Time for Man U to clean house

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This article was published 11/03/2022 (1643 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manchester United are bad.

Should they lose Saturday at home to Spurs (10:30 a.m., NBC & DAZN), and West Ham beat Aston Villa on Sunday, they’ll be seventh in table at kickoff against Atletico Madrid next week in the Champions League — the only cup competition in which they’re still involved.

Seventh. It’s where they finished in 2014, 12 months after the legendary and serial-winning Sir Alex Ferguson retired with 27 years’ tenure and a bulging trophy cabinet.

No club has recorded a higher net spend on playing personnel post-Fergie, and yet United are exactly where they were that spring when David Moyes was sacked and Ryan Giggs appointed player-manager in an unremarkable end to his own illustrious career.

They’re stuck in a time warp — a perilous place to be when football continues to evolve, and quickly. And a lot of evolution can happen in nine years, whether in formations, tactics, skillsets, training or technology, or in everything at once.

That awkward disconnect a viewer may feel in watching United and then almost any other team is actually the strangeness of the past, a film in black and white in the age of colour. It won’t be up for Best Picture this year. It already won it, quite some time ago.

In a moment when advanced stats supply the minutiae of a football match in real time to even casual fans, the Red Devils are subject to that most embarrassing chorus of contemporary condemnation: they don’t play modern football.

It’s why, in a rare flash of self-awareness, the club hired the professorial Ralf Rangnick to provide the lessons they hoped might catch them up. But it was too late for that. They’d already spent more than a billion pounds acquiring this player and that, with no coherent strategy, in wild attempts to somehow “get back” to the days of Ferguson and all those glories.

Never mind that they can no longer “get back” while trying to shift their gaze to the future. Goalkeeper David De Gea and, astonishingly, defender Phil Jones remain the only direct ties to the title-winning side of 2013. Even the repatriation of Cristiano Ronaldo was little more than frantic flail to somehow establish a tangible link to history.

There is simply no returning to where Ferguson left off. “Post-Fergie” was five years ago. That ship has sailed—and was sunk by the sabotage of former executive vice-chairman and glorified accountant Ed Woodward.

But there’s really no point in looking back on Woodward’s tenure, either, and that was just last month. No, the only way is forward. And it shouldn’t be too difficult.

The wonderful thing about “forward” is you’re always going there, only it’s easier to go willingly than be sulkingly dragged along. And it really is easier, especially when you have both the resources of Manchester United and the numerous examples of successful, rival clubs to adopt as templates.

It’s actually more difficult, and far more expensive, to be nostalgic, to be constantly fixing roads when your younger, healthier competitors have already switched to bicycles.

United are in a place they don’t want to be. They need to take the easy way out. And the easiest, most obvious way to go about it is to start from as close to scratch as possible.

Every member of the first-team squad who has been with the club more than two years must go. Some players, such as Fred, Harry Maguire and Aaron Wan-Bissaka, will have to avoid the door hitting them on their way out. Others, such as Scott McTominay, Marcus Rashford and Paul Pogba, will leave rather more mixed feelings behind them. And yes, De Gea and Ronaldo should go, too. The nonsensical deadweight of Jones, Juan Mata and Nemanja Matic are already as good as gone.

Next, promote the standout academy prospects. Alejandro Garnacho, Alvaro Fernandez, Shola Shoretire and Zidane Iqbal have already taken the U-18s to the FA Youth Cup final, and keeping James Garner instead of sending him out on loan would be sensible as well.

Then, simply do what Liverpool and Manchester City have already done and appoint a technical director who knows what they’re doing. And don’t make it complicated. There are plenty to poach, and United have the money to pay them. Guiseppe Marotta at Inter Milan, Michael Zorc of Dortmund, Sevilla’s Monchi… any will do. Michael Emenalo did well at Chelsea and is currently out of work. Pick up the phone and give him the job.

Finally, allow that technical director to acquire an entirely new squad and, crucially, hire the next manager. Maybe it’ll be a teacher like Erik ten Hag, or perhaps, at least for starters, an experienced football diplomat such as Carlo Ancelotti.

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In other words, just examine what the best teams in Europe are doing right now and copy them. A new, true-United identity can come later, and it does not have to look like it did in the 1990s.

Looking backward in futile efforts to replicate the past can only fail, as you’ll never see the reflection you crave. And if that’s where they continue to look, United will continue to suffer, to finish seventh, to be bad.

But there’s a better, simpler way, a way forward. And given their resources and what is still a decent academy, it should be easier for them to be good.

jerradpeters@gmail.com

Twitter @JerradPeters