The Long Read: United After Busby

Manchester United may have had it bad recently, but things aren't quite as bad as they became at Old Trafford by the mid-1970s.

This week, we have the story of what happened after the end of a dream. In 1967, Manchester United became the Champions of England for the second time in three seasons. In May of the following year at Wembley Stadium, they became the first English winners of the European Cup.

But just six years after that famous and emotional night in London, though, United were relegated into the Second Division of the Football League for the first time in more than 30 years. The architect of that 1968 triumph had been manager Matt Busby, but Busby's only partial departure from that position in December 1969 set in motion a chain of events that, if anything, only accelerated United's fall from grace.

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When Manchester United won the European Cup in 1968, some said that it was destiny. This year was, after all, the 10th anniversary of the Munich air disaster, and here was the architect of that team finally lifting the trophy that many had believed would have ended up being won by those lost a decade earlier. The record books read Manchester United 4 Benfica 1. A resounding win, kick-started by George Best dancing apparently effortlessly around the Benfica goalkeeper and rolling the ball nonchalantly into an empty goal.

But the record books only tell part of the story of this match. This scoreline comes with the heavy asterisk of having been won after extra time. Manchester United were matched pretty evenly throughout the first 90 minutes. They led for 26, but had it not been for a crucial save by Alex Stepney from Eusebio towards the end, they would almost certainly have lost.

In the same month, they lost the First Division title to Manchester City on the last day of the season, with City's win at Newcastle coupled with Manchester United's home defeat to Sunderland being enough to send the league title to Maine Road rather than Old Trafford. Few would have realised at the time how long it would be before it returned.

The club finished the 1968-69 season in 11th place in the table, their lowest league position since narrowly avoiding relegation in 1963. Busby was running out of steam as a manager and announced his retirement in January 1969. It was time. It was probably time after the 1968 European Cup final.

At this crucial point in the club's history, though, two decisions were taken which would change the fortunes of Manchester United for the next quarter of a century. Firstly, Busby didn't fully retire. Instead, he took the title of general manager instead and merely moved upstairs.

Secondly, they put him in charge of the decision over who his successor should be. Busby decided on Wilf McGuinness. McGuinness had first signed for United in January 1953. He was one of the Busby Babes team, but had been injured at the time of the Munich Air disaster and didn't make that particularly fateful journey.

He joined the coaching staff of the club when his career was ended prematurely by injury. Even though he'd been on the coaching staff for nine years though, McGuinness was only 31 years old when appointed as the manager of the club.

McGuiness’s period as manager of the club is, when recalled at all, widely derided as a disaster, but the facts don't entirely bear that out. United finished in 8th place at the end of the 1969-70 season, a modest improvement on Busby's last season, and we should also bear in mind that this 31-year-old with no previous managerial experience had been thrust into a uniquely difficult position.

For one thing, this was Manchester United, one of the biggest names in European club football. Secondly, this was Manchester United in decline, with an ageing squad including players such as Bobby Charlton, Denis Law, Pat Crerand and Shea Brennan, all of whom were over 30 years old themselves. And there didn't seem to be any pipeline of young talent coming through either.

And then there was Matt Busby himself, in the background, upstairs in the boardroom. His presence continued to hang around Old Trafford, emanating through the club. He likely didn't mean it that way, but it must have been an enormous pressure for a young and inexperienced manager to have to work under.

McGuinness's first season in charge couldn't have started much more disastrously, with three defeats from their first four matches. But the team steadied itself with an unbeaten run which lasted from the middle of December to the middle of March, and reached an FA Cup semi-final, where they were only beaten after two replays by Leeds United. As well as this, they also reached the semi-finals of the League Cup. They even ended their league season with a flourish, beating West Bromwich Albion 7-0 in their penultimate home league match of the season.

At most clubs, this would have been considered a reasonable season for a rookie manager. Manchester United, however, are not most clubs. That West Bromwich Albion match had been attended by just 26,582 people, comfortably their lowest home league crowd of the season.

Even in an era during which managerial sackings were considerably rarer than they are nowadays, Wilf McGuinness went into the 1970-71 season under already mounting pressure. Two defeats in their first three matches meant another slow start to the season, and the pressure started to turn up throughout September and October, with a run of just one win in seven matches.

By the middle of December, when they welcomed Manchester City to Old Trafford for a derby match, the feeling was starting to grow that McGuinness was out of his depth. A 4-1 win for City, including a hat-trick for Francis Lee, only turned up the pressure on McGuinness even more, as did another home defeat, this time against Arsenal, the following Saturday.

