Now that it’s been confirmed that Sunday’s home game against Champions League-chasing Aston Villa will be the last underwhelming chapter in Manchester United’s sorry season, the blame game has started in earnest. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, minority owner but now in charge of football operations, is a target of much ire, especially after the redundancies that cost hundreds of loyal, long-serving staff their jobs. Ruben Amorim and his inflexible tactics are also in the cross-hairs, as is a group of players that have underperformed for years.
Amorim, understandably, has preached patience, citing the scale of the task at hand. But irate fans, who see the team marooned in 16th place in the league table, point to the likes of Villa, who spent three years in the Championship between 2016 and 2019. Having enjoyed a stellar season in the Champions League, they could well qualify for another if results go their way on Sunday.
Villa are at least a storied club, European champions in 1982. How on Earth do you explain the likes of Bournemouth, Brentford, Brighton and Fulham finishing so far ahead of United. Bournemouth’s Vitality Stadium has a capacity (11,307) less than half that of the Sir Alex Ferguson Stand (26,000) at Old Trafford. Yet, it was little Bournemouth who were briefly in the running for a European spot, and who came to Manchester and played United off their own patch.
It’s fascinating how little of the blame for United’s travails is attached to Ferguson himself. It was his legal action against John Magnier, then United’s major shareholder, over the stud rights for Rock of Gibraltar, a racehorse, that eventually paved the way for the Glazer family’s takeover a couple of years later. And Ferguson happily accepted the Glazers’ dollars and stayed on as a global ambassador until he too became a victim of Ratcliffe’s cost-cutting.
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Had he uttered even a word against the rotten ownership that has bled United dry for two decades, there might have been enough momentum for a fan movement to drive the Glazers out of the club. But unlike a Roy Keane, who spits the truth without fear or favour week after week on television, Ferguson’s silence has been deafening.
The fans too need to shoulder some blame. When the supporters of their great rivals, Liverpool, realised that Tom Hicks and George Gillett were two scoundrels who would lead the club on the road to ruin, the sheer swell of discontent helped drive them out. There have been sporadic protests about the Glazers down the years, but nothing sustained enough to make a difference.
How they let Old Trafford go to seed is exhibit A in this tale of criminal negligence. Once the most envied venue in the country, it’s now an embarrassment that Ratcliffe and Co. want to abandon. It’s telling that United have not once played an exhibition/friendly game in Tampa — the Glazers own the NFL’s Buccaneers — on their US tours. Perhaps, the players would have seen the state-of-the-art Raymond James Stadium and compared it to Old Trafford with its leaky roof and outdated facilities.
It can’t be a coincidence that numerous players have thrived after leaving Old Trafford in the past decade. Even the much-maligned Erik ten Hag is still sufficiently highly rated to be in the running for the Ajax and Bayer Leverkusen jobs. The players and managers need to take some responsibility, but as long as the ownership continues to piss into the pool, don’t expect any upturn in fortunes. Instead, the putrid stench will only get more intense.
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