-
Ryan O’Hanlon
Do you remember when Manchester United’s newest star signing said this?
“We have to be together. Now is not the time to blame anyone. Now is not the time to look for guilty people,” he said. “Now is the time to stick together — with the manager, with his staff, the players and with the people on the board of the club.
“We need to carry on, to stay with the manager. We need to believe in him, because as players we know we have to improve. It’s not just the manager, it’s not just the tactics. It’s all of us. It’s not the time to blame one person. We are all together in this.”
No, I’m not talking about Matheus Cunha, or Bryan Mbeumo, or Benjamin Sesko. Not even Cristiano Ronaldo, or Bruno Fernandes, Ángel Di María, Jadon Sancho, Memphis Depay, Romelu Lukaku, Paul Pogba, Harry Maguire, Bastian Schweinsteiger, or anyone like that.
No, I’m talking about Juan Mata, who’d been frozen out of the Chelsea squad by Jose Mourinho and had joined Man United for €44.73 million back in January of 2014. These quotes are from April of that same year.
“When I was in my situation at Chelsea, not playing, everyone I spoke with in football said, ‘Yeah, maybe Manchester United aren’t at their best this season — but it’s still Manchester United!’ It’s not a team that’s just played one season in the Champions League and you’re going to a club that’s not top level. No, this will always be a top-level club, one of the biggest in the world. So, if you don’t play Champions League one season, you’ll play in it the next year, or you will still win trophies, because it’s what the club is about.”
A few weeks later, David Moyes was fired before the end of his first season with United, the first one after Sir Alex Ferguson. Ten-plus years later, you can copy-and-paste Mata’s quotes into the mouths of just about anyone who has played with the club since: the manager gets blamed for the team’s poor performance, one of the players who the manager signed defends the manager, the history of the club gets evoked as a reason to believe in a better future, and then the failure to live up to the history of the club gets used as the reason to eventually fire that manager.
It has, literally, happened every time. First it was Moyes, then Louis van Gaal, then Jose Mourinho, then Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, then Erik ten Hag, and at some point in the future, history says it’s going to happen to Ruben Amorim.
It’s almost not even worth paying attention to United’s results or watching the players kick the ball — every positive or negative development on a given weekend is a distraction from the fact that United have been stuck in the same, downward cycle for the past 10 years. United even have pretty good underlying numbers this season — fourth-best expected-goal differential in the league! — but I’m not letting myself buy into those, and neither should you.
Unless something massive changes, we’re going to keep writing these same columns, keep having these same arguments, keep hearing a new set of players and managers say the same things, until the sun eventually burns out. And a big part of the reason that’s true is that no one at Manchester United really needs it to change. After purchasing the club, the Glazer family oversaw a massive decline in results, coupled with a multibillion-dollar rise in the club’s valuation.
But let’s say that the people who matter at United really did want to build a competitive soccer team again — one that could compete with Liverpool, Arsenal, and Manchester City at the top of the Premier League. How might they do it?
It’s pretty simple: just copy all of them.
– O’Hanlon: Re-evaluating this summer’s signings
– Højlund, Rashford latest to shine since leaving Utd
– Man City are now a team of one player: Haaland
Step One: Make decisions like Liverpool
When Fenway Sports Group (FSG) took over at Liverpool, they were just coming off a seventh-place finish, and they’d follow that up with a succession of sixth-, eighth-, and seventh-place finishes. Then United’s biggest rivals nearly won the league in 2013-14 — oh wow, Liverpool are back! — only to drop back down to sixth, and then eighth, in the following two seasons. Same old Liverpool.
It’s a level of mediocrity, sprinkled with bits of false hope, that feels quite similar to where United are right now and in the nine seasons since, Liverpool have only finished outside the top four once. They’ve won the Premier League twice, lifted the European Cup once, and reached a further two Champions League finals. The club has ascended to a level where the soccer world is currently wondering if they’re in crisis … as they sit in second place in the Premier League, just one point back of first.
So, how did Liverpool do it?
For the 2010-11 season, Liverpool recorded the ninth-highest revenue in world soccer. In other words: way above where they finished in the Premier League. But those numbers were similar to Schalke in Germany. They would’ve been the third-richest team in Italy or Spain. Both big Spanish clubs were raking in revenues twice as high as Liverpool’s. United were in a similar stratosphere, while Chelsea and Arsenal were well ahead of them, too.
In order to compete with all of those teams, Liverpool had to find a way to be more efficient with their spending, and they did that in the same way that everyone else had already been doing it in all of the American sports: by using data. But it wasn’t just that Liverpool used data: it was that they had a decision-making structure in place to ensure that the data would actually have an effect on how the club was run.
“We had owners that were deeply invested in a data-driven approach, which isn’t the case at other teams,” Ian Graham, Liverpool’s former head of research, told me. “And I learned from experience: You need that investment from the top, otherwise it’s just not going to work.
