Part 2
Jose Mourinho was given a new contract at United but didn’t last long (Photo: Manchester United/Manchester United via Getty Images)
In January 2018, the first serious cracks in the Mourinho regime had begun to appear. A derby defeat by City at Old Trafford the previous month, far more emphatic than the 2-1 scoreline suggested, demonstrated the shortcomings in Mourinho’s tactical approach. The mood around the club’s Carrington training ground had started to sour. His relationship with
Paul Pogba and others in the dressing room had become fractious. United had improved, but the long-term progression evident in Guardiola’s Manchester City and Klopp’s Liverpool wasn’t apparent.
At the end of that month, though, United awarded Mourinho a longer contract on improved terms. After a disappointing end to the 2017-18 season, a summer full of growing tension behind the scenes and an alarming start to the new campaign, he suggested to Italian newspaper La Repubblica that reports about his job being under threat made no sense. “They say I’m in danger, but I don’t think it,” he said. “If they send me away, do you have any idea how much money they would have to give me?”
The answer is that it cost United £19.6 million in compensation when Woodward and the Glazer family sacked Mourinho and his staff in December 2018. The writing on the wall had been there for months as results mirrored the worsening mood inside the club — intolerable and untenable — before the end came.
All of this is a roundabout way of pointing out that this United hierarchy, the one that has presided over the club’s drift from supremacy to mediocrity over the past eight years, is not exactly known for being ahead of the curve.
There is faith, there is loyalty and then there is complacency of the type that has repeatedly seen Woodward and the Glazers bury their heads in the sand and even hand out long-term contracts at a point when alarm bells should have been ringing.
The dynamic has been slightly different in the two years and 10 months since they appointed Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, initially on an interim basis, after firing Mourinho. There have been moments of doubt, like when they sounded out Mauricio Pochettino’s availability in the fraught opening months of last season, fearful that they might have to make the kind of decision they were desperate to avoid.
But then results picked up again last winter, which meant Solskjaer was safe. So safe that United’s managing director Richard Arnold, who is expected to take over from Woodward in the day-to-day running of the club, spoke in March about the “phenomenal success he (Solskjaer) is bringing”.
For the record, they were second in the Premier League at the time. But they were also 14 points adrift of Manchester City and in the closing months of a fourth consecutive season without a trophy; they reached the
Europa League final, where they were beaten on penalties by Villarreal, but even that feather in their cap came as a consequence of failing to advance from the Champions League group stage.
A certain nuance is required when assessing Solskjaer’s tenure, such was the state of dysfunction prior to his arrival. It is a more stable, more harmonious environment now. Unlike the final months under Mourinho, a semblance of togetherness has endured — or at least it had until
Sunday’s calamitous 5-0 home defeat by Liverpool brought a renewal of the kind of behind-the-scenes blame game that typified the late Mourinho era.
But by no measure, at any point, has it resembled “phenomenal success”. For a prominent club executive to say so was as excruciating as it was disconcerting.
The decision to extend Solskjaer’s contract in July — for an initial three years, plus the option of a fourth — was plain weird. Even some within Old Trafford felt it was quite a leap of faith, but they were assured this deal would demonstrate stability, which would help in terms of recruitment and long-term planning. As is very often the case when a club talks in these terms, it was delusional nonsense.
Richard Arnold and Ed Woodward, right, have big decisions to make (Photo: John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)
You don’t need to create an illusion of long-term stability if you have a long-term plan. And one of those is among the many things United have lacked over the past eight years.
At various times, Woodward has spoken excitedly of a “culture reboot” and a “philosophy” and how Solskjaer was a “walking, talking version of that”. But just how hollow does that sound when you have witnessed so many mediocre performances from individuals who play so much better for their national team, or did so for their previous club? How is it even credible to talk about restoring the values of the Ferguson era when there are so many occasions — not just Sunday, or the chaotic 4-2 defeat at Leicester eight days earlier — when so many players look casual or sluggish or both? What philosophy? What reboot?
It has all just looked so complacent, so comfortable at a club owned by the Glazer family but run by Woodward, who became their blue-eyed boy thanks to his work at JP Morgan. Woodward is joined in the executive team by two old friends from Bristol University and then his days at PricewaterhouseCoopers: Matt Judge, their director of football negotiations, and Arnold. The long search for a director of football led earlier this year to the low-key promotion of John Murtough, who had risen largely without trace since following Moyes over from Everton in 2013. And this is the regime that was certain Solskjaer merited a new contract and is suddenly now left wondering whether… it couldn’t have happened again, could it?
