Will Manchester United ever return to the top of English football?

Back in the dark days of the 1980s, Manchester United used to run an advert in their official match programme with the slogan: “This season we mean business!”

It became a standing joke among fans once this slogan was not only retained beyond the miserable first few months of one campaign but well into the next.

But there was always a belief within the game that United, having fallen into decline after winning their first European Cup in 1968, would rise again.

Liverpool were English football’s dominant force, but the Merseyside club’s chief executive Peter Robinson often warned of the danger that “that lot down the East Lancs Road” would “get their act together” sooner or later.

Sure enough, they did. After years of struggle, Alex Ferguson (no knighthood in those days) got to grips with that faltering institution and, through sheer force of will, dragged United out of the doldrums, winning the club’s first league title in 26 years and establishing them as the dominant force in English football.

Rarely has a club “meant business” like United did under Ferguson’s management through the 1990s and 2000s — right up to his retirement in 2013, at which point the Glazer family started to run it their way and the footballing empire Ferguson had built so painstakingly was allowed to crumble once more. If the Glazers meant business, it was strictly in the corporate sense.

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Manchester United under the Glazers

The extent of United’s struggles in the post-Ferguson years is remarkable. So much money spent, so little success, so little joy, so little sense of direction or purpose. Their trophy successes have been beyond the dreams of most clubs — the FA Cup under Louis van Gaal, the League Cup and Europa League under Jose Mourinho, the Carabao Cup and FA Cup under Erik ten Hag — but for a club of United’s size, history and wealth, those have been meagre, miserable pickings.

And yet the same feeling has persisted among their rivals: that the darkest hour is just before the dawn; that at some point, “that lot” will get their act together and start competing for the biggest prizes again; that the confused recruitment strategies of the past decade will give way to something coherent; that they will eventually find a manager who can win hearts and minds and take the players and fans on a real journey, rather than reaching the first staging post and losing his way completely.

That is the challenge that awaits Ruben Amorim, should he choose to take over from Erik ten Hag, who was sacked on Monday.

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Man United working on deal to appoint Amorim

United sit 14th in the Premier League and 21st in the Europa League standings, sandwiched between Viktoria Plzen and Elfsborg. In all competitions this season, they have won four games out of 13 (against Fulham, Southampton, Brentford and Barnsley). Going back to the start of last season, they have won just 21 matches out of 47 in the Premier League, scoring just 65 goals and conceding 69.

(Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)

In terms of expected goals (xG), a metric that reflects the quality of chances teams create and concede, United’s tallies since the start of last season — per Opta — are 71.7 xG for and 85.5 xG against.

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To be polite, none of this is good. Whatever Ten Hag’s inevitable protestations, the problems went a lot deeper than profligacy in front of goal or an unwelcome VAR intervention at West Ham on Sunday.

Ten Hag was in some ways the quintessential modern-United managerial tenure: a challenging first transfer window, early struggles, a call to arms, back-to-basics football, an improved work ethic, a significant upturn, a trophy success, an upbeat declaration that “this is only the start”… and then looking helpless as the whole thing unravelled, a dysfunctional group of players reverted to type and another would-be saviour was quietly ushered away.

Even at the best of times, whatever technical and tactical vision Ten Hag had when he arrived in Manchester seemed to have been sacrificed in favour of pragmatism. It remains startling that a coach who initially wanted to build a team around Barcelona playmaker Frenkie de Jong ended up drifting so far from that concept, signing so many midfielders and trying so many combinations in that department, none of them remotely convincing.

(Visionhaus/Getty Images)

That word: drifting. United have spent far too much of the past decade drifting, going nowhere. One step forward, two steps back, more bust than boom, far more bad signings than good. There are parallels with Liverpool’s decline in the 1990s — not just in the way things crumbled and standards slipped so quickly but in the naive assumption that this is all just a bit of a readjustment after a little turbulence and that, sooner or later, the natural order will be restored.

That was a theme in this piece exploring the journey between Liverpool’s 18th league title in 1990 and their 19th three decades later. Their former defender John Scales, one of several big-money acquisitions in that mid-1990s period, reflected that “there was still a feeling at Liverpool that it was a matter of when — not if — they got back to winning titles”.

Steve Nicol, a Liverpool stalwart of the 1980s, recalled suddenly feeling in the early 1990s that “OK, we’re not in the best shape here. This is going to take a little bit longer than I thought.” “Before you knew it,” he said, “it was five years, 10 years, 20 years…”

Sound familiar? United are not approaching the 20-year stage yet, but it is 11 years since their last Premier League title (and while Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer still proudly trumpet their runners-up spots in 2018 and 2021, those were two of the most distant second-place finishes in English top-flight history). It can already be taken as read that 11 will become 12 after the way they have started this season.

The greater concern might be that, by prolonging the misery under Ten Hag into this campaign, by lacking the courage to go with their original conviction at the end of last season, United’s much-vaunted new executive team have risked this being another wasted season rather than phase one of the latest rebuild.

This was supposed to be a season when United “meant business”, to judge by the numerous bold statements from petrochemicals billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe when he bought a minority stake in the club.

Short of pointing fingers directly at the club’s majority owner, Ratcliffe could hardly have been more scathing of the culture of mediocrity that has developed under the Glazer family’s ownership. Addressing that, he said, would be a question of appointing the right people at all levels and changing attitudes and culture in the boardroom, dressing room and office floor alike. Some of these noises were encouraging, as were the moves to lure Omar Berrada from Manchester City and Dan Ashworth from Newcastle United as chief executive and sporting director.