“I also had the privilege working for a sporting director who is also heavily invested in data. So even if the owners are invested, that doesn’t mean that people actually making the sporting decisions are invested.”
After swinging and missing with Billy Beane’s pal, Damien Comolli, as their sporting director/director-of-football/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, FSG turned to Michael Edwards, who had worked with Graham at Tottenham. Edwards came up in the scouting world, but he also believed in the value of data to fight back against our biases, show us things that our eyes couldn’t see, and cut down on everyone’s workload. He trusted that Graham’s team could give him actionable advice that would help the team win. And then the club would make decisions together.
Edwards, then-manager Jurgen Klopp, and FSG’s on-the-ground representative Mike Gordon would have the final say on what offers got made and what players the club tried to sign. Edwards has said that the most successful signings were the one that checked all the boxes: approved by the scouting/data side, the coaching side, and the financial side.
While Liverpool couldn’t compete with the Manchester Uniteds and Real Madrids of the world for the most expensive players, their process unearthed undervalued players, and they could always outbid their competitors for these players. That’s how you sign Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mané, and Mohamed Salah in consecutive summers — before you’ve even come close to winning a major trophy.
United have never had anything close to this kind of decision-making structure. Sir Alex Ferguson was the decision-making structure at United and then the Glazers had no interest in building a modern front-office once he left at the end the 2012-23 season. So, there’s been a power vacuum ever since — filled randomly and haphazardly by different people, season after season.
Meanwhile, other big clubs began to shift the power away from the manager and just generally got smarter about how they’d make these $50-million investment decisions on players. That dichotomy is the biggest reason why United have been so bad over the past decade despite still spending so much money.
If we extend this out to other sports, United could just become the Los Angeles Dodgers. Not only do the Dodgers spend more money than everyone in baseball, but they hired Andrew Friedman to run the show. Previously, he’d helped build the Tampa Bay Rays, one of the smallest teams in Major League Baseball, into a World Series contender using various unorthodox, data-driven ideas. Combine first-class analytical decision-making with near-unlimited spending, and you get a team that’s made the playoffs in 13 straight seasons.
I don’t know who exactly could be their Andrew Friedman, but it should be the most important hire for Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS. Most managers will only last a couple seasons, and the same goes for players, but you need someone ensuring there’s long-term cohesion within the squad and making decisions over much longer than a one-or-two-year time horizon.
It’s only been one year, but Ratcliffe & Co. have not only dropped the ball here. They then ran the ball over with an 18-wheeler and set it on fire.
Initially, they hired Dan Ashworth away from Newcastle United to fill this role, but then Ashworth left the club last year, it seems, out of a disagreement over the hiring of Amorim. Since then, Ratcliffe’s deputy, Sir Dave Brailsford briefly served as the director of football, before being replaced by Jason Wilcox, who briefly filled a similar role at Southampton and was then serving a lower-level role at United.
The identity of the person is almost a moot point here. The bigger problem: If your head footballing decision-maker is leaving your club because of the coach your club hires, then your decision-making process is utterly broken.
Step Two: Build an academy like Arsenal
There is one primary reason why Arsenal are currently atop the Premier League — and it is not Mikel Arteta. No, it’s that the club seriously values young players. And I mean this in two ways.
The first: their academy is on an incredible run. Bukayo Saka is genuinely one of the best players in the world. Per Transfermarkt’s estimated values, only Lamine Yamal, Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappé, and Jude Bellingham would demand a higher transfer fee than Saka on the open market.
Guess how much Arsenal had to pay to acquire Saka? Zero dollars.
The consultancy Twenty First Group estimated that Liverpool saved £150 million over nine seasons by bringing Trent Alexander-Arnold up through their academy. In other words, it would’ve cost that much, in transfer fees and salary, to bring in an outside player who was just as good as TAA was for Liverpool.
Saka is giving that much value to Arsenal, if not more. And there’s a very real world where, in a couple seasons, 40% of Arsenal’s outfield starters are academy products, with Myles Lewis-Skelly, Ethan Nwaneri, and Max Dowman all still teenagers, and all already good enough to contribute to the first team.
This is the team-building cheat code. I’d argue that the emergence of Alexander-Arnold and Saka were the single most important player developments in explaining how both of their clubs re-emerged among the best teams in the world. Even Manchester City, who will spend as much as the Premier League allows (and then some), have been aided massively by the emergence of Phil Foden. When Chelsea won the Champions League, multiple academy players (Mason Mount and Reece James) started in the final.
United’s most promising academy player in recent years … now plays for Chelsea (Alejandro Garnacho). And their most promising academy player before him … is currently on loan at Barcelona (Marcus Rashford). Of course, these developments are somewhat random — player development is really hard to predict. But ultimately it’s a numbers game: if you have the right plan and invest enough money into your academy, it’ll eventually bear fruit.