As my colleague Adam Crafton said in
The Athletic Football Podcast on Monday, it should be one of the most challenging, intense environments in the sport, yet time and again this United regime fills important roles with people who will have to learn on the job. That applies to executives, recruitment staff and certainly to coaches.
It is fair to say Solskjaer looked a more competent, more assured United manager in his second year than during a challenging first. But very rarely, if ever, has he looked like he might grow into the long-term or even the medium-term solution that this summer’s remarkable show of faith suggested. It has felt like the longest caretaker spell in football history.
Do they have a contingency plan? Every club should, but this is a club who have been so reactive so often over recent years, whether in the transfer market or in their hiring and firing of managers. Their recruitment has looked a little more joined-up over the past couple of years, but there were still so many baffling decisions this summer alone (extending the contracts of
Eric Bailly and
Juan Mata with no apparent intention of using either player; retaining
Jesse Lingard but using him so sparingly; extending
Edinson Cavani’s contract but then signing
Cristiano Ronaldo; failing to cash on a disillusioned, underperforming Pogba when they still had a chance; failing to build a midfield that can be relied on) that it is really hard to have too much faith.
Lining up Solskjaer almost three years ago was one of this regime’s few indisputably good decisions. He arrested the Mourinho slump, restored a sense of calm, unity and focus, brought a sharp upturn in the short term and, significantly, bought the club the time they said they wanted in order to conduct “a thorough recruitment process for a new full-time manager”. Whether or not that upturn truly justified appointing him on a three-year contract three months later remains open to debate.
Either way, it felt like an appointment that would facilitate the next step, which presumably would be bringing in a top-class coach to build on the foundations that Solskjaer was charged with restoring.
At various stages, that looked likely to be Pochettino. He had politely resisted United’s overtures in 2016, when Ferguson was proposing him as an alternative to Mourinho, but he was getting restless at
Tottenham Hotspur by the summer of 2019, by which time Solskjaer’s honeymoon period at United was already over.
A few months after that, Pochettino was out of work and available, which remained the case for almost 14 months until his appointment at Paris Saint-Germain last January. Woodward and United mulled it over and sounded him out at least once — during last year’s October international break after an alarming start to the season, including a 6-1 home defeat by Mourinho’s Tottenham — but then United won away to
Newcastle United and PSG in back-to-back games and all was rosy with Solskjaer once more.
There are legitimate questions to be asked when Pochettino is proposed as the one that got away — or indeed the one to go after now, given that he does not exactly appear starry-eyed with life in Paris.
His excellent work at Espanyol,
Southampton and Tottenham did not extend to winning any trophies. At PSG, he has won the French Cup and French Super Cup but (like predecessor Thomas Tuchel) has so far struggled to impose his values and ideas on a star-studded squad. This underlines the folly of judging managers on trophy hauls alone. But if the United hierarchy consider Solskjaer’s tenure to be one of “phenomenal success”, then presumably they would surely recognise that Pochettino’s work at Spurs, on a fraction of United’s budget, was of another level entirely.
It isn’t just Pochettino they have missed out on in the past, though. Even if Guardiola seemed to be destined for City from the moment Soriano and Begiristain arrived in Manchester in 2012, United never made a serious — credible, coherent — play for him. Part of that was down to being too easily impressed by the faltering progress they were making under Van Gaal.
As for Klopp, Woodward’s pitch to him in 2014 is said to have been so heavily commercial in tone and so low in detail about football that the future Liverpool manager found it off-putting. One line reported by my colleague Raphael Honigstein in his Klopp biography Bring The Noise is that Woodward told him Old Trafford was “like an adult version of Disneyland”.
Once again, the word that comes to mind is excruciating. Imagine how that sounded to a coach who loved working under serious, football-minded people such as Hans-Joachim Watzke and Michael Zorc in a blue-collar environment at Dortmund.
Woodward is scheduled to leave United at the end of the year (Photo: Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
By the time Klopp stepped down at Dortmund in May 2015, United had moved on and Woodward was telling the world what a fantastic appointment Van Gaal was, having spent more than any club in Europe in the summer of 2014 (Marcos Rojo,
Luke Shaw, Daley Blind, Ander Herrera, Angel Di Maria, plus an eye-wateringly expensive loan deal for Radamel Falcao) and ended up with six more points than Moyes. They were still infatuated with Van Gaal when Liverpool appointed Klopp as Brendan Rodgers’ successor in October 2015. Maybe Liverpool were lucky to find themselves in the right place at the time, but United have repeatedly lacked the foresight to get lucky.
