the door of INEOS, but that doesn’t alter the fact that, despite having spent so much money in the summer transfer window, things as of right now seem very much as they have for most of the last ten years.
And even if we allow grace for the relatively short amount of time that they’ve been at the wheel, there’s little doubt that some of the decisions already made have been both extremely expensive and extremely avoidable. The sacking of Erik Ten Hag has cost the club more money than it needed to because of the nonsensical decision to offer him a contract extension off the back of winning the FA Cup, even though his team had just finished further than ever from a place in the Champions League or a title challenge. The departure of Ashworth feels similar to this, an unnecessary multi-million pound cost based in no small part on the jerking of a knee.
If there is a lesson to learn from all of this, it’s probably that a completely holistic approach is important when running an organisation the size of Manchester United. Ultimately, Old Trafford seems to be as unhappy as ever, and many of the decisions handed down from on high seem to have contributed directly towards this, whether we’re talking about the unsavoury rumours concerning the lack of interest in the women’s team, kicking hundreds of people out of work or the apparent lack of a strategy that they can stick to.
The Glazers might be majority shareholders, but the day to day running of the club is now in the hands of INEOS, and it turns out running one of the biggest football clubs on the planet might not be as straightforward as their billionaire originally thought it might be. Manchester United were a fish rotting from the head down, and ten months into their running of the club it really doesn’t feel as though that much has changed, even taking into account the arrival of Ruben Amirom. The structures still appear to be pretty rotten, and until that radically changes Manchester United may even find his appointment to be little more than the application of yet another sticking plaster. This is a club that it sometimes feels have become a little too used to this sort of wastage.
Accompanying Image byAllen Do fromPixabay.
Unexpected Delirium is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.