Manchester United

[S-RED]

How long before he is wheeled out on Super Sunday by Sky ...............

[S-RED]

[ame]https://twitter.com/FootballJOE/status/1462007227166908419[/ame]

[spud_gun]

Genius

[wiw]

That was almost as painful as an Ole interview

[Harv]

Zizou to PSG and Poch to Mancs on the cards?

[Yozza]

Zizou to PSG and Poch to Mancs on the cards?

Yeah I reckon this will happen eventually

[labourRed]

Zizou to PSG and Poch to Mancs on the cards?

That'd definitely be the best outcome for all concerned. I'm not sure Zidane will want to be Leanardo's puppet though so it could be protracted.

Certainly a better outcome for the mancs than some of the alternatives.

[Fivex]

Yeah I reckon this will happen eventually

Will happen now imo, they'd benefit from writing this season off (lol) and giving poch the chance to see what they (aren't) made of.

[Buzzo]

Will happen now imo, they'd benefit from writing this season off (lol) and giving poch the chance to see what they (aren't) made of.

Surely they need CL though. Would be ****ing amazing if they gave it to Bruce.

There are (is) a smorgasbord of **** managers mooted for the interim post.

Feels like we have been here before. OGS came in the same sort of time, got them through to the CL knockouts, then got offered the job, then didnt win a game for ages.



They haven't got a clue what to do

[Fivex]

The necessity for CL completely passed me by but it's possibly they realise how much **** they're in, and would be happy to have a few years in the wilderness while bringing through a new 'class' of youth.

Tbf, i should probably delete this as it's their best chance of staying relevant

[Buzzo]

There have been some brilliant Guardian articles detailing how ****ed they are over the last few days. I will try and share some of them.

[wiw]

Please do

[Buzzo]

Removal of doomed Solskjær will not solve Manchester United’s problems

The least qualified manager in the club’s modern history is gone but the real concern is how he got the job in the first place

Barney Ronay

Ever feel like you’ve been had? As the final notes in Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s long goodbye play themselves out, as statements are issued and narratives massaged, it is worth taking a step back from all that background noise. For all the dead energy, and the ultimate humiliations of the Solskjær era, this has also been an uncomfortable note in English football’s modern history. What exactly just happened?

Solskjær to Manchester United was a weird, doomed appointment from the start, one that bled into a weird, doomed, half-life as United’s sixth-longest-serving postwar manager. It will surely be a relief for all concerned that it is now concluded, not least for Solskjær, who seemed increasingly diminished by his appearances on the touchline – the sadness, the boggling eyes – an ancient mariner tied to the bridge of this zombified ship.

And yet there is no joy to be taken here, no real sense of new beginnings. The least qualified managerial appointee in United’s modern history has been eased out of the job, with the soft landing of a significant payout. But make no mistake, the wrong person is leaving the building.

It is self-evident that the problems at United will not be solved by the removal of a single sad‑looking Norwegian. It goes without saying that Ole was never really at the wheel in any meaningful sense, or if he was it was one of those small plastic contraptions strapped into the seat behind the driver. Peep your horn. Waggle the wheel. Do a press conference on Zoom.

But it bears repeating all the same, because that model of ownership – the sweating of the brand, the commodification of the present – is a blight, not just on Manchester United, and not just on football, but on so many other aspects of our shared culture.

For now it is necessary to offer the usual reckoning up of the Solskjær era. No doubt the next few days will bring us the inside story of his sacking. The real question is how he got the job in the first place.

It made, and still makes, zero sporting sense. Only three people have ever really succeeded as manager of Manchester United: Ernest Mangnall, whose reign coincided with that of King Edward VII; and Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson, through‑the‑roof geniuses who still took years of struggle to master these treacherous waters.

Solskjær had, and still has, nothing on his CV to qualify him for the job at hand. Had he been parachuted in as an unknown Scandinavian – which he was, in effect – his friends in the media would have shrieked for his dismissal from day one, appalled at this perversion of nature.

Instead we have this: three years of drift and an oddly pointless tale of the tape. Only nine men in the 143-year history of Manchester United have managed the club for longer. Nobody in the postwar years has managed as many games without winning a trophy.

