The Weekend: Manchester United & Chelsea show both sides of the profligacy coin
In 13th and 14th place in the table, these two clubs have not changed their spots, despite repeated attempts to do so.
Crisis season seems to come around earlier and earlier each year. At both Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge a distinctive smell is in the air, a pungent and heady combination of horse excrement, curdled hubris and burning money, as two clubs with practically every built-in advantage that a football club could hope for, whether that’s the financial means to repeatedly make catastrophic errors of judgement in the transfer market or the pull to be able attract the sort of players which, frankly, they don’t really deserve in the first place.
Because there is a fundamental truth that I think is worth looking at, under these circumstances. Does supporting a football club of this size even make those who do so happy? Because it sure doesn’t feel that way at times. In a way, I can relate. To the extent that it counts for anything I support Tottenham Hotspur, and there are two things that have made me able to maintain that link for 45 years and counting.
Firstly, I’m local, brought up within walking distance of yer actual White Hart Lane. My family is North London through and through, going back several generations, whether I like it or not. And while that can influence your outlook on life in many different ways, far from all of them healthy, it does at least seem to bed in your support for the local football team, if they come from the same bricks and mortar as you do.
And secondly, while others may find it amusing when bare their arses to the world, that ‘Spursiness’ is important to me. I want Spurs to be fancy, a bit cocky, a bit delicate, and to occasionally come apart at the seams altogether. They wouldn’t be Spurs without it. But as other clubs have been hoovered up by men of grand ambition (and occasionally no idea whatsoever of how to run a football club in England), Spurs have sat on the sidelines, looking on.
There has, over the years, been some talk over the fact that Roman Abramovich might have ended up at White Hart Lane rather than Stamford Bridge, that all that silverware they started hoovering up a couple of decades ago could have been ours. Except… nah. No thank you. I’d rather have no silverware at all—I may rather have no club at all—than to have to regard John Terry as a ‘club legend’.
And those winning streaks seem to build up expectations to frankly unsustainable levels. The Spursiness, the lack of expectation, has played a not-insignificant role in keeping me interested there. Last season, when things were categorically not fun, the summit of my ambition for them was, ‘Okay, just try not to embarrass yourselves publicly too much.’ It was a low bar, but they failed to reach it. But that, over the last decade, has been the exception rather than the rule, even without this silverware that the supporters of other clubs seem to believe is essential to enjoying the game in any way whatsoever, but which doesn’t seem to make them very happy.
With Manchester United and Chelsea sitting in 13th and 14th places in the Premier League respectively, with Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth either side of them, one can only wonder at the ongoing gravitational pull that they continue to hold over players and staff. To what extent is a professional player not paying attention to the business that they work in, if they think that moving to either of these two dysfunctional monoliths is going to actually progress their career in any way? These clubs break players. They break managers. Sometimes, they even seem to be breaking their fan bases.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of Manchester United’s home defeat by Brighton & Hove Albion on Saturday afternoon is that it isn’t really a surprise any more when United lose to Brighton. This was, after all, the third time in a row that Brighton had beaten them in the Premier League.
They are, when all is said and done, quite clearly and evidently the better team at the moment. And in amongst all the caterwauling and mourning, it is worth remembering that this was the first time that Manchester United had lost a Premier League at Old Trafford since Brighton pulled their pants down there on the opening weekend of last season. Woe is me! I am a season ticket holder and my team lost a home league match for the first time in thirteen months!
Of course, once the fans have made the decision over who to support, we’re rather tied into it. But what of the players and the staff? What of those who we accept have a different emotional reaction to the game to us? The urge for a professional to want to reach the top of their profession is a combination of normal ambition and, occasionally, an almost child-like ambition to fulfil a dream. When Robert Lewandowski left Bayern Munich for Barcelona, for example, he was making an emotional decision to play in the blaugrana at Camp Nou before retirement.
But will players be prepared to continue to do so at the ongoing risk to their professional reputations? The example of Jadon Sancho seems like a particularly pertinent one to raise at this specific moment in time. Sancho’s talent is undeniable. It was on display in Dortmund for long enough, for anybody who wanted to see it. And there was something in his decision to go there at 17 years of age which hinted at a player of courage and imagination, traits which he further demonstrated on the pitch in the Bundesliga.
His transfer to Manchester United should have been a point of revival for the club’s fortunes. A young, imaginative attacking player going to a club who really needed a player of near-talismanic status on the pitch. Just over two years on, how’s that working out? And while there will always be those who will see this sort of failure as a personal moral failing on the part of the individual concerned, this has happened repeatedly at Manchester United in recent years to such an extent that it becomes impossible to blame the players involved, or as a refereeing conspiracy because they didn’t give that penalty kick—you know, the one you demand every game—which would have definitely changed everything, this time around. This is institutional dry rot.
Chelsea haven’t been routinely breaking players for as long as Manchester United, but there may be a case for saying that they’re breaking them harder, and what is most striking about their tepid start to the season is the extent to which, for all the tumult behind the scenes and the hoovering up young players from all over the continent, so little seems to have changed on the pitch over the last twelve or thirteen months.
They’re still pretty in patches but playing—almost completely unsurprisingly—as though they’ve only just been introduced to each other. Leaderless and rudderless, there have been few signs of improvement, with their first five league matches of the season offering only one win, 3-0 against the team that are long odds-on to be relegated come the end of the season.
Their goalless draw at Bournemouth on Sunday afternoon offered no improvement on the weeks that had preceded it. They still don’t have a reliable goalscorer and offer no more than a mild suggestion of promise followed up by an almost complete lack of end product. Perhaps the owners of the club have decided that ‘winning the transfer market’ is all that matters. But as with Manchester United, there does come a point when you have to question the decision-making acumen of anybody who goes there now, when the most likely impact on their playing career is not going to be positive.
On this particular Monday morning, the fire is getting stoked yet again. Mauricio Pochettino and Erik ten Hag may or may not last the season before getting thrown on the pile marked, “Unable to instantly turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse”. Manchester United supporters cling to the idea that infinite Qatari money will save them, Chelsea supporters to the belief that if they throw these dice enough times, they have to roll a double six in the end.
You look at the teams who took points off them at the weekend. Bournemouth, tethered by a home stadium which only hold 12,000 people, have spent seven of the last nine years in the Premier League. Brighton, whose entire winning team at Old Trafford cost a fraction of some of Manchester United’s gilded misfits. Both clubs run with a degree of necessary leanness, in which transfer market mistakes have consequences, at which it is necessary to have a plan to manage every penny with care.
As much as you can do is compare and contrast with the profligacy and wastefulness of Manchester United and Chelsea. So much tumult, so much noise, yet at the eye of the hurricane nothing seems to be significantly changing at either club. This particular crisis season is coming around again because these two clubs are either unable to or incapable of learning from their very recent mistakes. It’s worth asking the question of whether it’s possible for a football club to be too big, or have too much money to spend on players which they don’t seem to have much idea about what to do with.