There are lots of reasons for why we are where we currently find ourselves. The three main reasons for me are:
1. The loss of a winning culture within the dressing room. Far too many players who think simply wearing the Manchester United shirt means you’ve made it. We don’t have enough leaders, players who will demand 100% from their teammates and lead by example. Our players go into hiding when the chips are down, they lack courage, fight, and desire. That is why they are able to be up for it against the bigger sides, but more often than not, seem half-hearted against the smaller sides.
Trying to fix this has been every manager’s downfall since Jose Mourinho. I think the way the team got torn apart and dismantled under LvG left the dressing room without leaders and identity, and we’ve never managed to rebuild a winning mentality since. Jose realised this and tried to change it, but his methods were too harsh and it turned toxic. Ole tried a different approach and it seemed to work to a point, but ultimately, it was too soft.
Rangnick said the side needed open heart surgery. EtH probably did the best job of instilling some standards in terms of effort and expectations, but recruitment under him was very hit and miss, and he had too much loyalty to certain players which combined with him not being particularly approachable meant things started to slide. Now Amorim is saying the same things many previous managers have said both during their time here and after they left. He comes across far more balanced than previous managers, he’s approachable and likeable, able to get the players onside like Ole in some ways, but he’s not soft, he has standards and will demand the best from the players like Jose and EtH.
However, this isn’t something that is entirely solvable by coaching or how the manager interacts with the players. Fixing this also requires the club to be ruthless, weeding out the bad eggs and players who have a negative influence on the dressing room, while also recruitment needs to be focused more on players’ attitudes and mentality. We need to bring in leaders, players who will help instil a winning mentality and culture. This is the hardest problem to fix and will take the longest time to solve. It also has to be done right.
2. The second issue is the squad, I’ve said many times we have a Frankenstein squad, cobbled together from a mishmash of parts brought in under different managers with different playing philosophies and ideologies. Along with what seemed to be some odd “club” signings that seemed to come from someone else at the club with an unknown motivation for those signings.
This means trying to find a playing identity that gets the best out of all the players is utterly impossible. While managers have been able to find a style that has worked for them to point, this has always fallen down once they lose one or two players from their starting line up as the replacements just cannot do the same job as the player who is out.
These managers have had to build teams around trying to get the most out of key individuals and has therefore been reliant on individual performances, rather than a unified team identity that is reliant on all the players knowing and being able to play their role and as long as the majority of them do so then the team performance will be good.
Fixing this issue is difficult as again it requires a rebuild of the squad to bring in players all capable of playing a specific way to the standard we need. This will take 3 or 4 transfer windows and probably promoting half a dozen youth players to plug the gaps. That’s a strategic whole club approach to both coaching, recruitment, and how the academy prepares our young players for the first team.
In terms of what that means for our current squad, well it means that we have to train them to play as a team, something none of them have had to really do in their United careers. While previous managers have come in with trying to get them to play as a team, they all gave up and ultimately relied on them playing well as individuals.
Could Amorim get better results by changing his tactics and focusing on individuals performing to the best of their ability? Absolutely he could. But that would also be abandoning the target of getting them to play as a team with a unified and clear style of play. It would be accepting the team to limp on as we have under the previous 5 managers.
Yes, as individuals we have some good players who are capable of playing much better than we are seeing. It is why players like Rashford and Antony are able to move to other clubs and seemingly put in far better performances than they did with us. They are either playing in a side that suits their skillset or are allowed a certain amount of freedom within that system to play to their strengths.
Ultimately, we have a choice, change to a system that focuses on individuals to get results in the short term, but make absolutely no progress towards becoming a better team. Or stick with the focus on team play, try and ingrain this into the players we have so that in the medium to long term we can move towards a style of play that can be successful at the highest level, but it means we sacrifice performances and results in the short term.
As fans would you rather finish 7th or 8th but make no progress towards being a team that could regularly challenge for the title, or would you rather finish 15th or 16th but actually start the process of becoming a side capable of challenging for titles again?
This is the real challenge with fixing this squad and style of play, not only do we need the manager and the whole club to be aligned on what they are doing, but we need the vast majority of the fanbase to be on board as well. Which is tricky, as most fans are only really focused on the short term, they think from game to game, not season to season.
3. The final issue is the current off field turbulence at the club, the new ownership getting their feet under the table and starting to make changes. That creates a sense of uncertainty, and even anxiety amongst the employees. Everyone will feel like they are being judged, their input weighed up, and their job potentially on the line. That is for both players and other staff.
That will make it a very tense atmosphere around the club. Change tends to be unpopular, as a species we don’t like change, in fact, we often fight against it. The new people in new roles will make mistakes, that in inevitable. These mistakes will likely be jumped on and hyped up more because people are unhappy and fear the changes. The media will have a field day and like they always have will make a mountain out of a molehill as Manchester United sells papers and garners clicks.
This is something that can only be fixed in time, eventually things will start to settle down, and the changes will either start to be successful or they won’t be and the club will react to that and make further changes to readdress that.
Ultimately, we haven’t been successful and we aren’t where we want to be. Therefore, change HAS to happen. We never really adjusted properly after SAF retired. The way the club was run under him was in some ways 20 years out of date, but worked due to SAF holding it all together. We can’t necessarily use how things were done under SAF as the yard stick for how we should do things now. The world is a different place and we don’t have SAF to pull it all together. Somethings might translate, but many won’t. A better yardstick is what other currently successful clubs are doing. We should be looking forwards and not backwards.
These three things combined is why we are where we are right now. All of them need time and patience to address and fix. As fans throwing our toys out the pram after every poor result really isn’t helping the club, it’s just us putting our own need to vent frustration over what benefits the club. Ironically, the thing many of us complain about with our current players.
Changes are happening and we won’t know how successful they are for another 18 months to 2 years. It will take at least that long to see as these are not changes to fix things in the short term but changes to fix things in the long term. Our own CEO has said that the club aren’t aiming to challenge for the title before 2028 realistically. Which will be seen in how we recruit players, I expect us to avoid signing players over the age of 24 or 25. With an appreciation that we will want to have the majority of our squad between the ages of 22-27 for the start of the 2028/29 season, certainly all our key players will need to be between those ages.
This season and next season will be a tough ride, if we can even qualify for the Europa league in that time would be a good achievement. We need to lower our short term expectations to stop us from creating a situation where we will be disappointed and frustrated while the team is being rebuilt, our long term expectations shouldn’t be lowered. But we need to appreciate where we are on this journey and just how far we still have to go.
Written by Shappy February 18 2025 18:56:10