United had also reached the semi-finals of the League Cup for a second season in a row, but two days before Christmas, they lost the second leg of that tie against Second Division Aston Villa and were knocked out of that competition too.

McGuinness's position had become untenable, and on Boxing Day his team travelled to the Baseball Ground to play the up-and-coming Derby County on a snow-covered pitch. It turned out to be a frantic, breathless afternoon. Derby were 2-0 up at half-time, but three quick United goals early in the second half turned the match on its head. Derby, however, came back to lead by four goals to three before a late Manchester United equaliser, ended the game in a 4-4 draw.

Wilf McGuinness was sacked a couple of days later. In truth, his position had probably been untenable from the start. McGuinness had inherited a creaking squad of players, and no significant rebuilding work on the first-team squad had been carried out over the previous two and a half years.

In addition to this, Matt Busby may have left the manager's position in a formal sense, but his presence continued to loom large in the corridors at Old Trafford. He had moved into the position of general manager and had even kept the manager's office for himself, with McGuinness having to take a smaller office just down the corridor.

And it's also important to remember the relationship between McGuinness and Busby. The latter had managed the former through the years of the Babes, and McGuinness's arguably life-saving injury, which had left him out of that fateful trip to Belgrade in 1958, left him with that one thing in common with Busby. Both, through very different types of fortuitousness, had survived Munich. But theirs was not an equal relationship. Busby had been McGuinness' manager as a player and had remained in charge, while McGuinness remained on the coaching staff at Old Trafford throughout the 1960s. The whole story of the offices didn't augur well for the future. McGuinness' spell in charge wasn't the complete train crash that we might have expected, either. His first full season had ended with an improvement on Busby's last, and they'd come desperately close to reaching an FA Cup final at the same time.

Subsequent to his departure, Wilf McGuinness spent four years in Greece, before returning to England with York City, with disastrous results. York had been, relatively speaking, flying high in the mid-1970s by getting to the Second Division, and their first season there, 1974-75, saw them finish in 15th place in the table.

With McGuinness in charge though, they were relegated twice in a row and would finish the third season, which he left halfway through, in the re-election places at the bottom of the Fourth Division. McGuinness would only have two further brief spells as caretaker manager at Hull City and Bury before giving up on the managerial game for good.

Meanwhile, 1971 started with Manchester United looking for a new manager. Busby installed himself as caretaker until the end of the season, and the team finished in 8th place for the second season in a row.

But Busby knew who he wanted to be the next Manchester United manager. Jock Stein was the only other British manager to have won the European Cup, having done so a year before United with Celtic, and his team had won the last five straight Scottish League titles. When Leeds United played Liverpool at Elland Road in the semi-final of the Fairs Cup in April 1971, Busby attended with Stein, and after the match, the two discussed the terms of his departure from Celtic Park. Busby left the meeting believing that Steen had agreed to accept the position. Stein, however, had a change of heart and decided to stay with Celtic at the last minute.

Busby had to look elsewhere, and his focus settled upon the Leicester City manager Frank O'Farrell. O'Farrell was another former player whose career had ended prematurely. He played for West Ham in the 1950s, but had come to the attention of Busby by getting Leicester to the 1969 FA Cup final, where they'd only narrowly lost to Manchester City. They'd been relegated in the same season and ironically, this actual relegation in 1969 had come at Old Trafford.

But he'd taken the club straight back up at the end of the 1970-71 season as Second Division champions. And he was considered to be the right blend of youth and experience, and critically, was quite a strict disciplinarian. The prevailing view had been that Wilf McGuinness had been too close to the players. There didn't seem to be any danger of this happening with Frank O’Farrell.

At his interview, Busby offered him £12,000 a year to take the job, but O'Farrell later found out from the club chairman Louis Edwards that Busby had been authorised to pay him £15,000 a year. Quite why Busby did this remains a mystery. Again, though, the early interaction set the tone for what was to come.

This time, O'Farrell made Busby depart the manager's office and head upstairs properly. This, however, didn't change the fact that Busby played golf with some of the older players, who still hadn't been replaced.

Initially, things worked out well for Frank O’Farrell. George Best hit a rich stream of form throughout the first half of the season, and with the last puffs of genuine excellence from Bobby Charlton and Denis Law could also be thrown into the equation, United powered their way to the top of the First Division table by Christmas 1971.

It didn't take long, however, for the wheels to start falling off the wagon. Best started drinking again, and despite O'Farrell's best efforts to help a player with clearly a developed alcohol problem by this point, his performances, and eventually appearances, became increasingly sporadic.

