In my very first piece on this site, a little under a year ago, during the dead of the 2024 NBA offseason, I wrote about the comparisons I saw between two of my favourite sports teams: the Dallas Mavericks and Manchester United.
Dallas is at a crossroads, in my opinion. Considering all the drama over the last few months, the franchise is seemingly all at sea, despite the good fortune in the Draft Lottery. The fanbase is fractured, the roster doesn’t have a clear structure, the ownership is invisible, and the Head coach appears to be flirting with other teams. As I thought about this, the dread slowly grew in my head, and I couldn’t for the life of me shake the notion - I’ve seen this before.
That piece last year was a frivolous one in hindsight, that naively tried to draw parallels between the players at the two clubs that I spend most of my time rooting for. I was hyped for the start of the new Premier League season and a newly minted member of the Mavs Moneyball crew. In my mind, it fit the bill. The events of February 1st and all that followed have only cemented that notion in my head. These clubs have eerily similar trajectories based on their recent history, and that’s definitely not a good thing.
Before I elaborate further on why that is the case, let me give you a small history lesson about my European football fandom and, probably, about Manchester United as well. I’m aware that most people know of the Premier League and United, and this might seem like we’re rehashing known history, but sometimes, to get to the point, you need to understand the events that led to it.
If there is one thing older than my love for Basketball, it is my love for European football. I started watching it in 1997 and never looked back. That was the year that Arsenal won the Premier League, and most of my family, at least the ones who could care about football, all support Arsenal. So, one could logically conclude that I would have followed suit and become a diehard fan of the Gunners. (Thank all the higher powers that have ever existed that it never happened that way.)
In my youthful eyes, though, Arsenal were the big powerhouse of the league and the bullies. I found myself drawn to the “underdog” United team. This was before the Internet made information readily accessible to all. I never knew that Manchester United was a historical juggernaut that had a rich legacy of winning in England and Europe. In fact, I didn’t even know that United had won the Premier League in four out of the five seasons that preceded the 1997 season. I just rooted for them because they were fun to watch. I was nine years old. That’s all that mattered to me.
My nascent fascination with the team was validated the following season when Manchester United won the treble – A historical achievement at the time for an English club. The treble, which consists of the League Title (the Premier League), the League Cup (the FA Cup) and the European Cup (the UEFA Champions League), is an undeniably difficult endeavour which involves maintaining focus and form for at least 60 games across all competitions – Something that’s been achieved in England only by United’s crosstown rivals Manchester City (a club that NBA Insider Marc Stein has professed to being a fan of) since 1999, with City achieving the feat in 2023. Imagine the mind of an eleven-year-old Sudarshan at the end of May in 1999 after watching the club he had just started supporting win the lot, as the Brits would say.
Bayern Munich v Manchester United Photo by John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images
From that point in 1999 till the early 10s, Manchester United would remain the dominant club in English football and matched in Europe only by the likes of Real Madrid and Barcelona. United would win eight Premier League titles, one FA Cup, three Carabao Cups and one UEFA Champions League title in that time, not to mention the finals that they had been to and couldn’t make it over the line (Those two Champions League finals losses against Messi and Barcelona still hurt) – An unprecedented amount of winning for a fanbase to experience. Success wasn’t something a Manchester United fan hoped for. It was something they expected.
However, despite all the success on the pitch, the rumblings behind the scenes weren’t all sunshine and daisies. In 2005, United were bought by the American Glazer family, also the owners of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The actual story of how everything went down is worth an ESPN 30 for 30 video by itself, involving the manager at the time, Sir Alex Ferguson, the two majority shareholders at the club and a horse called ‘Rock of Gibraltar’. Yes, really.
The deal was a record at the time, costing 800 million GBP – but there was a catch. The Glazer family only supplied around 250 million of that from their pocket, with the rest being borrowed from various sources. In a move foreshadowing their weasel-like nature, the Glazers then put most of the debt on the club in a leveraged takeover – something that has since been banned by the Premier League in the years that followed.
In an instant, Manchester United went from being debt-free and one of the richest football clubs in the world to being saddled with over 500 million GBP of debt from ownership – a move so unpopular with the fanbase that it sparked widespread protests from various fan groups around Manchester.
At the time, I didn’t have much of an opinion. I was a 17-year-old international fan of the club. While there was certainly an affection there, I wasn’t as invested as a local Mancunian who had grown up following the club. The matter of ownership didn’t affect my fandom. I was more worried about the rise of Chelsea, now backed by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and helmed by Jose Mourinho. I cared about the players on the pitch. The likes of Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic were the ones I focused on. Not who owned my team.
