We are entering a drab October international break and also, by sheer coincidence, Crisis Season in the Premier League. Nothing we can do about that.
Sure, we can do our usual thing of affecting a lofty superiority and pretending it’s all silly tish and daft fipsy.
But really we love it. We love clicks just as much as Reach do, at the end of the day.
And we therefore will proceed to both have our cake by chuckling at the transparency of the collective media attempt to plunge absolutely every team up to and including Arsenal into crisis (and if you don’t believe us, just a reminder that this was the response to them winning a Champions League game 2-0) just before the barren wasteland of a dreary international break, and also eat said cake by leaning directly into the assorted deliciously stupid and stupidly delicious cracked-badge crisis narratives currently knocking about.
Of course, there will always be those clubs where there is no need for manufactured CRISIS storylines. Those clubs who, out of the sheer kindness of their content-generating hearts, find themselves in some state of actual crisis.
And of those clubs, none has been more reliable over recent years than Manchester United. They are putting our kids through college.
It helps, of course it does, that This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About. This is a club that sat astride an entire generation of English football at a specifically crucial period for English football.
Sir Alex Ferguson remains, in a twisted way, one of the key villains in the story of where Manchester United now find themselves. Looking back, everything he did just made things impossible for absolutely anyone else who came after him.
He not only set impossibly high standards for an impossibly long and successful time, but in doing so allowed everything else at the club to become lazy and complacent, something most visibly obvious in Old Trafford itself and its continuing damp decay. With Fergie at the helm, United literally could not fail. That final title he won before retirement is an almost sarcastic display of achievement despite a club drifting blithely and obliviously towards disaster.
Ferguson left a United playing staff that absolutely nobody else could succeed with, because he might just be the best football manager of all time and nobody else is that.
Unlike, say, Jurgen Klopp and his succession planning at Liverpool, Ferguson did almost nothing to set the next manager up to succeed beyond declaring poor old David Moyes the Chosen One. Even Ferguson’s continued Old Trafford presence in his retirement years feels like it just makes an impossible job even more impossibly hard for whichever poor bastard is currently attempting it.
And some very good and even great managers have tried and failed to lift this giant club from its post-Ferg funk.
Which all rather leaves us pondering something more existential. The question with United, one that most clubs don’t need to ask but that even those who do can provide a plausible answer, is not “Are United in crisis?” But “How do Man United get out of their crisis?”
We genuinely don’t know what that would even look like any more. A non-crisis Manchester United. Can you even imagine such a thing? They’ve tried new players. They’ve tried new managers. They’ve tried new owners. If anything, it always just somehow gets worse. Despite that often appearing to be literally impossible.
It’s still less than a year, for instance, since Erik Ten Hag’s embarrassing banter reign that was saved by outplaying and beating a peak Man City side to win the FA Cup after an eighth-place finish was seen as the lowest United could possibly, feasibly sink. By the time of his long-inevitable departure it was widely agreed that this was surely United’s nadir.
Roll on 11 months and they’re ‘turning a corner’ by beating Sunderland at home to climb to 10th.
It might be an impossible task to ever get Manchester United back to the absurd levels of dominance and success they enjoyed during the ’90s and ’00s, but with every attempt to relocate that spark they drift further and further from even basic big-club competence.
So you end up with a situation where United become the perfect storm. As the biggest club in the country it already takes far less for them to be in crisis than it does for Joe Mid-Table-Battler or Johnny Yo-Yo-Club, yet they have also contrived to be actually bad enough to constitute crisis at any of those clubs as well.
In essence they are deeper down the crisis well than any other club you care to name, yet because TIMUFCWTA they also have much further to climb to escape it any way. We don’t know what a solution might even look like.
But what we can say with some confidence is that it doesn’t look like Ruben Amorim. We really did think it might for a while there. He has the requisite charm and charisma to pull off the performance aspect of being Manchester United Manager. But while you can’t succeed in this job without that, it still isn’t enough on its own.
Because, again, his record isn’t just ‘Bad for Manchester United’ bad; it’s ‘Bad for any Premier League club’ bad. It is relegation-form bad. The only other Premier League clubs with records anywhere near as bad as Amorim’s since he took over have all changed managers because of it, including one who did so out of sheer embarrassment at only beating United 1-0 in a European final.
It’s far more symptom than cause of Manchester United’s ongoing crisis status, but the continued inability to string two wins together is a great bit. It was a running joke during Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s time that every month or so United would turn a corner down yet another cul-de-sac, but Amorim has perfected it.
The list of terrible Premier League managers who have at least managed to win two games in a row is a hilarious one, and the fact Amorim talked openly about it before the botched chance at Brentford is revealing in itself.
While the record is specifically around league games, it also highlights just how damaging United’s failure to a) qualify for Europe and then b) avoid total Carabao catastrophe at Grimsby has been.
Because their near total lack of midweek football just gives no chance for any forward momentum to develop while allowing whatever the latest setback might be to moulder and fester for an entire week. United are definitely in their own heads to an uncomfortable degree on this ‘two wins’ thing.
And it also means less chance of some easier games to help things along. You only have to look at Villa right now to see how even a bit of gentle Thursday night Euroball can help change the mood.
United don’t have that option. They don’t have any option. For this once-mighty club, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. There is no end to the tunnel.
