On the 2023 FA Cup Final

The Inevi-treble is now a step closer.

Of course, the problem with matches being stacked with context is that it can work both ways. For Manchester United, the narrative in the build-up to the FA Cup Final was very much that they could be The Ruinators, the team that, through the sheer will of not wanting Manchester City to win the treble, could put an end to their hopes of that and having to settle for just the Premier League and the Champions League. In the cold, harsh light of defeat, what was most noticeable about it all was the gap between these two groups of players, and what that says about the influence of money in the modern game.

There is no question that Old Trafford is a happier place than it was this time last year. As Manchester United crawled over the line at the end of the 2021/22 season, they had a manager who plainly couldn’t wait to get out of the club, a ‘star’ striker creaking from every joint, and were pounding hard against the glass floor beneath, often seeming to play as though they were, in some near-masochistic way, trying to goad those below them into overtaking them. West Ham nearly managed it; they only finished two points behind them in the final table.

So, Manchester United are a better team now than they were then, and that’s visible in tangible ways. Rangnick, Pogba, and Ronaldo, symbols of the damp rot that had settled in again at Old Trafford, were successfully treated. Casemiro, Eriksen and Lisandro Martinez have been obvious improvements on the playing side, while Marcus Rashford and —when not injured— Anthony Martial have improved. They won the EFL Cup. They qualified for the Champions League.

But the FA Cup final was a reminder of where the true balance of power sits in Manchester at the moment. It took Ilkay Gundogan, a strong contender for the Premier League’s player of the season, to volley City into the lead, a goal that drove through United’s pre-match optimism like a masonry nail, and although United drew level from the penalty spot on 33 minutes, Gundongan’s second volley of the match, six minutes into the second half, crept into the corner —we can only assume that David De Gea’s eyesight is like that of a cat, dependent on movement and that he saw the slow-moving ball too late to fully react to it— and that was more or less that. United had chances, most notably in stoppage-time when Stefan Ortega pushed Raphael Varane’s shot onto the crossbar, but we all saw what we all saw. Manchester City were the better team and deserved the win. The treble, which Manchester United have held close to their bosom for almost a quarter of a century, is now within City’s grasp.

As things turned out, the penalty kick that brought them level didn’t end up counting for much, and it’s primary role for the viewing audience was largely to serve as a reminder of the gap between what is and isn’t a penalty kick and we think should and shouldn’t be a penalty kick. This was Schroedinger’s penalty —correctly awarded under the letter of the law but at the same time exactly the sort of decision that shouldn’t lead to a situation which gives one team a 75% chance of a goal— a decision which showed up just how much we’ve lost in recent years.

Because if there’s one thing that football culture has torn up and thrown away over the last twenty or thirty years or so, it’s been the very notion that ‘common sense’ refereeing can ever be applied in the professional game. The white noise of caterwauling about refereeing decisions, which have led us to a point at which there are supporters who actually believe that there conspiracies against their team, has made refereeing games subjectively all but impossible. So much of the discussion about ‘common sense’ always felt more like, ‘I want every decision to agree with the one that I would have made’ than anything else. After all, who has ever voted for someone else’s common sense to become the law?

The result of this is the penalty kick that brought Manchester United level against Manchester City. By every interpretation of the the rules as they are currently applied, it was a penalty kick. Yet at the same time, it felt as though it shouldn’t have been one. That gap only seems to be growing. But with conspiracy theories also on the rise, more automation seems likely than less, and it would remain unsurprising to see match officiating being fully automated in a decade’s time. It would be similarly unsurprising to see arguments about refereeing decisions still raging, even in this eventuality.

On this occasion, it did all end up being relatively inconsequential. Manchester City reclaimed the lead early in the second half and were deserved winners of the match and therefore the FA Cup, if we’re limiting ourselves to matters of which team were the best on the pitch on the day. They’ll probably ‘deserve’ to be the European champions on the same basis, although the haste with which some commentators have leapt to call the Champions League final a foregone conclusion does leave you wondering whether they’re setting themselves up for a fall. They are playing the wily old foxes of Inter, after all.

But when the chips came down at Wembley and Manchester United needed that extra boost from the bench, they had Alejandro Garnacho, Wout Weghorst and Scott McTominay, the latter two of whom may well have been playing their last games for the club. Garnacho was promising and lively. Weghorst and McTominay did little to dispel the doubts of those who consider them to be among the physical manifestations of the gap that has to be made up between United and the top of the Premier League table. With their ownership saga now sailing into the summer looking no more resolved than it has for many months, Manchester United remain parboiled, in a better condition than they were last season, good enough to qualify for the Champions League, and with a lot of ground still to make up on the teams above them in the table, for one of whom the treble is starting to feel like the inevi-treble.