Arsenal have the benefit of existing in London, one of the world’s soccer hotbeds, but if Liverpool can do it, there’s no reason why Manchester United can’t have an academy that’s producing players who are good enough to play for Manchester United. That’s especially true since Man United isn’t anywhere near as good as either of those two clubs.
Beyond the academy, though, Arsenal spent a number of years almost exclusively signing young players. As I wrote about this past summer, almost all of Arsenal’s core players last season were acquired before they hit their primes or right as they were entering their primes. Here’s how old their when-healthy starting lineup of field players were when they joined the club:
• Ricardo Calafiori: 22
• Gabrieal Magalhães: 22
• William Saliba: 18
• Ben White: 23
• Declan Rice: 24
• Mikel Merino: 28
• Martin Ødegaard: 22
• Gabriel Martinelli: 18
• Kai Havertz: 24
• Bukayo Saka: 7
Jurriën Timber started 27 games at right back and was signed when he was 22. Lewis-Skelly started 15 games, while Nwaneri made 11 — and both are academy products. Jakub Kiwior started 10 matches; he was signed when he was 21.
In fact, among all of the players to make 10 league starts last season, Merino, Leandro Trossard, and Thomas Partey were the only ones to join once they’d already hit their primes. Partey was a holdover from the Raul Sanllehi era, when personal connections seemed to drive player acquisition more than “trying to win soccer games,” and Trossard was signed while Arsenal were in first place, in January of 2023.
The last part is particularly important. Arsenal built themselves back up into a title contender by making bets on young talent, hitting most of those bets, and then having all of those players get better at the exact same time. They’ve only started signing older players when they’ve been in range of winning a title. And that still carries with it some risks — even when you’re one of the five best teams in the world.
2:11
Why Antony felt disrespected at Manchester United
Real Betis winger Antony reflects on the end of his tough time at Manchester United.
United, of course, signed 25-year-old Mbeumo and 26-year-old Cunha this past summer, right after finishing in 15th place. They signed 30-year-old Casemiro to one of the most expensive contracts in the league right after finishing a season with the same number of goals scored as conceded. Remember when Sofyan Amrabat was on this team? Do Mount and Matthijs de Ligt do anything to raise United’s long-term ceiling?
Now, sure, a bunch of their younger signings recently haven’t worked out. Rasmus Højlund is on loan at Napoli. Antony plays for Real Betis. Joshua Zirkzee plays, I assume, at Manchester United’s training sessions. Manuel Ugarte still hasn’t figured out how to pass a ball forward.
Part of the explanation for that came in Step One — this team has no unified process for player identification, and there’s almost no chance they’ve settled on a way to quantify the value of what a given target provides on the soccer field. Another part of it is randomness; some players just don’t develop, while others take a while to get there. But if you have a decision-making process in place, then you don’t lose your nerve because you missed on a couple signings. You know that even the best clubs only hit on a little more than half of their acquisitions.
The final part of these failings, though, comes down to the manager — and what he means to Manchester United.
Step Three: Coach like Manchester City
As we touched on earlier, Moyes got to bring Fellaini with him from Everton. Then Van Gaal got to bring Schweinsteiger over from Bayern Munich. Mourinho was allowed to sign Nemanja Matic from Chelsea. Ole Gunnar Solksjaer brought in his old teammate, Cristiano Ronaldo. Erik ten Hag signed four of his former Ajax players, another guy he coached at FC Twente, another one who used to play for Ajax, and then four other Dutch players.
While the signings under Ruben Amorim haven’t been as hilariously unimaginative as they were under Ten Hag, they’ve still all been Amorim signings. He refuses to play anything other than his three-at-the-back system with inside forwards rather than traditional wingers. So, United have been signing players who specifically fit Amorim’s specific system.
Seeing the problem here, yet?
None of these coaches lasted for three full seasons, and almost all of these players sign longer than three-year contracts. So, what happens is that you build a team that’s just a weird, Frankenstein’s monster, with echoes of every coach that came before. By building teams for the specifics of their current manager, United end up building a team for no one.
So, what they need to do is move beyond the idea of an all-knowing, all-seeing, transformative coach. It might seem strange to mention Manchester City as the model here, given what you literally just read in the previous sentence, but what I’m saying is that United need to find a way to be flexible — like Pep Guardiola.
In Guardiola’s first title-winning team at City, he figured out how to turn Fabian Delph into a full-back. Delph never did much at the highest level before the 2017-18 season or after the 2017-18 season, but he was on the roster and Pep found a way to make it work.
