Chaos and acrimony are more familiar to Manchester United than you may think | Jonathan Wilson

OOn Sunday, fifth-placed Aston Villa, perhaps exhausted after Wednesday’s euphoric win over Bayern Munich, drew 0-0 against a mid-table side. Under normal circumstances that wouldn’t get the pulse racing, especially on a day when Brighton came from 2-0 down to beat Tottenham and Chelsea turned into a 15-man match against Nottingham Forest. But this is Manchester United we’re talking about.

At some point the fascination may fade, but more than eleven years after the departure of Sir Alex Ferguson, the soap remains as compelling as ever. How could the most successful team in the history of the English league, the club with the highest average attendance, have got things so badly, so consistently wrong? The fundamental law of football is that as money rises, the rich eventually gain the upper hand: for United to defy that fundamental truth for so long represents a remarkable commitment to mismanagement.

There is undoubtedly a sense of schadenfreude among many who remember the ruthless United of the late 1990s, but there is also something more universal: this is Henry VI of Succession, an eternal story of the elite bickering and bickering and doing everything wrong. It is failure, but failure elevated to a comedy because of the
gilded character of those involved. Mundane draws against Twente or Villa shouldn’t be poignant, and yet they are.

When things first went wrong, the camera usually cut to Ferguson staring into the stands, a haunting reminder of past glories. But there’s a new target: the grim, bespectacled bald men, whom Irish journalist Dion Fanning memorably called “the politburo of nonsense”, who have been appointed to run the football side of the business after Sir Jim Ratcliffe took over about a year ago. had taken over. the club’s quarter in February.

So far, their revolution appears to have consisted of little more than layoffs, pushing for an end to working from home despite a lack of office space and limiting staff privileges, making life generally less pleasant for those who work at Old Trafford, while begging for public money to build a new stadium. So far the new owner seems to be pretty much the same as the old owner, just dirtier.

It turns out that it’s much easier to turn hospitality suites into makeshift offices, or to cut down on the number of packed lunches handed out to staff, than actually making the big decision and replacing a manager who sees less and less of an opportunity to turn things around. The front of the fanzine United we stand seemed appropriate, Erik ten Hag stood off-center, his domed head characteristically bowed, as the rain poured down all around him.

This is Ferguson’s paradoxical curse: because it took him time, every subsequent United manager must be given time, because no one wants to answer the question of what would have happened if Mark Robins had not scored that famous winner in the FA Cup against Nottingham Forest In 1990, Ferguson had been sacked before winning his first trophy at the end of that season, his fourth campaign with the club.

How, the question now is, could Ten Hag be so impressive at Ajax? How could he have led that team within seconds of a Champions League final? How could they have beaten Juventus and Real Madrid in such a thrilling manner? How can you go from there to a team that is usually cut open, a team that is so completely at odds with the modern dictum that success comes from compactness? But no Ajax player who reached the semi-finals of the Champions League in 2019, not even Frenkie de Jong, has really managed to become the player they seemed like – and that doesn’t just apply to those who finished. at Manchester United.

Perhaps Ajax itself, with its long tradition of doing things in a certain way, brings its own coherence. Perhaps there was something in that combination of players that just worked, an internal balance that needed little guidance. At the end of Ten Hag’s final season at Ajax, although they won the league for the third time in four years, there were defensive problems: they kept three clean sheets in the last twelve games. No one paid too much attention – Jurgen Klopp’s final months at Borussia Dortmund were much worse, for example – but there may have been a warning in there.

Just as Ajax, the viper’s nest of egos as it sometimes seems, provided cohesion, United may be doing the opposite. Ten Hag is far from the only one who has noticed that the club is degenerating into a whirlwind of confusion around him; United may have won 20 league titles, but those championships were achieved under just three managers. And history shows that between Ernest Mangnall and Sir Matt Busby, and between Busby and Ferguson, there was chaos, disappointment and bitterness. The soap opera continues.

• This is an excerpt from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, the Guardian US’s weekly look at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Jonathan will answer your questions in next week’s edition: if you have a question for him, email footballwithjw@theguardian.com, or reply to this email directly, and he will provide the best answer.