Solskjær took a team that had finished second the season before. A total of £300m net has been spent on players in his time. United currently have four of the five best‑paid players in the league. And yet this Solskjær team still never gave any sense of developing a clear style of play.

For a while bloody-minded counterattack worked well enough to give an illusion of progress. In between there were doomed experiments with playing “on the front foot”, hurling a clump of attacking players into the same cauldron in the hope some kind of alchemy might occur.

It is rare to see such obviously poor coaching at this level, a team playing in atomised units, a setup where it is possible for poor, willing, overexposed Fred to remain a constant presence, while Donny van de Beek, a high-end but difficult footballer, is just too much to deal with.

There were good spells. Third place in his first full season, 23 points behind Liverpool, was followed by second in the year of Covid isolation, when Solskjær’s unusually simple managerial style – based around vibes, feelings, smiling encouragement – seemed to fit the anxiety of the times.

But by the end, watching his United was like a weird cultural experiment. What happens if you just don’t sack the manager? What if football becomes a fish out of water comedy: Eddie Murphy runs the world bank, Steve Martin is the US president, Solskjær is an elite manager?

It seems you end up like this, a team full of high-class players losing 5-0 and 4-1 and 4-2, staggering around the ring like a half-done knockout artist, gassed and holding on, all hope placed in that single golden punch.

No doubt even in those grisly final weeks some part of the United marketing machine will have enjoyed this circus: the domination of social media, the unofficial brand ambassadors jazzing up the story, the whole organisation burning Solskjær for firewood. But those weekly thrashings were unsustainable. Football management takes pieces out of you even at the best of times. Solskjær was being bullied by opposition fans, falling apart a little in his TV appearances. The job had become a paid weekly humiliation.

At the end of which the Glazers have made fools of us all. Supporters who loved Solskjær as a player, who loved the idea of him succeeding, have had their most delicate loyalties preyed upon. Gary Neville, the nation’s top football pundit, and usually so clear in his thoughts, has backed himself into repeating the very obvious untruth that there is something dishonourable and ungallant in suggesting anyone, anywhere should ever stop managing a football team.

There is a serious point behind all this – and a note of warning, too. The Glazers will continue to take money out of English football, to monetise the past to pay for the present, to value share price over silverware, and to make fools of those who still see this as an irresistible sporting romance.

Why should this matter? First because vast sums of money are involved, every single penny of it originating in the pockets of supporters of the club, whose attachment is non-negotiable.

And second because there is a need to preserve the sharp edges, the robustness of competitive sport. A great deal of pride was taken in the rejection of the European Super League, a machine designed to transform elite sport into a secure revenue-generating toy for club owners.

And yet, zoom out and the Solskjær era comes from same place, an interlude in United’s history where the aim has been simply to exist, profitably – in this case by installing a pliable figurehead, by fluffing the brand, by re-signing a 36-year-old legend, and constructing a kind of waxwork museum to the recent past. How are they going to take that thing that you love out from under your feet and sell it back to you in plain sight? Like this, it seems.

For now there is at least an opportunity for instant uplift. With a proper plan, with something more than DNA and shirt-power, passion and memories, this team can still finish in the top four. Players who have drifted, under-coached and badly used, can still bloom.

Jadon Sancho, for example, is a brilliant but raw footballer who needs a brilliant coach to complete him. Who knows how good Mason Greenwood can become?

We may find out. For now the defenestration of Solskjær, enacted by the same people who hired Solskjær and then presided over the age of Solskjær, still feels like a strange kind of new beginning.

[Buzzo]

Ronaldo is the biggest problem for Manchester United’s next manager

Forward is seemingly impossible to fit into a modern system and his signing symbolises a flaw holding back the club

Jonathan Wilson

So, what next? Ole Gunnar Solskjær has gone, and with him perhaps Manchester United’s most visible problem, but a sentimental appointment wasn’t the only issue holding the club back. United are institutionally dysfunctional and it will take more than a change of personnel in the dugout to change that.

