Decline and Fall

The long slow disintegration of Manchester United leaves the club battered by a failure of their own making and facing vital questions about the future

The best scripts make what is random or at least arbitrary seem pre-ordained. Viewed in hindsight, everything seems to be leading to an inevitable denouement. Football, at the moment, and Manchester United in particular, feels as though it has some first-rate talent in the writing room.

It would have been easy to write a storyline in which the club goes into decline after the retirement of an all-time great manager. The genius was to make that manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, in part responsible, as his dispute over a racehorse led him to welcome in the Glazers and a leveraged buyout. Again, it would have been easy for the decline to be immediate. But the seeds of United’s decline, once planted, took a long time to sprout.

The collapse has been brought about at a slow enough pace that everybody slowly adjusted to it. There was no one cataclysmically awful decision to provoke a reaction dramatic enough to force change. Rather this is a story of neglect and stupidity, of people with no understanding of football running the football side of the business, as callous owners neglect infrastructure, waste vast sums on ill-conceived signings and leech money out of the club in interest payments and dividends. Twenty years after the Glazer takeover, it’s reached the point that United are effectively sitting in the corner, beating themselves on the head with frying pans of their own construction.

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On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we looked back on the bleak end to the 1985 season: Millwall, Bradford and Heysel. Listen here.

Libero’s review of the Europa League final and look at Italy will be available on Friday morning. Listen here.

Issue 56 of The Blizzard is out now, featuring Saudi Arabia’s relationship with football, Jock Stein’s last game, Eduardo and his broken leg, Hastings United, Kerala and much, much more. Buy here.

And, ever wanted the history of football tactics explained in one gorgeous poster? Or the Premier League as Fibonacci sequence? Then you’re in luck. Buy here.

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