The Daily: 16th August 2023
Their silence was initally understandable, but Manchester United have made the Mason Greenwood situation a problem for themselves through six months of apparent inertia.
In the first place, the position in which Manchester United found themselves over the Mason Greenwood situation was not their fault. Adults have agency and make bad or stupid decisions. There are limits to what a football club can do in a situation such as that in which this particular player ended up. To say as little as possible didn’t only feel both prudent and wholly understandable on the club’s part; in a legal sense, it wasn’t far short of as much as they could do.
It has now been 18 months since audio footage and accompanying appalling photographs made their way into the public domain. It has now also been six since the Crown Prosecution Service discontinued its case against Greenwood for attempted rape, controlling and coercive behaviour and assault, whereupon Manchester United would be carrying out a full investigation before making a decision over what they’d be doing next.
As the 2023/24 season kicks off the matter has still not satisfactorily been addressed by the club, and all the worse the club briefly gave the impression of trying to lump responsibility for what will be a contentious decision whichever way it goes onto their female players in the England squad, before doing the only thing that the alleged ‘leadership’ of this version of the club were probably ever likely to do, at some point; make themselves look even worse than they already. According to The Athletic, “The club says that the women’s team will be informed, ideally as a collective, with feedback sought, but their opinions will not govern what happens”.
So, a recap. Just 1.5% of sexual assaults reported to the police result in charges being pressed, so in a country in which such crimes are effectively decriminalised—and it really is difficult to know how else to interpret such a stark statistic—it should come as no surprise when a man isn’t prosecuted over such an allegation. And the case was dropped after key witnesses “withdrew their cooperation from the investigation”, which is hardly the most convincing argument for this supposed ‘innocence’ that anyone could imagine.
Women already know that sexual assaults reported to the police seldom result in accussees being charged, never mind convicted. They also know more about their own safety than they a, would ever fully reveal to men, and b, should ever have to in the first place. It is absolutely no surprise to hear that the women’s team might have strong feelings on the matter of Mason Greenwood, or that they have stronger negative feelings on the subject than the men’s team.
Reporting on the subject remains coy. It is known that Erik ten Hag has given his opinion on the matter to the Manchester United men’s squad: “Of course, I have said my ideas and opinions but it’s a club decision. We all have to accept that.” On the matter of whether Ten Hag would like to keep Greenwood, he said: “I can’t say so much about it. But what I say is I shared my opinion about it so let’s see what’s going to happen and what the decision will be.”
As time has passed, it has increasingly started to feel as though United would really like to just kick this into the long grass. It had been reported that there would be a resolution and a definite decision made by the start of the new season. But as the new season started to hone into view there was a sudden volte face on the part of the club when it was confirmed that the decision had been delayed because three of their players were still playing at the Women’s World Cup.
It was the sort of statement that sounded completely fair and reasonable for around three to five seconds. The Manchester United women’s team should be important. Their views should be valuable, because they are club representatives who wear their colours. But three to five seconds isn’t very long, and that’s about as long as it takes for you to think, “Hang on, didn’t this investigation start six months ago? Have they not yet spoken to them about this? Did they forget, or something? And why did they do this publicly? And did no-one look at the calendar once and think, ‘Ah, the final stages of the Women’s World Cup overlap with the start of the Premier League season, so if we want this done by then and the players are going to be in Australia... we should probably get this sorted by before the time they leave’? And why did they about-turn on it in such a stupid way?”.
And then, just a few days later, came a report in The Athletic (£) that the club would no longer be consulting with the women’s team, rather explaining their decision to them afterwards, instead, and that “it is now possible there will be no resolution until the September international break”.
That article may only have been available to a few, but its interpretation by the Mirror wasn’t and they led with “Man Utd chiefs perform Mason Greenwood U-turn after players targeted online by fans”. The three England players concerned, Mary Earps, Katie Zelem and Ella Toone, had been targeted by Manchester United supporters demanding that they support Greenwood’s recall following that initial statement, all of which gives some indication of just how reprehensibly negligent the club’s behaviour had been by hanging these three players out to dry in this way in the first place.
Because let there be no mistake about it, this announcement never needed to be made on the eve of the start of the Premier League season, and nor is there any need to delay it to the middle of September. Fixture dates have been known since the 13th April, and clubs will have been aware of them longer than that. The Women’s World Cup dates were confirmed on the 1st December 2021. Considering that England had reached at least the quarter-finals on the last four occasions, their recent pronouncements are absurd, when considered against their previous ones. They’ve had since February.
It is entirely possible that they were holding out for a loan offer from abroad which might have taken the pressure off them a little, and that they may be continuing to. Moving Greenwood to another club in England remains pretty much untenable, but when push came to shove it seems at present that either Greenwood doesn’t want to go, Erik ten Hag doesn’t want him to go, Manchester United–whether a current or future owner–don’t want him to go, or that there have been no suitable offers from abroad. The first three of these, of course, may even make the fourth of them irrelevant. But we don’t know, because the club has been edging towards making a decision at such a glacially slow and deafening silent pace.
It was reported six months ago that the women’s team were “strongly opposed to the possibility of the player returning to the club’s Carrington training facilities”. That the men’s “first-team squad are split over the possibility of the striker returning to their ranks” is unsurprising when we consider the number of players congratulating Bernard Mendy on his acquittal of rape charges in July. That there should be a split is similarly unsurprising when we also consider the number of players who didn’t.
But if the Manchester United women’s team are not going to be listened to anyway, why are the owners continuing to delay? Are they holding out in the hope that they can finally get their protracted sale over the line and leave it as the next owner’s problem? Did they think that leaving it for months would soften what was reported as quite a firm stance from their women’s team? Or is this just a sheer lack of communication from a club with more heads than a Gorgon and a reputation for being in a constant state of negotiation without ever reaching any significant outcomes?
Considering such transfer market hits as “The Frenkie de Jong Pursuit” and “Is Harry Kane Good Enough? Oh Never Mind, Can’t Afford Him Anyway (Extended Remix)”, it’s tempting to start thinking that Manchester United’s default status is becoming inertia. But the modern 24-hour news cycle abhors a vacuum, so damage is already being done.
How on earth do Adidas feel about being front and centre in that Mirror article with a huge advertisement for this year’s home kit? What will happen, should United decide that actually they could do with another striker after all and that perhaps blue-ticked Twitter user @GreenwoodUnited69 might have had a point when he said that ‘all women are gold-diggers’ and that ‘innocent until proven guilty’ literally means ‘didn’t do it’? If they reach the conclusion that they are to try to integrate him back into the first team squad, how are they going to explain it away to all women connected to the club and maintain any credibility with them whatsoever?
Because whatever Manchester United are cooking up, there’s a shitstorm a-coming. Is this a situation of their creation? Absolutely not. Is that fair? Well, life’s not fair and claiming the football club as the ‘victims’ in any case of this nature is at best ill-judged. The truth of the matter is that they will be judged on the verdict they reach. Should they try to reintegrate him into the first team squad, what will the reaction of the women’s team be? What will the reaction of the club’s female supporters be? What will the reaction of their sponsors be? Might Sheikh Jassim or Jim Ratcliffe think that if they can wave enough bag of money at all this, they can make it go away?
Whatever the final decision they make, we’ll learn a lot about all concerned from what happens next. There’s little reason to be optimistic.