Solskjær was a fine appointment as caretaker, perhaps the last good decision Ed Woodward made as United CEO. The return of a popular club legend, the sunshine man whose rays of decency could dispel the acrimony of the latter days of José Mourinho’s reign, made sense. The problem was that rather than waiting until his short-term contract expired, Woodward gave him the job on a permanent basis.

Even by the end of that season, as United won only two of their final 12 games, it was apparent a mistake had been made. Solskjær’s teams lacked the sophisticated organisation that differentiates the very best from the rest. The board could have made an assessment with the benefit of as much evidence as possible; instead they allowed themselves to be carried by emotion.

That lack of organisation was never resolved. Solskjær could set up a team to defend deep and strike on the break, which brought a series of notable results in big games, but they struggled to break down well-organised defences. Of course, when you have a squad as loaded with talent as United’s, you will score goals most of the time, but the draw at West Brom, the home defeat by Sheffield United, and perhaps most especially the draw against Villarreal in the Europa League final were indictments.

This season, the flaw was compounded by the signing of Cristiano Ronaldo, another nostalgia-driven investment, another reminder that United as a club see themselves as being less about the production of effective football than saleable content. This is a squad put together less for utility than celebrity.

Suddenly it was no longer possible to sit deep and counter because there was a chugging goal-machine who had to be selected up front. With a great midfield, as Real Madrid showed with Casemiro, Luka Modric and Toni Kroos, it is (just about) possible to compensate for Ronaldo and his unwillingness or inability to press. Scott McTominay, Fred and Nemanja Matic do not constitute a great midfield.

The inertia of the United directors, their hope that everything would somehow come good, that a functioning team could somehow be constructed out of some famous people and some 1990s memes, means they have missed out on the best available candidate, Antonio Conte going the way of Thomas Tuchel and Mauricio Pochettino (when he joined Paris Saint-Germain). United’s statement said they will appoint an interim manager until the end of the season. But then who? Zinedine Zidane, Pochettino, Brendan Rodgers, Julen Lopetegui? Would Laurent Blanc be up for it? Could Ralf Rangnick be persuaded to leave Lokomotiv Moscow and take over as sporting director?

And that is probably the biggest issue. The United board might not be so susceptible to each passing tide if there were somebody there who grasped modern football. The most damaging aspect of the Solskjær appointment was probably that it meant plans for a high-profile sporting director were shelved. John Murtough was appointed as football director in March but his visible impact has been minimal. With a figure who could guide the overall outlook there might be a coherence to signings, rather than a series of half-baked half-theories vaguely pursued before the allure of nostalgia and glamour takes over again.

This is a squad that has been expensively assembled, but it lacks coherence and whoever is appointed will have to face that first of all – and that means sales as well as signings. Why was Paul Pogba not offloaded when he might have generated a fee? It’s not necessarily a criticism of them as players, but why are Donny van de Beek, Eric Bailly, Juan Mata, Alex Telles and Diogo Dalot at the club if there was no place for them in Solskjær’s plans? But the biggest problem is Ronaldo.

It’s all very well him scoring late goals to salvage games against teams such as Villarreal and Atalanta, but why do those games need salvaging? Zidane left Real Madrid at the end of his final season there, since when Ronaldo has seen off Max Allegri, Maurizio Sarri and Andrea Pirlo before Solskjær: that’s five coaches in three and a half years across three clubs. How can he be fitted into a modern system? The truth is that, for all his goals, he probably can’t. While he remains at the club, whoever the manager is will be compensating for his presence and that militates against an integrated philosophy.

His status dwarfs all else and that leads to a compunction, not to use him as an impact sub or only in matches in which United are likely to dominate the ball, but to play him in the majority of games. And the effect of that ripples out, reducing opportunities for Jadon Sancho (a £73m signing this summer who has seemingly been sacrificed on the altar of Ronaldo), Mason Greenwood, Marcus Rashford, Anthony Martial, Jesse Lingard and Edinson Cavani.

What United need, fairly obviously, is a coherent structure. They need to build a system that presses, that allows the team to function as a unit, both going forwards and backwards. But achieving that with this squad, with a board forever adding new gaudy accoutrements, is far from straightforward.

