Manchester United fans are trapped in the script of an absurd drama
TRAPPED: Manchester United players look dejected after Bournemouth's Marcos Senesi (not pictured) scores their side's third goal of the game. Pic: Martin Rickett/PA Wire.
It is great fun watching Manchester United Football Club at the moment.
That has nothing to do with the quality of the play on offer; instead, it is all about the sheer theatre on view in almost every aspect of the organisation.
There is no soap opera to match the real-life psychodrama that is playing out week after week. It is supposed to be one of the biggest sports clubs in the world, but it is like the set of a TV drama.
Although if a television company or streaming service were to present its viewers with some of the Manchester United storylines in recent years, they would be laughed out of it as simply preposterous. This is a truth much stranger than fiction.
The brutal reality of Manchester United’s decline – apparently unstoppable – is made plain by the words and deeds of its key characters:
First, there are the owners. The American Glazer family bought the club, loaded it with debt, now never come to Old Trafford where they are utterly reviled by fans, but are intent on keeping this unique cash machine tipping away for themselves.
The latest plot twist has seen them find a new way to make money: sell around 25% to a buyer who will take control of “the football operation” for £1.3 billion. What a wheeze!
What makes the story all the better is that the buyer is Jim Ratcliffe. This is supposed to be “a good thing” because Ratcliffe is a devoted fan who is “buying his boyhood club”. The only problem with this spin is that Ratcliffe only recently tried to buy Chelsea. Ah well, may as well ignore that inconvenient truth and pretend it didn’t happen.
Second, working for the owners has been a succession of executives and advisers who they appointed and whose single unifying feature is that they all appear to have had no experience in the industry, learned no real insight, demonstrated no intuitive gift.
Basically, absentee owners have for a decade given the day-the-day running of their club to people who have no demonstrable record of achievement and put them into a structure that redefines the meaning of chaotic. What could possibly go wrong?
Third, and most helpfully, these executives and advisers have provided a superb series of plotlines involving the appointment of managers who are themselves entirely different from each other. David Moyes then Ryan Giggs then Louis Van Gaal then Jose Mourinho then Ole Gunnar Solskjaer then Michael Carrick then Ralf Rangnick then Erik ten Hag. What could offer greater insight into the absence of any governing principle apart from the desire to make money than the decisions to hire that list of managers, one more different than the next?
And as if to make things more interesting, managers were given enough money to buy all around them. The only problem with the spending was that each has wanted to buy almost an entirely new squad of players to “fit with their philosophy.” Which meant buying a load of lads from the middle shelf and – crucially – doing it in such a way as to spend so recklessly close to the deadline as would drive the price of every player to the limit and then beyond.
Clearly, the only way to fix this now is to appoint an expert in cycling. Sure why not. Arise Sir Dave Brailsford!
Fourth, those players. They have been magnificently cast, as well chosen as on the best Reality TV shows. There is not enough space here to do full justice to the layers of their contribution over the past decade of decline.
Recruitment is – as we all know – fundamental to the success of every single enterprise. And so it is that the players bought for Manchester United have repeatedly found new ways to confound those who thought they had seen it all.
Best of it all was the purchase of Ronaldo, back where he announced his greatness, but back as a ghostly presence, there but not really there, a spectre on a plinth.
Then, to liven things up, the appointment of Bruno Fernandes as captain was quite the gambit. His antics could fill a mini-series on their own. And people wonder why the team is “inconsistent”.
Fifth, Alex Ferguson, the ultimate silent brooding reminder in every scene of a Paradise Lost. Supposedly just in the background, except he’s at every match on camera and therefore completely not in the background at all but actually right up-front, a centre-stage reminder of ‘The Way Things Used To Be’.
Sixth, the former greats, off-stage but on-camera. Keane. Neville. Scholes. Weighed down by their medals, desperate to find something positive to say, endlessly disappointed, kind of hilarious in the scale of their everyday despair.
Seventh, the set. To ensure that every act is lived out in the maximum emotion, there is a stage that is nicely decaying, a hulking exercise in nostalgia.
There is a world in which that could be a positive, a world where the stadium could stand as a living monument to greatness, that it could be like Fenway Park is in Boston, a glorious inspiring arena where new legends are made.
But all sense of that collapses when you put a leak in the roof. And then another. Who would have thought it would be that hard to fix a hole in the roof?
And so the heroes that are made, the ones who are inspired by the venue, are those who play for Brighton and Brentford and Bournemouth.
Eight, the neighbours. Manchester City, for so long the kind of next-door tenants who made even United’s mistakes look like successes, are now the ultimate poster boys for what can be bought in modern sport. They now own what was once the preserve of Red Manchester. To compound things, Liverpool, the oldest and most bitter rivals, appoint a manager who is disgustingly likeable. In fact, he’s exactly the man who fans would love to have managing United. But they can never really admit to that love. Especially when he is the only one who can stop City winning and winning and winning.
So United’s fans are left with a choice of seeing City win an unprecedented four-in-a-row of league titles or Liverpool equalling their record of 20 league titles. What a delightful decision to have to make.
The show goes on. Manchester United fans are trapped in the script of an absurd drama. It is properly compelling. And there is no end in sight any time soon.
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