Without him, Manchester United were stuck. They got to the top of the table the previous season by outgunning their opponents, and that made covering up holes in the defence easy. When the goals started to dry up, though, so did their form.

New signings Martin Buchan and Ian Storey-Moore arrived, the former to strengthen the defence, the latter to add attacking options, but they didn't make any difference to the form's waning fortunes on the pitch. That summer, George Best announced his retirement from playing at the age of 26, but then turned up to pre-season training anyway.

More new players, Wyn Davies and striker Ted McDougall, arrived. But the 1972-73 season started horribly, with just two wins from their first 16 matches of the season taking them through to the end of October. Best was suspended and transfer listed by O'Farrell, and was made available for £300,000 if anybody wanted him. Denis Law was injured again, and Bobby Charlton announced that he would be retiring at the end of the season.

November 1972 saw a brief upswing in form, with three wins from four games. But it didn't take long for the team's biggest distraction to flare up yet again. Best found himself in court on charges of assault, although he was acquitted of the charges levelled against him.

After a home defeat against Stoke City, a trip to Selhurst Park to play Crystal Palace on the 16th December 1972 became a match that would come to hold considerable symbolic importance in this part of the club's history. Crystal Palace 5 Manchester United 0. It was a Manchester United performance to rank amongst the very worst in the entire history of the club, and both O'Farrell and Best were sacked the following Monday.

There were a lot of parallels between Wilf McGuinness and Frank O’Farrell, despite their very different personalities. Neither did as badly for long spells as they're remembered for, and both were ultimately undone in part by the extracurricular activities of George Best. Lavishly talented but increasingly beyond the control of Manchester United, Best remained the axis upon which the team's fortunes continued to rest, beyond the point at which it was tenable for them to do so.

O'Farrell's replacement was also at Selhurst Park that day. Tommy Docherty had made his name when he took charge of Chelsea as player manager in 1961. His relatively young team had been promoted back into the First Division in 1963, and he'd reached the FA Cup final in 1967.

Following his resignation in October of that year, Docherty had spells at Rotherham United, Queen's Park Rangers and Aston Villa, before going to Portugal to manage Porto early in 1970. After 16 months away, he returned briefly as the assistant manager at Hull City, before becoming the caretaker manager of Scotland, becoming their permanent manager in November 1971.

Throughout the second half of the 1972-73 season, Docherty did just enough to keep Manchester United in the First Division, with an eight-match unbeaten run made up of five wins and three draws, including a 1-0 win at Leeds United being enough to nudge them up to 18th place in the final table and safety.

The summer of 1973, however, didn't bring with it the breath of fresh air that the club badly needed. As promised, Bobby Charlton retired, while Denis Law was surprisingly released on a free transfer to Manchester City. Manchester United's Holy Trinity had evaporated in the space of just a few short months, and even if it was obviously inevitable that this would eventually come to pass, its speed and completeness was still a shock.

Tommy Docherty, meanwhile, had given the team a Caledonian lick of paint since his appointment. December 1972 had brought George Graham from Arsenal, while Lou Macari and Jim Halton followed a month later, from Celtic and Shrewsbury Town, respectively.

After losing their opening match of the 1973-74 season at Arsenal, they won their first two home league matches, but this proved to be the falsest of dawns. Manchester United were chronically unable to score goals and won just two more league matches before Christmas 1973, both before the end of October. After beating West Ham United 3-1 at Old Trafford in the middle of September, they scored just two in their next six league matches. It might just have been this desperation for goals which caused the return of George Best for one last time in October of that year.

There was, on the surface, cause for optimism with Best’s return to the team. After all, he was still just 27 years old, and if he was being honest about his condition, then there was a possibility that, as Docherty intimated, perhaps he would be able to get back to the brilliance that he had so casually demonstrated earlier in his career. Docherty would later reveal himself the true motivation behind the decision, telling the press that United “weren't blessed with too many good players” and that they were “a bit desperate”.

On New Year's Day 1974, with the team in the middle of a scrap to avoid relegation, Manchester United travelled to London to play Queen's Park Rangers. They lost the game 3-0. Best disappeared again, Docherty's patience snapped, and Best was sacked again. The QPR match was his last ever appearance for the club. His return had seen him make just 12 appearances for the club.

With goalkeeper Alex Stepney taking penalty kicks - his winning goal from the spot against Birmingham City in October made him their joint-top goalscorer at the time with two - Manchester United limped into 1974. After having beaten Ipswich Town at the end of December, they won just one more match before the end of March. Attendances slumped. 60,000 people saw them lose at home to Leeds United in February. Their 3-3 draw with Burnley two months later was watched by just 33,000.