The Champions League carousel is such that there will always be one or two A-list coaches out of work. Right now, that applies to Antonio Conte, who has led Juventus and Inter Milan to Serie A titles and
Chelsea to the Premier League one, when he was up against Mourinho, Guardiola, Klopp and Pochettino in 2016-17, and Zinedine Zidane, who took Real Madrid to three Champions League final successes and two
La Liga titles across two fairly brief spells in charge. Conte is understood to be seriously interested in any potential vacancy at Old Trafford, Zidane apparently less so.
That Conte would bring more tactical rigour and intensity to a squad like United’s is beyond question. The argument against him would be that, like Mourinho, he brings too much baggage and causes too many divisions. Both things can be true. There are clubs that appear well suited to the divide-and-conquer style of the short-term coach — Real Madrid, Chelsea, Inter and PSG all spring to mind — and there are others who favour a more organic approach.
United have always liked to regard themselves as being in that second category. That is why they appointed Moyes on a six-year contract as Ferguson’s successor, initially resisting the temptation to turn to Mourinho. It is also why, after Mourinho, they sought stability under Solskjaer. And the obvious question, after nearly three years of Solskjaer, is whether they have indeed restored that tradition of a long-term outlook or whether they have now regressed to the point where they find themselves scrambling in order to make the type of appointment they would have been desperate to avoid.
Since the Mourinho experience, the names that have appealed most to the United hierarchy are those who tend to be perceived as a different, more progressive type: Pochettino, Tuchel, Max Allegri, Julian Nagelsmann. All of them, with the exception of Nagelsmann, have had spells out of work in the period since (albeit only four weeks in Tuchel’s case). But Pochettino is now at PSG, Allegri back at Juventus, Tuchel at Chelsea, Nagelsmann at Bayern. Time and again, satisfaction in their progress under Solskjaer has taken United out of the picture.
Gary Neville argued against Conte on Sky Sports after Sunday’s defeat, saying that United “won’t bring in a hitman again, a hitman who comes in and does a job for two years”. Some will argue this is precisely what they need. But the whole point of the Solskjaer appointment was about bringing the type of stability, focus and direction that meant they could look forward without needing to “bring in a hitman” in future. It has previously been suggested within the hierarchy that, “We don’t want an Antonio Conte. It would be Mourinho all over again.”
You can ask, “Why on earth wouldn’t you appoint Conte?” But not every club would. Manchester City, for example, have worked around a playing philosophy that Conte simply wouldn’t fit. They might never be as big a club as United, but as a football project, they have arguably outgrown the need for a “hitman”.
Barcelona, at the peak of their powers, would never have turned to a Mourinho/Conte type. If a club genuinely has a clear football vision which shapes the way they operate and the way they recruit players, it would be strange to expect them to disregard concerns over personality and playing style and simply appoint the most successful coach who happens to be available.
United have spent the past few years trying to convince themselves that, contrary to the impression given in the post-Ferguson era, they are that type of club again. The type of club who are working to a long-term plan. Sometimes that sounds more like a slogan than a sincere belief.
A personal view is that a club who have been willing to back Solskjaer to such an extent, with time and resources, should be perfect for a coach such as Pochettino, Rodgers or perhaps Ajax’s Erik ten Hag or Borussia Dortmund’s Marco Rose, rather than a “hitman” like Conte or Zidane.
But is that long-term plan really there? Does the football expertise and vision expertise exist under an ownership and a hierarchy whose priorities lie away from the pitch? Sometimes you get the impression the modern philosophy at Old Trafford goes no further than, “We back our manager… until we can’t back him anymore”.
Patience and support are admirable traits, but how many times over the past eight years have they got the appointment in the right place? How many times has that appointment reflected a football philosophy or vision rather than a decision made under duress, from a position of weakness?
There was always going to be a time when the virtues Solskjaer brought to the job were no longer enough. If that time is now, then he deserves to leave with gratitude and with his dignity intact, but the club’s hierarchy also need to take as much time as it takes to get the next appointment right.
There was a case for acting swiftly and ruthlessly at the end of last season and at various junctures before that. Having failed to do so, having convinced themselves yet again that they were “so close”, as Solskjaer put it the other day, they might just have to take their time over this.
If they are true to their word, then they will already have done their homework and lined up a candidate who reflects the long-term vision they keep talking about. But after the past eight years, it really isn’t easy to share their confidence.
