IS THIS THE first time Manchester United have gone into a Champions League campaign knowing that they can’t win it? Probably not.
There were the early years of struggle with the three-foreigner rule (or The Gary Walsh Experience). Then there was David Moyes and his unlikely but in-the-end-actually-quite-respectable sojourn to the quarter-finals.
But given that the European Cup was Alex Ferguson’s obsession, his white whale, and thus how his United teams set out on their annual continental quest full of vim and expectation, then this season’s outlook feels unusually unpromising.
“WOAH! Back up the ill-informed, half-baked truck just a second! United can’t win the Champions League, eh? They’ve just beaten Liverpool 3-1! All’s well with the world!”
Well, it’s not just United. Realistically, no English club can this season. Even the hitherto reasonable chance of Chelsea bundling the unsuspecting trophy back to Blighty seems to be fading with every plod of John Terry’s aging limbs.
Manchester City might catch on soon, but then again, they might not. Arsenal? That’s not a question by the way, but a suggested rebrand: Arsenal? FC.
Mostly though, they can’t win it because none of them are Barcelona.
So it is unfair to single out United. But then, everyone is having a go these days.
It’s almost as if, after two decades under the yoke of the Ferguson Empire, the oppressed masses of Planet Football have rushed to abandon teeth-gritted deference for gleeful mockery.
But there should be sympathy for United, given the seismic nature of what the club has gone through since they last reasonably held hopes of winning the Champions League.
A keen student of history, Ferguson is probably familiar with the words of former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who when asked by Richard Nixon during the then US president’s historic visit to China in 1972 to give his thoughts on the historical impact of the French Revolution, replied: “It’s too early to tell.”
This pithy but probably misunderstood quote (it’s thought that Zhou was referring to the 1968 Paris student uprising, not the 1789 noble-nobbling bloodbath) comes to mind when you look at United’s fortunes since their own historic upheaval of summer 2013: the simultaneous departure of Ferguson and his boardroom consigliere, David Gill.
With Louis Van Gaal and Ed Woodward at the tiller, United have just completed a transfer window that resembled the maiden voyage of the Titanic: a confident, no-expense-spared start (Depay, Schweinsteiger, Schneiderlin), backed by outlandish boasts (Ramos, Bale, Ronaldo, Neymar), before disaster struck (they weren’t for sale! To the lifeboats!) and panic followed (Anthony Martial).
The happy ending to the De Gea situation – which is about the best stroke of fortune United have experienced in transfer dealings since Howard Wilkinson decided the boy Cantona was a wrong ‘un – and Anthony Martial’s eye-catching debut against Liverpool don’t disguise the fact that United have come through a third post-Ferguson summer of Supermarket Sweep-style transfer shopping.
The sense of lessons-not-learned is alarming, with the Cesc Fabregas flirtation of 2013 being repeated with Sergio Ramos in 2015. Then there has been the wasteful dumping of expensive mistakes (Di Maria, Falcao), the Jack and the Beanstalk-style failure to fill key positions (“Magic beans are all very well, I told you to buy a top-class centre forward!”) and the over-fondness for the wares of Jorge Mendes.
On the field we’ve seen the anaemic, sterile play of this season’s opening weeks, in which Louis Van Gaal delivered the footballing equivalent of a Hornby train set: painstakingly assembled but it just goes around and around and around…
The chorus of criticism from Old Trafford grandees has continued to centre on the sense that something has been changed, changed utterly. Neville, Scholes, Ferdinand: the playing style, the transfer style, everything,
“The club is totally different and doesn’t look like anything I knew when I was there,” Rio told the Sunday Times.
The point is: of course it bloody is. United are currently like an amputee learning to use his new prosthetic limb.
Their efforts must be understood in the context of what they lost two years ago. This Champions League campaign may see them rub shoulders again with the sort of clubs that they have clearly identified as the post-Ferguson blueprint for success.
Real Madrid, PSG. Spend big money, hire big managers, act the big man. We’ll see if it works.
Ferguson’s personal library features a section on notorious dictators and tyrants, whom he greatly admires…er, sorry, I mean, is fascinated by in a strictly academic sense.
He may have a pamphlet in there on Marshall Josef Broz Tito, ruler of Yugoslavia between 1953 and his death in 1980. Tito is generally held to have kept the mongrel state united despite its ethnic divisions through a mix of suppression and concession. Just over a decade after his death Yugoslavia was aflame.
How will Manchester United look a decade after Ferguson? Much too early to tell.
