They're not quite the worst Manchester United team in living memory, but there's not much in it

2025 will begin with Manchester United in the worst state they've been in on the pitch in half a century.

Still the records keep tumbling. Last night at Old Trafford, Manchester United lost a third consecutive home league match. It was the first time they’d managed this in 45 years. And they didn’t just lose it. After having conceded within four minutes they were feeble to the point that, at moments throughout the first half, it was difficult to not start wondering whether they might even be doing this on purpose or not. There is no way it can really be sugar-coated; they’re just not a very good football team at the moment.

As eleven years without a Premier League title turn into twelve, there seems no end to the torment in sight. Managers have come and managers have gone, new sporting directors have filed both in and back out again, and the club even now has completely different people running it from the head down. But still nothing. Even the occasional sparks that various United teams could produce on a big occasion, as though they’d been asleep and awoken with the understanding that they were Manchester Bloody United have become increasingly faint.

It is a popular internet meme, to post pictures of technology from the 1990s and ask whether anybody under the age of 35 could guess for what these strangely alien items were actually used. Manchester United increasingly resemble the Premier League’s equivalent to the Sony Discman, the cutting edge until they weren’t any more, but now primarily a museum exhibit and little more, superseded by leaner and more efficient technology.

Old Trafford, it’s fair to say, has lost its edge. Talk of the crowd as “the 12th man” in football has always been overstated, but there was definitely a period of years during which the very Manchester Unitedness of Manchester United struck a degree of fear into opposing teams. Between the carefully orchestrated Big Day Outness of playing United away, the 73,000 baying home fans added an air of inevitability to what would come to pass once 3pm came around.

This loss of edge was most obvious when Joshua Zirkzee was replaced by Kobbie Mainoo after just 33 minutes of last night’s match to considerable jeering. Zirkzee is obviously a symptom of the problems at Old Trafford rather than the cause of them. Years of profligacy and bad decision-making in the transfer market have left United fundamentally hamstrung when it comes to bringing in new players. Zirkzee is one of the results of that. It was certainly all a very long way from him scoring their late winning goal against Fulham on the opening weekend of the season.

It’s not his fault that he isn’t the elite calibre of player that the club’s supporters expect, but this doesn’t mean that he’s not on the receiving end of supporters who are starting, yet again, to reach the end of their tethers. The reaction to Zirkzee’s withdrawal was a cri de coeur, a visceral response to a club that seems to be pulling in just about every wrong direction that it can.

This rot runs far deeper than any one player, be it Zirkzee or Marcus Rashford, who has been banished from the first team squad until further notice. It’s not the manager. They’ve done this so many times without that much of an improvement that surely somebody has noticed this by now. A roster of some of European football’s most knowledgeable coaches have filed through the club since Alex Ferguson retired in 2013 and the sum total of buggerall has improved to any meaningful degree. If anything, things are worse than they’ve been before over the last eleven and a half years.

But while the players are symptoms of this malaise rather than its cause, there can be no such excuses for the senior management of the club, because ultimately somebody has to take overrall responsibility for the absolute state of it all. And INEOS have made mis-step after mis-step, whether through the PR car crashes of redundancies or stopping Christmas bonuses for stewards, the apparent sidelining of the women’s team, or basic footballing errors like offering Erik Ten Hag a new contract off the back of winning the FA Cup and then sacking him a few months later, to get the managerial merry-go-round spinning again.

It is a sign of just how calcified the game has become that in recent years, for a club of this scale, finishing 6th, 7th or 8th in the table has become a disaster. But this team really are plumbing new depths. With half the season played, they are in 14th place in the table, and have fewer than half the number of points accrued by leaders Liverpool. It is something of a surprise that the gap between them and a Champions League place remains as modest as thirteen points.

But looking up the table feels like a fool's errand. The time has come to start looking over their shoulders at the relegation places. The gap between United and 18th-placed Ipswich Town is now just seven points, and of the teams below them in the table only bottom of the table Southampton are in worse form over the last six matches.

As unthinkable as it may seem, if this form doesn’t somehow start to turn around—and there were precious few signs of that last night—they could now easily find themselves getting sucked into a relegation avoidance scrap for which it’s difficult to conclude anything other than that they appear to be extremely ill-prepared in just about every conceivable way.

Since the middle of October, their only league wins have come against Leicester City, Everton and the Freefallin’ Manchester City (another example of that Big Club Muscle Memory that they’ve displayed repeatedly over these fallow years). And with their next two games against Liverpool and then Arsenal in the FA Cup, their home match against Southampton on the 16th January really does look like a far more important match than anyone would have guessed at the start of the season.

But if Manchester United may be heading towards a relegation fight, what does the past have to tell us? The 1973/74 season is the low-water mark in the living memory of the club, a season during which the mis-steps of the previous five or six years all hit them at the same time, resulting in their ultimate relegation from the top flight for the first time since 1937.

At this point in that season, United were in 19th place in a 22-team division, with five wins and 16 points (under two points for a win) from half of their season. The equivalent would be 21 points today. They have won more matches from three fewer games, so it’s fair to say that this team isn’t quite as bad as the team that went down 51 years ago, but there’s really not that much in it.

The January transfer window often offers solace, but United have spent a lot of money in recent years and value is difficult to find at this time of the year. In addition to this, this ongoing sense of crisis hardly seems likely to attract the calibre of players that will get them back pushing towards the top end of the table. If there were obvious, attainable replacements who could breathe some much-needed life into this moribund squad of players, perhaps the mood around the club would be someone lighter, but no-one obvious springs to mind and the question of whether they could even afford them remains a very open one indeed.

It had been the case that this very lack of quality elsewhere had been the one solace that United supporters could take from their current predicament, but is that still the case? Ipswich Town are showing signs of life, having beaten Chelsea on the same evening that United were phoning it in against Newcastle. Crystal Palace are obviously improved. Everton have definitely been here before. Wolves appear transformed since the arrival of Vitor Pereira. With no improvement in sight, for the first time in many, many years, it’s fair to ask the question of how much further Manchester United can fall. They certainly don’t seem to have stopped falling yet.