This is how it ends. Not with bangs and whistles, nor with high-profile clashes between senior players and reports of training ground bust-ups. But with the dispiriting mood of resignation that comes with another sorry defeat against a better organised, better coached and better prepared opponent.
Do not let their current guise fool you: Manchester United’s team is packed full of excellent players who have been made to look ordinary by the system and environment in which they operate.
Manchester United wanted this to work but wanting something badly is never enough. And United wanted this to work because having a club legend manager, and that manager reaching his peak at the club where he was so loved, represented something unique. It suggested that there was something deep within Old Trafford that made them special.
They had tried gun-for-hire managers and here was their refreshing antidote. Unfortunately, logic, sense and coaching ability rules. United are not unique. They are a rich club in a league of rich clubs where your failings will be exploited if you leave them exposed.
Hopefully they have learnt that lesson now, although it takes a double dose of optimism to believe in that today. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer leaves his beloved club with them closer to the bottom of the Premier League than the top. His legacy as a popular individual, as someone close to United’s heart, is not in doubt.
But he is proof that good intentions are less powerful than successful experience and tactical acumen. If that sounds a little harsh, those are the standards by which we should judge financial superclubs and their managers.
Over the last few months, Manchester United’s players have come in for a huge wave of criticism from their own supporters. These players are underperforming; nobody is suggesting any different. But good managers make good players better, not worse.
If anything else was true, there would be no benefit in having an excellent coach at all; you would simply pile more and more players on top of each other and wait for it to click. And that is effectively what Manchester United have done. They became a control experiment for the benefits of high-level coaching.
This is not all on Solskjaer; again, nobody is really arguing that. Somewhere along the way Manchester United got lost. They probably placed too much focus on sponsorship and marketing deals (although they insist otherwise).
They probably didn’t have an effective succession plan in place post-Alex Ferguson and in case his replacement didn’t work out. They were too easily bewitched by Solskjaer’s short-term hit after Jose Mourinho’s scorched earth exit. And they were too slow to accept Solskjaer’s own failings.
They have become a transfer market magpie, chasing after glamorous signings because they can, not because they have identified a system into which they would fit snugly. And they are learning the hard way the fallacy of each of those missteps.
But criticising United’s hierarchy is not the same as defending Solskjaer. If he did indeed repair the mood post-Mourinho, he also leaves the club in a lower position than his predecessor and failed to win a trophy. That rebuilt mood has also evaporated in recent weeks as he struggled to integrate new signings and lacked the courage to change the team to address the slump.
He is sold as a decent man who wanted the best for his club, but is that not the absolute minimum we expect from every manager? If your greatest strength is not actively wanting to undermine your employer, or simply being an antidote to your predecessor, that itself is telling.
Where Manchester United go next says everything about the issues within the club’s structure. More sensible and savvy clubs have succession plans in place in case of emergency – do they? Appointing a caretaker before a permanent manager suggests that United lacked such a plan.
The timing is instructive too: we could all see where this was going and yet United waited until one game after an extended break – during which other clubs changed managers – and a fortnight after Antonio Conte left the job market.
That is the sign of a broken club, a complacent club or an arrogant club. It’s hard to know which camp Manchester United sit in, but this episode has proven that they have no VIP pass to trophies or Champions League participation.
English football is not a meritocracy – money matters too much for that – but there are plenty enough apex predators and ambitious, forward-thinking owners to leave a superclub grasping at its own identity.
There is a natural floor for Manchester United – the wealth, the history and the clout all ensure that. But United are a club that for decades judged themselves by their short distance from their lofty natural ceiling rather than their floor and they are lying in the gutter staring at the stars. The most damning indictment is that nobody really seems to know how they get back to their feet.
This is an extract of The Score newsletter, Daniel Storey’s weekly verdict on all 20 Premier League teams’ performances. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox every Monday morning
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3kWcetE
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