And while the present situation is clearly filtered through a modern lens, the sense of frustration, of stars never quite making a constellation, has been, beyond the Busby and Ferguson eras, fairly standard at Old Trafford since the second world war. Only three managers have won the league with United. Without major changes throughout the club, it may be a long time before there’s a fourth.

[Buzzo]

Dysfunctional Manchester United have bigger problems than just Solskjær

United have an imbalanced squad and a muddled long-term strategy did not help a manager who was clearly struggling

Jonathan Liew

Manchester United are a club hooked on instant highs and short-term fixes, where memories are short and judgments are definitive, right up until the moment they aren’t. New episodes arrive twice a week. Redemption is – usually – only ever 90 minutes away.

United’s 4-1 defeat at Watford on Saturday proved a watershed moment for Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s management, the final straw – except the humiliation against Manchester City was supposedly the final straw. So too the 5-0 trouncing at home to Liverpool. Or the time they conceded a goal to Istanbul Basaksehir without a single defender in their own half.

Even so, the dead energy to United at this particular moment seems vaguely new and vaguely familiar all at once. The glumness and the vacant stares are redolent of the Louis van Gaal end-days; the half-paced running and basic lack of sacrifice a throwback to the José Mourinho years. If United in their worst moments under Solskjær have occasionally looked like a team running around with no idea what it was doing, then it was at least marginally preferable to them not running around at all.

Afterwards Solskjær was asked where things were going wrong. Honestly, you may as well have asked him to explain the internal combustion engine. “That’s human beings,” he said in response to a question about why so many garlanded footballers were playing so drastically within themselves, and from his perspective it probably is that bafflingly simple. Humans. They play football. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose. Either way, enjoy it.

One actually felt for him. It’s hardly Solskjær’s fault he was handed a job for which he was so patently ill-equipped, and with this in mind it’s probably fair to say he exceeded expectations. He may not have the personality or the CV to mould a dressing room in his image, the tactical nuance required to coach title-winning sides. But for three years he at least kept the show on the road, reached a European final, made some memories. Nobody really saw that coming.

'I have belief in myself': Ole Gunnar Solskjær defiant after Watford defeat – video
And yet by a curious quirk of fate it is probably Solskjær’s lack of intrinsic ability that had kept him in the job this long. It is often said that managers can weather defeats but not being turned into a punchline. Solskjær, by contrast, was appointed as a punchline, the Norwegian Ted Lasso, a fun sketch taken just a little too far. And so when things started going wrong the only real option was to double down on the joke, spin it out, suspend our disbelief even longer. To do anything else would be like Jason Sudeikis breaking the fourth wall and earnestly admitting to the audience that yes, the whole thing was actually fictional from the start.

As for the football itself, United were dysfunctional before Solskjaer arrived and will probably continue to be dysfunctional after he has gone. At times one could glimpse the bones of something promising in there: a second-placed league finish, big European scalps, a home-grown core with a sturdy defence and an exciting forward line (although not always at the same time). And so, in retrospect, the decision to go all-in on Jadon Sancho and Cristiano Ronaldo in the summer rather than strengthening in midfield or at full-back may go down as one of those crossroads moments in the club’s modern history: the point at which they were on the verge of building a new house, but instead decided to blow it up for the YouTube numbers.

Indeed, perhaps the biggest mistake United could make at this point was to conclude that Solskjær is the root of their current problems. The rot goes far deeper: an imbalanced squad of many egos but few leaders, where players are signed on their individual merits and play largely the same way. The need for some sort of grand idea or defining identity can occasionally be overplayed a little – what is Chelsea’s defining identity over the last decade, for example? But at a bare minimum you need a proper structure, applicable footballing expertise at boardroom level, a coach with more tools in his locker than “just believe in yourselves”.

United are too big and too rich to keep making the same mistakes indefinitely. Wealth and power are like an infinite supply of lottery tickets; one day, eventually, you’ll nail it. It was Solskjær’s eternal ambition to be the man holding the ticket when that day came. Alas, his luck has finally run out.