The Ongoing Memeification of Harry Maguire

The Manchester United defender has now reached the point at which people are starting to point and say, "he's going to do the thing", whenever he appears.

It’s a difficult sell, a friendly match between Scotland and England in 2023. Both teams are significantly improved upon recent years. England remain locked in a virtuous circle of player development which continues to bear significant fruit. Scotland seem destined to qualify for their second successive European Championship finals. These are good times to be supporting either team, and for Scotland the match was an opportunity to test their mettle against one of the continent’s very best teams.

Selling friendly matches isn’t easy in the 21st century unless there is some sort of galactic superstar playing, and neither team can manage that right now, although in the still-improving Jude Bellingham it does rather feel as though Gareth Southgate and his inevitable successor have found the lynchpin to ground the England midfield for the next decade or longer. But even Bellingham doesn’t quite manage Messi-like levels of adulation just yet. Still, the temptation of an opportunity to send them tae think again can still attract a capacity crowd to Hampden Park.

There’s still a big between gap these two teams—this was a match that played rather more in the way that we’d have expected than their tepid goalless draw at Euro 2020—but they did make England work for a while after pulling a goal back, which got some air back into the lungs of the home crowd if nothing else. Playing the 150th anniversary match closer to the 151st all felt like a bit of a tepid excuse to play this fixture, even if there were solid FIFA-buffoonery-related reasons for this being the case. For now, and for the tiny amount that they’re worth, bragging rights remain south of the border.

Of course, the main story of the evening beyond Bellingham’s excellence—and the corollary fact that he and Phil Foden look like close to an ideal midfield combination, but that’s a different matter—started to come through at half-time. Harry Maguire, a player to whom Gareth Southgate has a near-inordinate amount of loyalty, came off the substitute’s bench at half-time to hoots of derision, and it didn’t take long for him to deliver, being in the wrong place at the wrong time to turn the ball past his own goalkeeper and deliver Scotland something of a lifeline back into the game.

So the memeification of Harry Maguire, and it is almost difficult to say anything about it. On the one hand, the snorting dismissiveness with which he is greeted whenever he appears anywhere nowadays is certainly problematic. But then again… things like this just keep on happening to him on football pitches in front of millions of people and it’s tempting to wonder whether it’s even doing him any good to be out there playing at the moment, even if it’s obviously preferable to sitting on the substitute’s bench for him.

Football’s inherent cruelty means that Maguire is now beyond help, according to many, a busted flush whose astronomical transfer fee was yet another example of Manchester United throwing good money after bad. But you don’t have to swing fully the other way and try to rewrite history. Maguire was a decent central defender for Leicester City, and was fortunate enough to be playing in a team which shattered the low expectations that were placed upon them at the start of the 2015/16 season. He was never one of the world’s greatest defenders, and the transfer fee did feel too high. But he was solid, dependable and fairly consistent, both for Leicester and England. Something, somewhere along the line, has gone wrong. 

The ongoing insistence of some that this is all somehow a character flaw on his part, that he is somehow ‘letting people down’, is also a fundamentally bad take. There are no bad professional footballers. No-one gets paid more than thousands of pounds a week to do something that they’re bad at. They can be mismanaged. They can suffer catastrophic tail-offs in form and confidence. They can let their fitness go.

But the idea that there are a small number of people who fall upwards into a career as a professional footballer is bunkum and deserves all the contempt it gets. That doesn’t change because some Twitter banter account administered by somebody who’s never been within a hundred metres of a football pitch in their lives thinks they can earn clout by constantly dunking on him.

He would almost certainly be better off away from Manchester United, though his refusal to leave the club for less than he is currently earning is understandable, if potentially misguided. That is a football club that feels like little more than a toxin at the moment, poisoning everything that it comes into contact with. Maguire won one more Premier League trophy with Leicester than he has with Manchester United, a fact which tells you about as much as you need to know about the state of them, this last decade or so.

Harry Maguire needs a reset. A move would do him good, a change of scenery, a change of pace, an opportunity to get some confidence back and play as though the weight of the world isn’t balanced upon his shoulders. Everything that we’ve seen about Manchester United over the last, well, perm as many years as you like, really, has indicated that this is a toxic work environment, one that any player keen to further his career would be best advised to stay away from at the moment. A change of pace, far away from the honking and the memes, could be just the change he needs, even if he does have to earn a little less money to get it.