If you are reading this article, I assume you are an intelligent football fan, because I don’t know of many blithering idiots who stumble onto The Trivela Effect. No, no, usually those trolls end up somewhere like Diario Gol or Don Balon while they fiddle with their dial-up connection.
Because you are an intelligent football fan, you acknowledge that Manchester United are indeed bad. Very bad. In fact, they are so horrendous that it almost defies belief that a club that has given the world so many of the finest footballers of all time – Cristiano Ronaldo, Paul Scholes, Nemanja Vidic, David Beckham, Eric Cantona, Bobby Charlton, Ryan Giggs, Wayne Rooney, George Best, Denis Irwin, Roy Keane…OK I’ll stop now – could be such an abject failure in 2025.
It has been more than a decade since Manchester United were actually relevant in a Premier League title race when in the decade prior, they were the most succcesful team at stocking up league titles.
Manchester United HAVE spent
They do invest in their squad. You can’t look at the last summer transfer windows and say that Manchester United haven’t tried to back their managers by signing expensive players like Jadon Sancho, Antony, Rasmus Hojlund, Joshua Zirkzee, Manuel Ugarte, and Leny Yoro as well as the likes of Bryan Mbeumo, Matheus Cunha, and Benjamin Sesko this past summer.
Manchester United have spent beyond what rival clubs have been willing to spend on these same players, and while the footballers they signed were great before Man United and even great after – Sancho made a Champions League Final on loan and Antony was the best player not named “Kylian Mbappe” or “Lamine Yamal” in La Liga for the second half of the 2024/25 season – they were irredeemably crap at Old Trafford.
Listen, Manchester United do heed their fans. They sign top players. They sign top young players. They hire new managers. They do give them more time than the rabble-rousers want, as with Erik ten Hag and everyone’s favorite bus driver Ole, but they are also willing to fire people when it’s clear things aren’t working.
Yet they never work. Jose Mourinho didn’t get time, even though he finished second with an embarrassingly bad squad. They tried to promote from within with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, but he didn’t have the tactical acumen. Ten Hag was touted as a genius at Ajax, but he rubbed everyone the wrong way by the end of his tenure. Does anyone even remember Louis van Gaal?
What is Man United’s identity? (Where’s Bueller?)
Now it’s Ruben Amorim coaching Manchester United, and as the Red Devil supporters bask in the utter downfall of sewage that is a first-round League Cup exit at the hands of whatever on earth a “Grimsby” is, all the years of failures come to ahead in a singular moment to leave them in a *record scratch* moment of just how this all happened.
And it’s incredibly complicated, yet it all boils down to one thing – and it is the one thing clubs that rebound from bad seasons or bad periods like Real Madrid (they were a meme in 2018/19…even Ten Hag humbled them), Barcelona (remember the Ronald Koeman days?), and even Bayern Munich (a bad season for them is not winning the league by double-digits).
Manchester United don’t have an identity. They buy the players. They hire all the up-and-coming new managers everyone wants like Ten Hag and Amorim. And what they have to show for it is nothing because there is no sense to what they are doing.
Barcelona know exactly how they want to play. Real Madrid know exactly who they are, to the point where they say they have a certain “DNA” and identify specific traits mentally in the players they go for.
Bayern? They are so full of themselves it is nauseating, but they know that they are all about dominating their opponents in a certain way and settle for nothing less than players who are comfortable and confident enough on the ball to do that.
They used to have ‘Heritage’, you know…
Manchester United will buy anyone and hire anyone. There is no philosophy top-down that dictates what Manchester United do, who they buy, or what playing style they prefer.
Jose Mourinho’s infamous “Football Heritage” press conference was so prescient because he could see that as much as he was trying to instill a new identity focused on winning at all costs at Old Trafford, there was great resistance internally to that and more of a focus on the commercial aspects that, as anyone will tell you, are ultimately doomed to fail if your team are pathetically losing every season.
Manchester United had no identity beyond “have fun and vibes” under Ole, which then devolved into a Draconian “play ugly but still lose” mantra that was apparently the edict of Ten Hag’s time, because I sincerely cannot tell you what his tactics were.
And now, Manchester United are saddled with Amorim, who is so stubborn in his rigid 3-5-2 or 3-4-3 system that it’s come at the cost of his best player’s production and best role. More importantly, it’s come at the cost of even worse results than under Ten Hag, with Amorim winning on par with legendary relegation specialist Neil Warnock.
Amorim is the latest young, arrogant Manchester United manager to deploy tactics that have never worked at the top level, rigidly stick to them, and force his existing players to conform to them…or get out.
It’s the strategy Ten Hag used to doom Manchester United, and it’s one that Amorim is so smugly utilizing, not realizing he is putting his club in the exact same sitaution that his predecessor did with the exact same results – if not worse – to show for it.
What Manchester United have to do is put the club before any individual manager or player. They have to forget about the short-term results, which, ironically enough, Ten Hag and Amorim said themselves, but their own egoes couldn’t enable them to heed their own advice for themselves as managers.
So Manchester United, as a club, have to step in and do it. They should have stuck with Ruud van Nistelrooy, a legend who knows the identity and past of the club and isn’t an inexperienced pushover like Ole. They need a real, respected leader and not a self-proclaimed savant who dominated a smaller league.
Where have the Ronaldos and Rooneys gone?
They need an identity, and that starts with going back to their roots and what made Manchester United so special. They were a club built on homegrown stars and the world’s best players – like Cristiano, Rooney, and Vidic – BEFORE they became the world’s best players.
Who on Manchester United right now fits that bill when you look across the entire XI? Who did they sign who was already touted as a special player or who is currently a world-class player? The answer is nobody. Maybe Yoro in the upside department and Fernandes before him at Sporting, but certainly nobody close to the quality of a Cristiano or Rooney as a youngster.
And you may think “well, not everyone is as good as Rooney or Ronaldo,” and while you’d be right, those are the players Manchester United consistently had every year in the 90s and 00s when they were THE force to be reckoned with in Engilsh football under Sir Alex Ferguson.
Their identity, thus, was about winning, excellence, and having talented squads. Their identity now reeks of ego, mismanagement, desperation, and rigidly sticking to someone else’s flawed ideas. Until that changes drastically and until the right hire can change the culture with a mindset to put Manchester United before himself, the Red Devils will remain devilishly dreadful.
Joe Soriano is the editor of The Trivela Effect and a FanSided Hall of Famer who has covered world football since 2011. He’s led top digital communities like The Real Champs (Real Madrid) and has contributed to sites covering Tottenham, Liverpool, Juventus, and Schalke. Joe’s work has appeared in ESPN, Bleacher Report, and Sports Illustrated. He also helped manage NFL Spin Zone and Daily DDT, covering the NFL and pro wrestling, respectively.