The real downfall wouldn’t begin until the 2013-2014 season, though. Till then, even after the Glazer purchase, United remained successful because of the leadership of Sir Alex Ferguson on the pitch and David Gill off it. Sir Alex, a legendary manager revered by the fanbase, was the architect who resurrected Manchester United at the start of the 90s and made it the global icon that it remains today. He built the team around youth and opportunistic purchases of key players, which, when combined with his tactical versatility, allowed United to transform into a team greater than the sum of its parts. It was his immense ability as a coach and a manager that allowed the club to flourish in the manner that it had for the greater part of three decades.
At the end of the 2012-2013 season, Sir Alex announced his retirement from football, capping off an unprecedented twenty-six-year run at the football club. This was swiftly followed by news of David Gill stepping down from his post as United CEO, overseeing all commercial affairs.
What followed was a decade-plus of abject misery that continues to this day.
FBL-ENG-US-MANUTD-GLAZER-FILER Photo by PETER MUHLY/AFP via Getty Images
Tampa Bay Buccaneers v Buffalo Bills Photo by Rich Barnes/Getty Images
Avram Glazer, Dallas Cowboys vs Tampa Bay Buccaneers Set Number: X81317 TK1 R2 F38
Malcolm Glazer and his spawn – Joel and Avram Glazer, in their infinite wisdom, replaced David Gill with Ed Woodward as the group’s operational head. Woodward, a financial executive who played a key role in the leveraged takeover of United back in 2005, had worked his way up the ladder at the club on the commercial side. He was, rightly, credited with the rise of Manchester United as a commercial giant, with club revenues boosted year-on-year, making the club one of the top earners from sponsorship deals and other financial ventures.
He wasn’t a football expert, though.
The way that football clubs generally work is that you have the Manager, the person who is responsible for the on-field product – Tactics, Training, Game Management, Media, etc. They are usually backed up by a Sporting Director, the equivalent of an NBA GM. The Sporting Director oversees Transfers, Squad Building, and Organisational Strategy. There are ancillary roles at the club, like the Director of Youth Development, who oversees the youth academy, as European football follows an academy model and not a unified draft model like it is in America.
Sir Alex, over his years at the club, had evolved to become a hybrid of the two roles – part Manager and part Sporting Director. He had help from the likes of David Gill and Peter Kenyon when it came to negotiating transfers and player contracts, but it was his authority and his voice that carried through the club – a singular vision that allowed for a streamlined organisation. This worked when he was running the show. It would not work when he was replaced by the likes of Ed Woodward and David Moyes, Ferguson’s handpicked successor as the club manager.
Woodward, being the money guy, thought that throwing money around in the transfer market equated to winning. His lack of footballing knowledge and acumen led to him relying on flash signings and big-name purchases, regardless of fit, to pacify the fanbase that was growing restless with the continued lack of success. His arrogance at being at the helm of the richest football club in the world led him to make the now (in)famous quotes:
Manchester City v Manchester United - Carabao Cup: Semi Final Photo by Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images
“We can do things in the transfer market that other clubs can only dream of. Watch this space,”
“Playing performance doesn’t really have a meaningful impact on what we can do on the commercial side of the business.”
The likes of Bastian Schweinsteiger, Angel Di Maria, Paul Pogba, Anthony Martial and Romelu Lukaku were signed for absurd sums of money and only comprise a fraction of the names that passed through Old Trafford without affecting the club’s fortunes on the pitch. In total, Woodward’s signings since he took charge amount to close to a billion GBP, with little to nothing to show for it. In addition to this, the Interest payments of more than a billion GBP only mired the club deeper in debt, rendering Woodward’s successes in the Commercial arena moot.
It’s not only the players that were brought in that were the problem. Where they (the players) failed or couldn’t be bothered, the managers faced the firing squad. David Moyes was swiftly replaced by Louis Van Gaal, who lasted 2 seasons. Van Gaal was then succeeded by Jose Mourinho, hoping that the “Special One” would bring the good times back. Spoiler Alert – He didn’t. Mourinho would last 144 games in charge before he, too, was sacked. The return of club icon Ole Gunnar Solskjaer brought life, for a time, to a club mired under a cloud of negativity, but his time in charge was also short-lived, lasting a little more than three seasons. Erik Ten Hag was the latest in a long line of unsuccessful managerial appointments, with uninspiring play executed by underwhelming player signings brought in by an uninterested ownership that placed their faith in an unqualified director.