The next season, he was “stuck” with Sergio Aguero. I put that in parentheses because Aguero is one of the best center forwards in league history. But up to this point in his managerial career, Guardiola had preferred more flexible, movable, false-nine-types at the center of his attacking band. He wanted all of his players comfortable on the ball, in any part of the field. Aguero was not that kind of player, but Guardiola found a way to adjust — even after losing Kevin De Bruyne for almost the whole season.
How’d he do it? By being more British. In an age of inverted wingers cutting in and scoring and creating goals, Guardiola played left-footed Leory Sane on the left and right-footed Raheem Sterling on the right. Although they didn’t win as many points in 2018-19, I’d argue that their team was even better.
After Aguero phased out, Guardiola won another 90-plus-point title without a recognized center forward. They led the league with 99 goals scored in 2021-22, but no one on the team ranked in the top five on the Premier League’s goal-scoring charts. Instead, they had seven different players who scored at least eight goals.
And then came Erling Haaland, who immediately broke the Premier League scoring record the following season but was unlike any player Guardiola ever coached. He rarely ever touches the ball, other than when he smacks it into the goal. And yet, they won two more league titles with him leading the line. This season, they’re playing more conservatively and more directly than any Pep team ever has.
1:28
Burley: Ratcliffe backing Amorim will come back to bite him
Craig Burley reacts to Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s statement backing Man United manager Ruben Amorim for the next ‘3 years’
United absolutely should not be looking for their next Pep, a coach who stays at the club for a full decade, but they should be looking for a coach with a history of pragmatism. And I don’t mean that in the way it’s commonly used, as a shorthand for “defending and countering.” No, United need to look for managers who are the opposite of Ruben Amorim — they need coaches who can take the talent that’s in front of them, and figure out the best way to arrange it.
A source who has helped run data-driven front-offices across a couple of sports, including European soccer, told me that the main thing he looks for in a coach is exactly that: flexibility and problem solving. The benefit of hiring a coach like this is that it drastically increases the potential pool of new players you can sign, and it prevents your club from building a roster like United’s, one that was partially built for three different coaches. You can identify the best available and attainable players in a given moment, then you can sign them, and then you can trust your coach to figure out how it’ll all work.
Of course, there still needs to be some kind of general agreement on how you’re going to play. A team with United’s ambitions can’t play like Sean Dyche’s Burnley or even, well, Scott Parker’s Burnley. You still have to find a way to dominate the spaces that matter: in front of both goals.
However, Klopp’s Liverpool and Guardiola’s City both played “attacking” soccer, but they did so in very different ways. Too much exposure to Hansi Flick’s Barcelona would put Mikel Arteta on blood-pressure medication, and Flick probably uses Arsenal matches as a sleeping aid. Yet, both teams manage to dominate possession and win lots of games.
Step Four: If not, sell the club
I say this is simple, because it actually is. United have so much more money than almost every other club in the world that they don’t even have to be that good at any of these things: making decisions, understanding age curves, identifying coaches. They just need to be average at all of it, and they’ll be challenging for titles, season after season.
Now, easy and simple are not the same thing, and there’s clearly some kind of cultural and organizational rot at the club.
The decision-making structure is convoluted and decrepit. The financial success eliminates any urgency for grand-scale change. The shadow of the Ferguson Era hangs over Old Trafford in a negative way. And half of British soccer media is made up of former Manchester United players who mostly have no idea what they’re talking about. If this were easy to overcome, the team wouldn’t be so bad.
Ultimately, though, it does all go back to ownership. Outside of the fans, the people that own the club are the only ones who remain constant.
The Glazers have been horrible owners of Manchester United the soccer club, and fantastic owners of Manchester United the business. While I’m still dubious of the situation they’ve created, in which they still own the team but Ratcliffe runs the club, they at least have theoretically washed their hands of the day-to-day decision-making that they’ve really never had any interest putting any effort into from the start.
So, if Ratcliffe really does have full control, then he can do all of the things we’ve outlined here. There’s no one he needs to answer to — he’s a billionaire; he calls the shots.
It might take some time to overhaul the organization, but if Ratcliffe wants it to happen, then United can eventually streamline their decision-making structure, they can invest in new ways to more objectively identify players, they can finally suck it up and start trying to build a team that wins the title in five years rather than next season, and they can stop searching for the one manager who will magically make anything better. Ratcliffe, though, seems more focused on making sure everyone stops working from home and that those greedy little cafeteria workers don’t eat too much of the food at the canteen.
Or, United can just keep doing what they’ve been doing. They can aimlessly float along, with no coherent thought process connecting any of their moves. And they can keep hitting the reset button when they inevitably fire their coach because the outcome of all these broken decisions doesn’t win enough matches.
But is it really worth $1.65 billion for Ratcliffe to do that, even if he’s a lifelong fan of the club? There has to be some other billionaire, somewhere out there, who would be willing to come in, empower the right people, and finally change the way that Manchester United works … right?
