As Bad as Things Got: Manchester United, 5th May 1934
Complaining about losing a handful of Premier League matches would probably get somewhat short shrift from Manchester United supporters who were watching the club in the early 1930s.
I write these words in the full knowledge that every other sports publication on the goddamn planet has already had its say on the matter, but Ruben Amorim’s comments on the current Manchester United team being the worst in the history of the club were so extraordinary that they really did warrant all the conjecture that followed them.
In any realistic sense, it is objectively false that this is the worst Manchester United team of all-time in term of league position, so what was he doing by saying this? Was he tripping up linguistically, with English being his second language? Was he trying to set the expectations bar as low as possible in order to make his future life easier? Whatever the truth is, the players’ reactions to this view being common knowledge may be fascinating to observe.
Of course, “best” can be a highly subjective word, but it can also be an objective one, and to prove it I’ve decided to rewrite and republish an article for all that was on here for paying subscribers last year about the objectively worst Manchester United team of all-time, the one that only avoided relegation into the Third Division South 91 years ago this year. Should you like this piece, you may be interested to know that there is an entire series of these - 29 in total, both for clubs and even a couple of international teams - already available for paying subscribers.
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It’s probably worth taking a moment to remember that, even for the biggest, grandest and most successful football clubs of all, life hasn’t always been days of wine and roses. Five of the “Big Six” have spent time in the second tier since the end of the Second World War, and one of them, Manchester City, have spent a season in the third, as well.
Manchester United’s successes have largely come about during two periods in the club’s history during which they were managed by visionaries who stayed. Eighteen of their twenty league championships, ten of their thirteen FA Cups, and all three of their Champions League titles came under the managerships of Matt Busby (1945-1969 and 1970-71) and Alex Ferguson (1986-2013), with the periods before, between and after those periods being substantially more fallow.
The years between the two world wars were particularly difficult for the club. Manchester United didn’t win a single major trophy between the Football League championship in 1911 and the FA Cup in 1948, and spent just ten of the twenty years between 1919 and 1939 in the First Division. Their highest league position during this entire period was 9th in 1926, while that season also saw them reach their only FA Cup semi-final of this period as well, losing 3-0 to Manchester City at Bramall Lane. It also saw them struggle financially and very nearly fall into the third tier.
The story of how it came to that by 1934 began a decade and a half earlier. Manchester United resumed their place in the Football League Division One in 1919 but were relegated three years later in bottom place, having recorded just eight league wins all season. It was a season of heavy interruption for the club. Manager Jack Robson retired on ill-health grounds in October 1921 and died of pneumonia less than three months later.
His replacement, John Chapman, arrived at Old Trafford after fifteen years managing the Scottish club Airdrieonians, but was unable to stop the slump on the pitch. Following relegation, their first season back in the Second Division saw them miss out on promotion by three points, and the following season they dropped to 14th. But in 1925 Chapman managed to get United back into the First Division as runners-up behind champions Leicester City.
A return to the First Division didn’t cure the pall that had fallen over the club since the returning after the War, but things did briefly improve. 1925/26 brought their highest league finish since 1913, and which would go on to be their highest league finish until after the end of the next War, along with their only FA Cup semi-final appearance of the inter-war years.
But the following season brought a fresh crisis when, on the 7th October 1926, the FA announced that Chapman had been suspended from “taking part in football or football management” for the remainder of the 1926/27 season “for improper conduct in his position as Secretary-Manager of the Manchester United Football Club”. No further explanation for this suspension was ever given.
United had little alternative but to relieve Chapman of his duties and wing-half Lal Hilditch replaced him for the remainder of the season, becoming the club’s first player-manager in the process. He could only ease the team to 15th by the end of the 1926/27 season, but worse was ahead.
Hilditch was replaced by Herbert Bamlett, a former referee. It was a controversial decision. In 1909, Bamlett had refereed an FA Cup 4th Round match between Manchester United and Burnley, but called the game off due to heavy snow with only 18 minutes left and Burnley leading 1-0. United won the rearranged game 3–2 and went on to win the FA Cup for the first time. Even coming almost two decades after the event, this was eyebrow-raising.