When they did eventually find a run of form, it came just in the nick of time to keep their season alive to the end. A 3-1 win at Chelsea on 30 March started a run of four wins and two draws from six matches.

It wasn't quite over, but two straight defeats meant that, by the last full day of the season, United could survive only by winning their home game against Manchester City and then a rearranged game at Stoke City, providing that points were dropped by the other relegation candidates, all of whom only had one game remaining.

On that final Saturday of the season, more than 56,000 people turned up at Old Trafford for a Manchester derby with a difference. Denis Law was returning. United needed a win to have any hope whatsoever of avoiding relegation.

It was perhaps the most dismal afternoon in the entire history of the club, punctuated by crowd violence and pitch invasions. And with the score still goalless and with nine minutes left to play, Law back-heeled the ball into the United goal. It was the end of Manchester United's 36 years unbroken run in the First Division.

Another pitch invasion caused the referee to blow the final whistle a few minutes early, even though Granada TV's match commentator Gerald Sinstadt called it as 45 minutes in his commentary. There was talk of an appeal against the ending to the match, The Football League awarded the win to Manchester City regardless.

The Manchester City goalkeeper Joe Corrigan later said this at the end of the match: “The United fans poured onto the pitch and I was surrounded in seconds. but I knew the safest place for me to stay was in my goal. Nobody could get to me from the back and if they wanted to have a go, they'd have to come at me from the front and from there I'd take my chances.”

It was a sorry way to end 36 years of First Division football at Old Trafford. Denis Law didn't backheel Manchester United into the Second Division, of course, but he didn't know that at the time. There were no mobile phones in 1974, and false rumours spreading on the basis of misheard or scurrilously misreported announcements from the few people who took a transistor radio with them to matches were not uncommon.

But Law knew. He'd probably known the previous summer, when he upped sticks and headed across Manchester to Maine Road. But Denis Law didn't relegate Manchester United. What relegated Manchester United was a Birmingham City win. And even if that hadn't happened, United lost their final match of the season at Stoke City the following week, regardless.

Law's goal that day, indeed the whole portmanteau of his walk back to the centre circle against a backdrop of violence, was symbolic more than anything else. It marked a low. Manchester United had drifted throughout the season. Seldom heavily beaten, they scored just 38 goals in 42 league matches. Their top league goalscorer was Sammy McIlroy, with just six. Alex Stepney ended the season as one of the club's joint fourth-highest league goalscorers.

Tommy Docherty survived in the manager's seat, and it turned out that relegation was exactly what the club needed. With the Holy Trinity now gone, Docherty's team, built on a solid defence and young talent, moved to an expansive 4-2-4 formation. United sailed back to the First Division at the first attempt, with an average home crowd of over 47,000, which was the highest of any club in England, even though they were in the Second Division.

The following year, they returned to Wembley for the first time since 1968, although they lost the 1976 FA Cup final 1-0 against Second Division Southampton. However, they returned again in 1977, and this time they took the extreme satisfaction of denying Liverpool a League and Cup double - a treble, including the forthcoming European Cup final - by beating them in the FA Cup final. They'd have to wait a further 16 years until the first season of the Premier League to become the champions of England again, though.

Tommy Docherty left Old Trafford in the summer of 1977. It turned out that he'd been having an affair with the wife of physiotherapist Laurie Brown, and when that story hit the tabloid press, the club decided to sack him. Docherty would later say that this team was on the verge of seriously challenging Liverpool for the league title. We'll never know, but this certainly didn't happen under his replacement, Dave Sexton.

It's tempting to draw parallels between United after Busby and United after Ferguson. Both managed the club for decades, enjoying huge success and left their personalities stamped on the club's identity forever. Both chose their successors and both proved themselves to be not very good judges of who those successors should be.

But football has also changed, and the widening financial gap between the richest and the rest has probably ensured that such a relegation cannot happen again for a club the size of Manchester United. To a point, that first Premier League title in 1993 was just as symbolic as Dennis Law's back-heel had been 19 years earlier. It marked the end of 26 years in relative limbo and over the course of the first 20 years of this new competition Manchester United would become the relentless poster boys for an age of rampantly growing financial inequality.

Things are different now. It's been twelve years since Manchester United last won the Premier League and it’s unlikely that they’re going to be doing it again next season. It's worth remembering, though, that the club has won the FA Cup, the League Cup and the Europa League since 2013. But the metrics which determine success have irrevocably changed since the 1970s. The sense of destiny has gone from the club for now and the gap to make up is now fourteen league places. But at least it's not an entire division, like it was 51 years ago.