It seemed so strange in that context, having held talks with Thomas Tuchel, Roberto De Zerbi and various others, to stick with a manager who had been floundering for an entire season. Results had been poor, performances frequently even worse and the mood inside the club, while not approaching late-Mourinho-level toxicity, was almost unremittingly bleak.

Beating Manchester City in the FA Cup final brought a day to remember, but it had the feel of a happy ending for Ten Hag rather than a new start.

United’s FA Cup win against Manchester City in June gave Ten Hag a reprieve (Alex Livesey – Danehouse/Getty Images)

The message from inside Old Trafford in June, after they had decided to offer Ten Hag a reprieve after all, was that they wanted to give him the opportunity to work under an elite sporting structure. As Mark Critchley suggested here, it is far from clear whether that is something they were in a position to offer. There is something deeply hubristic about such talk when INEOS’ track record in football is so underwhelming.

There was another line that sticks in the mind from Ratcliffe’s round of interviews last February. When asked about United’s playing style, he told reporters that “we will decide that style, plus the CEO, sporting director, probably the recruitment guys, what the style of football is and that will be the Manchester United style of football, and the coach will have to play that style”.

Eight months after that statement, five months after holding talks with coaches as stylistically opposed as Tuchel and De Zerbi, and four months after choosing to trigger a one-year extension of Ten Hag’s contract, it is still not entirely clear what that style is meant to be. United’s summer transfer activity certainly didn’t bring much clarity in that respect — though perhaps Amorim, if he takes the job, can make more sense of their latest intake than Ten Hag ever looked like doing.

In some ways, perhaps the United hierarchy should be grateful that results remained so poor. Performances were arguably a little more coherent and structured than last season, but this is the faintest of praise. Results gave them little option but to call time on Ten Hag and seek a top-class replacement immediately. Far better if they can do that than write off another campaign under a beleaguered manager or an interim.

Ten Hag said recently that there is “almost no club in the world where the expectations are so high as at Manchester United”. Did he really believe that? He was kept on last season after finishing eighth in the Premier League with just 18 wins (few of them encouraging) from 38 matches and with a negative goal difference. There are few bigger clubs in world football, but this is not a club that has sacked managers — or been under external pressure to sack managers — for falling just short.

If it is to be Amorim, he will be given time. He will also get money to spend (unless, of course, United have blown too much of their profit and sustainability allowance on players for the previous manager). An improvement will be expected of course, but it will be requested in the context of medium-term improvement.  That is not an overwhelming level of expectation.

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It was fascinating to hear that Berrada, when addressing the club’s staff recently, cited a target to be Premier League champions again by 2028, the 150th anniversary of United’s formation. It was a target that somehow managed to sound both terribly unambitious for a club of United’s size and unduly optimistic when looking at the state of the squad.

On the one hand, Manchester City, Premier League champions in six of the past seven seasons, are a daunting opponent and Liverpool, Arsenal and even Aston Villa and big-spending Chelsea look better placed to challenge them in the immediate future. Looking at United’s squad, there is some obvious talent, in Bruno Fernandes and some of the younger players, such as Leny Yoro, Kobbie Mainoo, Alejandro Garnacho and Rasmus Hojlund, but under Ten Hag they did not even seem to have the nucleus of a squad that might challenge for the big prizes any time soon.

But the mention of those other clubs tells you it shouldn’t be as difficult as United and their managers keep making it look. Liverpool went from an abject position in late 2015, before the appointment of Jurgen Klopp, to the Champions League final within three years, winning the Champions League within four years and winning the Premier League within five; Arsenal went from finishing eighth in their first two seasons under Mikel Arteta to making genuine title challenges in seasons four and five; only goal difference was keeping Villa out of the Premier League’s relegation zone when they hired Unai Emery in October 2022, but by the end of his first full season, they had qualified for the Champions League, where they have thoroughly enjoyed themselves, sitting top of the table after three games.

Recruitment is a big part of where United have gone wrong. So many of their big signings have flopped, which points to failures of strategy, failures of coaching and failures of environment. The new regime at Old Trafford insists things will improve on its watch. It hopes that summer signings Noussair Mazraoui, Matthijs de Ligt, Manuel Ugarte and Joshua Zirkzee, having brought negligible improvement to date, will be energised under a new coach.

But it isn’t just about energy. United desperately need goals. In the last three seasons, they have 57, 58 and 57 in the Premier League. For context, the seven teams who finished above them last season all scored at least 74. Zirkzee, Garnacho and Hojlund have potential, but the reluctance to invest in proven goalscorers and proven creators is all the more confusing when set against the sums and wages paid for players in other positions.

United’s summer 2024 signings before the first game of the season (Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images)

There is so much work to be done. United will hope that a new coach can unlock something in those players the same way Klopp, Arteta and Emery — all of them mid-season appointments — got so much more out of the squads they inherited at Liverpool, Arsenal and Villa.

If it is to be Amorim, his work at Sporting inspires a certain confidence that he would bring an uplift in performance, both individual and collective, over the first 12 months.

But that is almost taken for granted when a manager takes over a big club at a low ebb. The greater challenge at United is to ensure that any such uplift can be sustained beyond the first year or two — and to escape this familiar post-Ferguson cycle where the rot sets in so quickly and where, suddenly, it once again seems such a long way back to pre-eminence.

(Header design: Meech Robinson)