Greg Gordon, I work as a football scout for a professional club in Scotland and also provide player information for club
Updated May 1, 2017
I’d have to say no. Not in say, the next five years and probably not in the next decade (as a guess).
People with longer memories will not be as confident about Man United’s prospects as some of the other younger Quorans who will inevitably answer in a positive way, due to a lack of context.
The reason is that we’ve been here before many times. When an empire-building manager moves on he ususally can’t be replaced for years, maybe decades. Their blueprint is a moment in time, held in their brain and is the product of special chemistry between key people, charismatic leadership and a holistic view of how, what, where, why and when important things need done .
This is not the modern process and data-driven business school model. And with the public schoolboys at the helm most places, it explains why managers don’t get the opportunity to remake a club top to bottom as Sir Alex Ferguson did. And it explains the unseemly power grab at United by the men in the Hugo Boss ties.
Few clubs, Liverpool being a notable exception after Shankly, handle regime change well when it is due. And Liverpool did it, back in the late 1970s and 1980s, with their bootroom (a coaching succession plan that mirrored the stealthy recruitment of one key signining per season and a handful of players in and out). And that was in another era. a generation ago. Not now.
But football doesn’t work, it can’t work, if the people making the decisions are not football people (or at least people who have learned football) but corporate people, mired in the double-speak of branding and shareholder value.
But I think most people of fair mind would agree that the soul has been ripped out of United in the last four years under Moyes, Louis Van Gaal and now Jose Mourinho.
What was unique about United as a football club was a romantic spirit, a vision of playing, a family atmosphere despite the club’s massive size, a club with a human touch and a sense of place.
Now United are no different to a whole host of corporate clubs - a product of the boardroom rather than the dressing room. The players are ‘onfield assets’ and the good sense ‘say what you see’ culture has been replaced by people with reams of stats to back up their viewpoint but no feel, no soul and no eyes.
Mourinho should never have gone to Old Trafford he is the acme of everything that is not United. Moyes was too embattled and too paranoid to embrace the size of challenge he faced. Louis van Gaal lacked fundamental human warmth and a vision appropriate to United’s history.
This season we’re getting a deathly 0–0 draw at Man City being spun as acceptable in a game where United saw less of the ball than in any game since 2003, when OPTA began recording stats. The home team, Man City completed 117 passes in the final third in second half. United: 7.
United have also had 13 draws in the league this season, which puts them second in Europe’s top five leagues for stalemates in 2016/17. In other words it is the profile of a Europa League side, at best, a team that are hard to beat but lack the quality to either play poorly and win or indeed to turn on the ‘United style’, especially late in games.
But somehow, this embracing of mediocrity is being spun as progress. Winning the Europa League (and that is no given) will be hailed like the attainment of a fourth European Cup/Champions League trophy. And sadly, a load of fans will lap that up as same.
I love the smell of corporate, expectation management in the morning especially when it comes together. But there are a few things that can’t be spun in terms of football.
Without even discussing the bumnote recruitment of Moyes and LVG we have £90m for Paul Pogba. £30m+ for Eric Bailly. £35m for Henrikh Mkhitaryan. And the best performers are the old stagers Carrick and Valencia and the free transfer Zlatan. That United made nothing of Angel Di Maria and are making’less than nothing’ of Luke Shaw is just as damning.
The current mantra is United have been undone by injuries and have 15 fit players, but here’s the thing. Every other club in the world could get a fit, competitive team on the park at any level with United’s resources.
And you know...Mourinho hasn't even introduced himself to his scouts yet, his greatest potential asset. Can you imagine Fergie doing that? I can’t.
But Mourinho doesn’t need to I suppose when his agent friends and the suits are carving it all up for themselves.
Of course, if it was as easy as just throwing money at a manager and off the peg stars United would be sorted already, business as usual. But there’s no ‘magic spreadsheet’, no Man United For Dummies manual to follow.
Writing in a wholly different context, Martin Luther King Jr. claimed “There is nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity”. It is a phrase as relevant to modern football clubs as it is to the history of race relations.
I think this is the culture of Ed Woodward’s Man United and corporate Britain generally, from where it draws its professional class.
Football today, and not just at Old Trafford, is like a bad game of Football Manager and United is a viper's nest club now. it could go on for years.