In his defence, Bamlett was an experienced manager, with previous spells at Oldham Athletic, Wigan Borough and Middlesbrough. And it is also worth remembering that the role of ‘manager’ was very different in 1926 to now, a largely administrative rather than coaching position. But his arrival at Old Trafford was to coincide with events that would stifle his chances of reviving Manchester United’s fortunes.
Brewery owner John Henry Davies had been the saviour of Manchester United a quarter of a century earlier. Newton Heath had been labouring under a £2,670 debt and had a winding up order hanging over their heads when Davies was convinced to invest into the club in 1902. He changed their name to Manchester United and steadied their finances. Facilities were improved, and new players being brought in led to promotion to the First Division in 1906. He moved the club to Old Trafford four years later.
Davies, however, suffered ill-health in the 1920s and died at the age of 63 in October 1927. Shorn of his munificence, the club quickly veered back towards crisis again. At the end of the 1927/28 season they only avoided relegation by a single point and by 1930, with the Great Depression starting to bite and attendances plummeting, there were serious doubts over whether they could remain as a going concern.
They started the 1930/31 season with twelve successive defeats, and by Christmas they were hopelessly marooned to the bottom of the First Division table with just six points from twenty matches. On the 27th December 1930, playing their third game in three days, they lost 7-0 to Aston Villa.
Manchester United were relegated at the end of the season in bottom place, ten points from safety at a time when there were only two relegation places and only two points for a win. They’d conceded 115 goals in 42 league matches, the only time in the history of the club that they’ve conceded a century of goals in a single league season.
Bamlett struggled on until November 1931, but the club’s fortunes hadn’t improved at all with relegation to the Second Division. Crowds had collapsed – just 3,507 turned out for their first home match of the season against Southampton – and form didn’t seem much better than it had the previous year.
When Leeds United came to Old Trafford on the 7th November 1931 and won 5-2, the game was up for Herbert Bamlett. He was sacked two days later, and United handed the job to club secretary Walter Crickmer until the end of the season. But with Davies’ death and the tailwinds of the Depression, United’s financial position was in ruins by the end of 1931. Players turning up to pick up their Christmas wage packets were told that there was no money to give them. On Boxing Day 1931 they lost 7-0 to Wolverhampton Wanderers.
But by this time moves were already afoot behind the scenes which would change things. Fresh investment was found. James W. Gibson arrived in the same month as that defeat to Wolves. He was approached by the Manchester sportswriter Stacey Lintott and met with the board, offering to help on condition that he became chairman and could choose his own directors. They had little choice but to agree, and Gibson invested £40,000 into the club. The deal was sealed a week before Christmas.
On the pitch, meanwhile, Crickmer was turning the team around. Eight wins in ten matches between the end of January and the end of March resulted in United ending the season in 12th place in the Second Division. But it wasn’t enough to keep the manager in his job. At the end of the season he was replaced by Scott Duncan, a former player with Rangers and Newcastle United.
Duncan had spent the previous seven years as the secretary-manager of Cowdenbeath, where he’d received attention for keeping the club in the Scottish First Division following their promotion in 1924. The improvement that had started throughout the second half of the 1931/32 season continued under him the following year. United finished that season in 6th, although in a very tight division only two points separated them from Portsmouth in 14th.
With a higher league position than they’d managed since relegation and with some money to spend on new players, hopes were reasonably high for the 1933/34 season. But Duncan didn’t spend the investment money very wisely and United had another disastrous start, failing to win any of their first five games, scoring just three goals while conceding twelve. Form remained patchy throughout the autumn, but another dreadful run of one win and one draw from thirteen between December and the end of February plummeted them back into the relegation places.
By the end of March, the crisis on the pitch had hit new depths. West Ham United had been chasing promotion to the First Division, but their chances of securing one of the two places had broadly disappeared by this time. When they travelled to Old Trafford, their second-highest crowd of the season, more than 29,000 people, turned out. It was a match that United had to win, but West Ham won 1-0, with Ted Fenton scoring the only goal. Two days later, United travelled to London for the return fixture and lost 2-1.
Staring relegation into the Third Division North for the first time in the club’s history in the face, the team finally started to get their act together on the pitch. They had five games left after the West Ham defeat, and picked up a crucial five points from a win against Port Vale and draws against Bradford City, Notts County and Swansea Town to get themselves back into the game for the last day of the season. In one of those coincidences that fixture schedulers occasionally manage to throw up, their last game of the season was away to Millwall, who were one point and one place above them in the table.
This match was a straight shoot-out between United and Millwall to avoid the one remaining relegation place, with Lincoln City already relegated on 26 points. United had to win to avoid joining them. Anything else and Millwall would stay up and Manchester United would be relegated into the Third Division North for the first time in their history. A crowd of 24,000 turned out at The Den, but the United players rose to the occasion. An eighth minute goal from Tom Manley settled the nerves, and a minute into the second half Jack Cape scored a second to ensure survival in the Second Division for another season.
Things would never quite get as bad again for Manchester United. Under Gibson’s ownership the club’s financial position started to improve, and in 1936 they won the Second Division championship. They only lasted a season back in the First Division, relegated back at the first attempt in bottom place in the table, but in 1938 they were promoted back again, this time as runners-up behind Aston Villa, on goal average above Sheffield United and one point above Coventry City, who’d never played top flight football at that time and wouldn’t go on to do so for almost another three decades.
Scott Duncan, however, wasn’t there for any of this. He resigned in November 1937 to take over as the manager of Southern League Ipswich Town. Walter Crickmer returned to take his place, and he remained the manager until Gibson replaced him at the end of the Second World War with an Army coach–who’d spent the previous 17 years playing for Manchester City and Liverpool, of all people–by the name of Matt Busby. United had enquired about signing Busby from City as a player in 1930, but such had been the state of their finances at that time that they couldn’t afford the £150 transfer fee that City had quoted them.
Under Busby, United truly were transformed. Despite the fact that they had to play their home matches at Maine Road–bomb and fire damage from German raids in December 1940 and March 1941 left Old Trafford unusable until 1949–they ended their first three seasons back as runners-up in the First Division behind Liverpool, Arsenal and Portsmouth, and they won the FA Cup in 1948, beating Blackpool 4-2 in the final, ending a spell of 37 years without a trophy.
The Manchester United youth system that would go on to produce the Busby Babes was also introduced during this period, but James Gibson wouldn’t quite live to see it truly bear fruit. He died in September 1951, a month before his 74th birthday. The Busby Babes lifted their first First Division title—and their first in more than four decades—the following May.
Of course, Manchester United are a global brand nowadays, and already enjoy considerable insulation from the occasional life-threatening events that occasionally consume other clubs. But they have been there again since. The 1973/74 team found itself relegated from the First Division, the culmination of a decline from having won the European Cup six years earlier which makes their more recent travails look like an extremely gentle incline indeed. They were promoted back a year later.
It remains highly unlikely that Manchester United will be relegated come the end of the 2024/25 season, but the financial differences between the haves and the have-nots, while they have always existed in professional football, has never been greater, mean that there are simply no excuses for the current team over the position in which they have come to find themselves. There were few for the team of 1974 either, really. In comparison with either of these, at least the 1934 team had a conflation of events which had conspired against them as an excuse.
History can turn on the tiniest of details. Had United failed to beat Millwall on the 5th May 1934, relegation might have been a minor blip. They may have bounced back straight away and the equilibrium of the universe might have been completely restored by the time that war intervened into football’s calendar again in 1939.
But it might not. Promotion back from the Third Division North was tight the following season, with just six points separating the top six in a high-scoring division, with almost 3.5 goals per game and no club scoring fewer than 51. There is a possibility that with relegation happening at this particular time, with the effects of the Great Depression still being felt in industrial communities, Manchester United could have ended up in quite a different place within the city’s football landscape by 1939 had they dropped again at that specific point.
The club’s growth came about through the teams of the 1950s and the manager who developed them. That’s when the snowball started to grow. The Manchester United of those two decades between the Wars was pretty much unrecognisable from the global commercial behemoth of today, and all of this is ultimately a sequence of events, some of which came about on the turn of a sixpence.
Such are the fine margins within which football operates that Manchester United’s win at Millwall on the last day of the 1933/34 season might just be one of the most important in the history of the club. And Ruben Amorim would be doing extremely well to get his United team to be worse than that lot, or even the team that conceded 115 goals while getting relegated from the First Division three years earlier. But it does happen to also be the case that there have been times of late when it’s felt as though they’ve been trying to emulate them. That may be what Amorim has been trying to get at, and it’s not encouraging news for the club’s supporters.