On Sunday, Aston Villa, fifth in the table, perhaps drained after Wednesday’s euphoric win over Bayern Munich, drew 0-0 against a lower mid-table side. Under normal circumstances that wouldn’t get the pulses racing, particularly not on a day when Brighton came from 2-0 down to beat Tottenham and Chelsea against Nottingham Forest degenerated into a 15-man melee. But this is Manchester United we’re talking about.
At some point, perhaps, the fascination will fade, but more than 11 years since Sir Alex Ferguson left, the soap opera remains as compelling as ever. How can the most successful team in English league history, the club with the highest average attendances, have got things so badly, so consistently, wrong? The basic law of football is that money rises, that the rich eventually prevail: for United to defy that basic truth for so long represents a remarkable commitment to mismanagement.
There’s no doubt a sense of schadenfreude from many who remember the relentless United of the late 90s, but there is also something more universal: this is Henry VI or Succession, an eternal tale of the elite bickering and squabbling and getting everything wrong. It’s failure, but failure elevated to a pitch of comedy because of the gilded nature of those involved. Mundane draws against Twente or Villa shouldn’t be gripping, and yet they are.
When things first began to go awry, the camera would habitually cut to Ferguson glowering in the stand, a dread reminder of glories past. But there is a new target, the grim-faced bespectacled bald men, what the Irish journalist Dion Fanning memorably termed “the politburo of bullshit”, who have been installed to run the football side of the business after Sir Jim Ratcliffe took over roughly a quarter of the club in February.
So far their revolution seems to have consisted of little more than redundancies, insisting on an end to working from home despite a lack of office space and reducing staff privileges, making life generally less pleasant for those who work at Old Trafford, while begging for public money to build a new stadium. So far the new ownership appears to be much the same as the old ownership, just nastier.
Much easier, it turns out, to turn hospitality suites into makeshift offices, or to hand out fewer packed lunches to staff, than actually to make the big call and replace a manager who looks increasingly unlikely to turn things around. The front cover of the fanzine United We Stand seemed apt, Erik ten Hag standing off centre, domed head bowed characteristically, as the rain pours down all around him.
This is the paradoxical curse of Ferguson: because it took him time, every subsequent United manager must be given time because nobody wants to answer the question of what might have happened had Mark Robins not scored that famous winner in the FA Cup against Nottingham Forest in 1990, had Ferguson been sacked before winning his first trophy at the end of that season, his fourth campaign at the club.
How, the question now is, could Ten Hag have been so impressive at Ajax? How could he have led that side to within seconds of a Champions League final? How could they have beaten Juventus and Real Madrid so thrillingly? How can you go from that to a team that is habitually cut open, a team that so completely defies the modern dictum that success is born of being compact? But then no player from that Ajax side that reached the Champions League semi-final in 2019, not even Frenkie de Jong, has really kicked on to become the player it looked as though they might – and that’s not just true of those who have ended up at Manchester United.
Perhaps Ajax itself, its years of tradition, of doing things in a particular way, brings its own cohesion. Perhaps there was something in that combination of players that just worked, an internal balance that needed little guidance. By the end of Ten Hag’s final season at Ajax, although they did win the league for the third time in four years, there were defensive issues: they kept three clean sheets in the final 12 games. Nobody paid too much attention – Jürgen Klopp’s final months at Borussia Dortmund, for instance, were far worse – but there was perhaps a warning there.
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Just as Ajax, vipers’ nest of egos as it can at times appear, brought coherence, perhaps United does the opposite. Ten Hag is far from alone in finding the club degenerating into a swirl of confusion around him; United may have won 20 league titles, but those championships have come under only three managers. And history shows that between Ernest Mangnall and Sir Matt Busby, and between Busby and Ferguson, there was chaos, disappointment and acrimony. The soap opera goes on.
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This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Jonathan will answer your questions in next week’s edition: if you have a question for him, email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, or reply directly to this email, and he’ll answer the best.