Paul Rouse: Man United’s onfield decline irrelevant when placed beside Greenwood allegations

Manchester United's Mason Greenwood has been suspended by the club

This evening Manchester United play Middlesborough in the FA Cup. It is the club’s last realistic chance of winning a trophy this season. It is true that they have reached the knock-out stages of the Champions League, but it is exceptionally difficult to make a sustainable argument as to how United might win that competition.

The club built to greatness by Busby and then remade by Ferguson lives on, but it is unable to compete with the best teams in England or Europe.

Basically, when you go to Old Trafford now, there is an unmistakeable sense of decay.

Manchester United’s last Premier League match was a 1-0 victory over West Ham United. It was a tense, mediocre arm wrestle between two teams that have the pursuit of fourth place the height of their Premier League ambitions for this season.

Of course, fourth for West Ham would be more or less the biggest achievement for that club since the FA Cup success of 1980.

By contrast, fourth for Manchester United would be the type of success that demonstrates just have far the club has fallen over the past decade.

It is not that it will collapse or disappear or anything like that. The club is too wealthy for that to happen and the legions of fans too numerous. The ferry from Ireland was filled with dozens of supporters; many more flew to the game.

In general, the hotels in Manchester are filled with thousands of visitors who join the locals in support of their club. Soccer is a vital industry in the city. And it is a fascinating and enjoyable experience to go to a match.

Especially if the result is good. The only goal of the game was an injury-time winner by Marcus Rashford. It produced scenes of incredible celebration in the stadium; the release of tension and the outpouring of emotion was immense. It was tinged with relief and more than a hint of desperation.

When the supporters left the ground into the streets of Trafford and down into the city along the canals, they continued to sing hymns of praise to their club.

The last-minute goal against West Ham was deemed to have been scored in ‘Fergie Time’. But the idea of ‘Fergie Time’ and the last-minute victories of Alex Ferguson’s succession of championship-winning teams is as much a relic of the past as the canals are relics of the nineteenth century when Manchester was the ‘workshop of the world’.

The team is not even the sum of its parts. There are a lot of good players in the team and on the bench. Indeed, there are good players who do not even make the match-day squad.

And yet Manchester United are nowhere close to being a good team; often, now, they are not even a functional one.

What makes it all the more stark, is the contrast between the current team and the ones who are still sung about at Old Trafford.

This is a stadium where history can truly be said to be alive and be felt all around – it does so through the presence of Ferguson in the Directors’ area. Corporate and media gigs mean former players such as Gary Pallister and Gary Neville are to be seen walking the passageways.

But history is also to be found packaged for sale in the club shop and at the stalls that line the streets into the stadium. There are replica jerseys, with the name of ‘Sharp’, being sold in the Megastore.

Images of long-retired legends of the club are emblazoned on flags and scarves and on anything else that can be sold. That’s the reality of the commerce of modern sport and is essential to the financial operation of any club that wishes to compete. But in Manchester it serves also as a reminder of just how successful the club has been – and just what a state it is in now.

This column was planned as a nostalgic piece about the experience of going to a match in Old Trafford in post-Ferguson era.

But events have rendered the plan obsolete.

The sporting decline of Manchester United is entirely irrelevant when placed beside the news that has emerged about Mason Greenwood, the club’s star young forward.

Allowing for the right of innocence until proven guilty, this week has brought shame and much else.

The arrest of Greenwood last Sunday evening followed the disclosures on social media of material that was shocking. Greater Manchester Police said they were aware of “social media images and videos posted by a woman reporting incidents of physical violence”, and said the arrest was on suspicion of rape and assault.

For the victim, there is the fact of the attacks, their legacy and now also the scale of publicity that they have brought.

Manchester United – aware of the images and allegations circulating on social media – had announced that “Manchester United does not condone violence of any kind” and, later, that “Mason Greenwood will not return to training or play matches until further notice.”

Greenwood has been associated with Manchester United since he was barely six years old, with the development schools and the academy. His emergence as the youngest player ever to play in the Champions League for the club, one of the youngest ever to play in the Premier League, and various awards as the best player in the club’s youth teams marked him out as the latest of the graduates of a club that prides itself on the introduction of academy players to the first team.

Basically, he was the epitome of how the club saw itself as a nurturer of young talent in a way that no other large club in the world could match.

That Greenwood spent so much time during his formative years in the charge of Manchester United binds the club into what is unfolding in profound ways.

What the club does next really matters. Too often in sport there has been an impulse to “protect the asset”; there can be no prospect of that protection here. Indeed, the reports that Greenwood is being abandoned on social media by teammates, being stood down by sponsors and taken out of video games is his new reality.

At the match in Old Trafford, I was sitting beside a teenage boy who was wearing a ‘Greenwood’ jersey. Greenwood was his idol from the first time he saw him play. 

Greenwood was who he wanted to play like. But now no more.

- Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin.