If "spursiness" is now a thing, we should probably contemplate "uniteditis" too
It's been more than ten years now, yet the same old script has been trotted out again. Will Manchester United ever break this cycle?
It’s not over. Not yet. Somehow or other, despite having failed to win four of their Champions League group matches so far this season, Manchester United still have a glimmer of opportunity in this season’s competition. They are at home to Bayern Munich in their final group match, while FC Copenhagen and Galatasaray meet in the other one. A draw in the other match, and a win for United in their final match would still put them through to the knockout stages of the competition.
But hope, the morning after another two-goal lead in a critical match was thrown away, seems somewhat thin on the ground this morning, not least because not only did Manchester united capitulate in their trip to Istanbul, but they did so in a way so familiar that it can only reasonably lead to asking what it is about the club that seems to make this sort of thing happen over and over again.
Once again, hope had been building up. A run of five wins from six in the Premier League had pushed them up to sixth place in the table (and top of the form table), and their 3-0 win at Everton on Sunday afternoon saw hubris levels start to rise again ahead of this match. But seasoned United-watchers will already be fully aware of the fact that this very false hope is an essential part of the Manchester United cycle, getting hopes up that THIS TIME the club WILL be restored to somewhere close to the top of the perch.
And then something like what happened in Istanbul happens again. Much was made during the build-up to the “Welcome To Hell” game of 1994, but times have changed a lot in the intervening 29 years. Manchester United supporters are trapped in their own recurring hell, these days. There’s no need to create one for them; they’re perfectly capable of doing it for themselves.
As they got out onto the pitch, we turned to the apex of the false hope narrative that seems to follow them around these days. Two early goals, and then a third after Galatasaray had pulled one back, restoring that cushion again. 35 minutes to get through. Two goals. They’d fluffed their lines over this in their previous match in Copenhagen. Presumably some lessons had been learnt from that. Hadn’t they? HADN’T THEY?
The answer to that question is a fairly emphatic “no”.
62 minutes. Hakim Ziyech’s free-kick passes through the Swiss cheese United defence. Andre Onana, about whom a lot of positive things had been said in recent weeks, dived one way, pushed the ball the other. 71 minutes. Kerem Aktürkoğlu finds at least eight inches of space in the right-hand channel and drives the ball into the near post top corner, with Onana flailing. If anything, considering what we’ve already seen from United in the group stages, they did pretty well to hold on for the point, considering that the third Galatasaray goal came with twenty minutes plus stoppage-time still to play.
And because this is Manchester United, fate had an extra hand to lay down that was completely beyond their control. The small sliver of comfort that they could take from their result was that FC Copenhagen had to travel to Bayern Munich in their evening’s second game in this group and that they weren’t expected to take much from that fixture. Ruh-roh.
A couple of hours later, Bayern—who were already comfortably through to the next round—had a succession of handball claims for penalty kicks waved away and the visitors came away from it all with a precious point from a goalless draw, meaning that United now have to beat Bayern Munich in their final group match and hope that the final match between Copenhagen and Galatasaray ends in a draw to get through.
Yeah, United supporters could start getting angry at Bayern for failing to win their match, but in the back of everyone’s minds seems to be a largely tacit understanding that: a, United are only in a position in which they can still get through after having failed to win four out of five group matches because they, FC Copenhagen and Galatasaray have all been taking points off each other, b, that so much of what has gone wrong for them has been so self-inflicted, both at a micro and macro level, and c, even should they scramble through the group stages, there’s no way on earth that this team is winning the Champions League this season regardless. There was rage following this match, but it was underwritten by what felt like a degree of resignation over it all because this sort of thing just keeps on happening to them.
This isn’t just about what happened in Istanbul or Copenhagen, because this has been going on for years. For those of us who lose track of time as the years roll by, it can be easy to forget that it is now more than a decade since they last won the Premier League, and it’s almost sobering to realise that there are now adult Manchester United supporters for whom even the dog days of the game-changing successes of Alex Ferguson are little more than a collection of stories passed down by their elders.
All of this raises one utterly unimportant question. If "spursiness" is now a thing (and it can sometimes feel as though it’s now invoked every time they lose, even if it’s to a good team in decent form, as happened last weekend against Aston Villa), we should probably contemplate "uniteditis" too. The symptoms are different. The slapstick nature of it looks similar, as does the horrific injury problems which hint at the existence of a thoroughly unloving God, but uniteditis is different because the hubris train is so much more packed, and because the levels of expectation are simply so much higher.
Manchester United supporters have continued to be told for more than a decade that they are still A Massive Club. Qualification for the Champions League is expected as a minimum (they’ve failed to do this five times in the last ten years) and the expectation, regardless of the reality of the boots on the ground, is that they will challenge for the Premier League title every season.
Furthermore, the slapstick of all of this is only compounded by what’s happened elsewhere. If you’d told a 20 year-old Manchester United supporter twenty years ago that by the time he was middle-aged Manchester City would be the most ominous club team on the planet, they would have laughed in your face. And it’s not only City. Throughout the 2010s, the silver lining to it all was that Liverpool weren’t really that much better than them, but they’ve won the Champions League, the Premier League and the FA Cup since United last did.
This, perhaps, is the point at which it may be fair to argue that this could all be some collective fever-nightmare from which nobody has yet woken up. Typical City are dead. Liverpool are a threat in a way that they weren’t a decade ago. Your two biggest rivals. It’s a miracle more of them haven’t fallen down a conspiracy wormhole.
There’s little evidence to suggest that spursiness has a cure, but equally there’s little to suggest that uniteditis does either. A succession of head coaches has passed through the club’s doors. None have been able to make it work. Money has been thrown at the team, but the only measurable impact of that seems to have been the growth of a practice of making players worse. When was the last time a Manchester United player left Old Trafford a better player than when he arrived? The ground is tatty, but renovation work still hasn’t started. Even the hope that the Glazers might finally be dislodged from the club have ended with… another billionaire buying a minority share, with no guarantees that anything will improve.
While it’s easy to laugh at the reaction channels losing their minds every other week or so, there does come a point when you start to think, “Stop it! Stop It! They’re already dead!”. Supporting Spurs may feel a little like supporting the Washington Generals when they’re playing the Harlem Globetrotters at times, but at least Spurs supporters have the expectation of Generals-like results from their team. Supporting United looks more like supporting the Generals but expecting them to play and win like the Globetrotters.
It remains the case that uniteditis can hardly be described as a chronic condition while the most likely cure for it is throwing money at it, and a well-run Manchester United side would have plenty of that. The problem is that this is not a well-run Manchester United side, it hasn’t been for more than a decade, and when they do start throwing money around they even seem to do that badly. How do you fix this? Well, probably not by beating Bayern Munich and slipping through the backdoor into the Champions League knockout stages. Sacking the manager doesn’t seem likely to help either, when they’ve tried this so many times before and with largely identical results. After a night when history repeated itself yet again, all these extremely familiar question marks continue to hang over Old Trafford, and they seem as unanswerable as ever.