Olympiacos FC v Manchester United - UEFA Champions League Round of 16 Photo by Michael Regan/Getty Images
FBL-ENG-PR-MAN UTD-SOUTHAMPTON Photo by OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images
Tottenham Hotspur v Manchester United - Premier League - Wembley Photo by John Walton/PA Images via Getty Images
Watford v Manchester United - Premier League Photo by Mark Leech/Offside/Offside via Getty Images
To be fair to Woodward, the issues during most of Ten Hag’s time as manager stemmed from the ineptitude of Woodward’s successors, Richard Arnold and John Murtough. Neither of them reached the dizzying heights of arrogance and incompetence exhibited by Ed Woodward, but both were the final note in the death knell of a global sporting icon.
Yes, Manchester United is under new leadership now, with the Glazers having sold a 29% stake in the club to petrochemical giant INEOS, led by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who’s brought in his own seemingly more-qualified leadership in Omar Berrada and Jason Wilcox, who seem inclined to a total course correction. The results under newly appointed manager Ruben Amorim don’t seem promising to start, but the club has a direction it’s committed to, for what that’s worth. It doesn’t change the facts, though.
An entire generation of United fans who grew up accustomed to continued success have spent more than a decade railing against the Glazer ownership and their failings, both on and off the pitch. It’s reached a point where most fans feel disenfranchised with something they used to love with all their heart. Not a United game goes by where you don’t hear the chants of “We want Glazers out”, and that’s not just from the home fans at Old Trafford. It extends to the numerous fans at away games, often the more vociferous in their protests due to being smaller in number (Old Trafford seats 74,000 fans; Fans in the away ends vary anywhere from 1,500 to 5,000 fans).
Manchester United v Liverpool FC - Premier League Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images
It has led to a malaise that has settled over the fanbase and on the pitch. An inexorable curse which has divided the once united supporters, with lines drawn between those who believe that the only way out of the rut is to commit to the path that has proven unsuccessful before and those who posit that a hard reset is required. What used to be friendly discussions and debates about the club have turned into toxic arguments. Club legends like Gary Neville, who grew up at the club and was an integral part of the “Class of ‘92” that revived United’s fortunes, spends most of his days lobbing scathing criticism of the Glazer ownership and their role in the club’s downfall in their roles as a pundit for Sky Sports.
All this comes back to the Dallas Mavericks and the warning signs that are there for those who can see if they care to look. A disconnected ownership backing a misguided front office executive so convinced of his superior intellect, disenchanted franchise icons who have been sidelined and have chosen to stay away in silent protest, and a disheartened fanbase that is divided and constantly at war with each other. Sure, there are differences that one could point to, because the circumstances of each sport and culture are different, but it all feels the same.
The Mavericks fanbase has, in the space of four months, gone from total positivity, buoyed by more-or-less two decades of continued franchise success, where there was a general faith in the club that it would find its way, to being lost and divided. Yes, there were back-office missteps along the way. Yes, there were times when everyone railed against Mark Cuban and his outmoded team-building strategy and his penny-pinching during the post-title era. There was always the team that brought everyone together, though.
2021 NBA Playoffs -Dallas Mavericks v LA Clippers Photo by Juan Ocampo/NBAE via Getty Images
The Luka Doncic trade eviscerated that. It turned the whole Mavericks ecosystem into a fog of negativity that I’m not sure the arrival of Cooper Flagg can dispel. The franchise feels limp and rudderless, helmed by a front office that can’t seem to get out of its way and hated by a betrayed fanbase, which is leaning towards apathy at what they perceive as a lack of direction.
For me, as a fan of Manchester United, I’ve spent the past decade listening to the club I love become the butt of all jokes – An utter laughingstock in the football fraternity. It’s gotten to the point where there are times when I can’t summon the energy to feel dejected at the losses or get angry when someone cracks a joke at the club’s expense. I just feel numb. Detached. Dispirited. I’ll always look forward to the next season because, in a lot of ways, it’s the club that I chose to love and support – I don’t know anything else. The joy just slips away a little more with every season, though.
I just hope that the same doesn’t happen to the Mavericks fanbase. Falling into apathy would mean the normalization of the incompetence that has been on display for the past few months, and that would be a damn shame. Learn from history, fellow Mavericks fans. Stand together, engage each other positively, and demand accountability from the franchise. Those are the only things that are in our control.
NBA: FEB 08 Dallas Mavericks Fans Protest Photo by Austin McAfee/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images