Disclaimer: The following article is the opinion of the author and does not reflect that of Sportskeeda.
Objective: Fix Manchester UnitedIssue: The task at Manchester United is not easyProcedure: Long but simpleResult: FailApproach: All WrongVictims: Manchester United Football Club and FansWinners: Rivals and Media
Manchester United – The world’s most popular football team. It is surely one of the world’s biggest football clubs and it will continue to do so for the coming years, provided their on-pitch performances add up, because, without it, the glitter and the money will eventually dry up.
After Sir Alex Ferguson retired, Manchester United have not even been a shadow of themselves and countless articles have been written and debates as to why a club like Manchester United, even after significant amounts of expenditure, is not able to get out of the slump which goes deeper with each passing day.
Pundits and fans are always harping about how the managers after Ferguson are not suiting Manchester United, or how it was always bound to happen after Sir Alex left, or how Ed Woodward is a clown or how Sir Alex left United in a poor state and so on.
Here is my take on the same. I will try to be objective and not repetitive from the above points too much and not bore with baseless football jargon.
The Biggest Problem – Lack of Identity
If you study football closely and then study tactics, managers, great teams, you would find one thing common – any football team or rather a great football institution is based on an identity and not just a philosophy.
There is a difference between the two.
People don’t realize this difference and maybe a lot of top managers also don’t as well. This is one of the reasons that some top managers fail at great football institutions. A philosophy remains just a philosophy until it is implemented, adapted and becomes an identity. Playing a certain way and winning is philosophy and doing it day in and day out is an identity.
To give you a clichéd example would be the team of Johan Cruyff. He had a philosophy which ended up impacting the entire footballing fraternity. He was able to build a football institution out of his team with an identity and players following the philosophy.
Pragmatic managers like Mourinho have trouble building institutions because their teams lack identity. There isn’t anything wrong with Mourinho’s way of running a football club. Mourinho’s track record speaks volumes as to how he has managed to build great teams. My point is about a footballing institution and not just a team.
Mourinho and Louis van Gaal have done great with clubs over a couple of seasons but usually, have left their clubs on a bad note. Mourinho’s teams are usually not set up for future success as he fails to give them an identity. This happened at United after Sir Alex.
Sir Alex’s Manchester United teams had an identity and yes, while the last few years of his reign weren’t supremely brilliant, they were efficient. Moyes, in particular, couldn’t carry on that identity. He never picked up on it and it all went downhill from there. He let coaches leave and then Louis van Gaal came in and asked some of the squad stalwarts to leave. This made United lose their identity.
The squad now looks like a disjointed group of players who are trying to look for a philosophy to follow, but sadly they aren’t getting the right leadership. Humans are basic animals. It is their basic instinct to follow a leader. United have been so used to it for many years, that anything less seems diabolical and so it should.
Rivals’ Identities
Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola’s teams don’t just follow their philosophies but perform well using them, giving them an identity. Thus they build good teams and great institutions. Every manager makes slight changes as per the opposition, but they stay true to their team’s basic identity.
For example, in the Manchester Derby, Pep didn’t go with the inverted full-backs because he knew Mourinho would be fielding his favourite 4-2-3-1 formation and would favour with zonal marking.
This way he pushed his full backs outside and created spaces for his amazing number 8s – Silva and Kevin de Bruyne in the half spaces. But what was he true to? His team played like a team and indulged in coordinated pressing and created the midfield overload with a man advantage and always passed with precision and speed.
Guardiola adapts and now you can see his teams doing fast counter attacks and Kevin De Bruyne wreaking havoc.
The former Barcelona manager doesn’t stay long in jobs but he respects the existing tradition (Bayern Munich and Barcelona) or helps build a new one (Manchester City). He would have been perfect for Manchester United but their own indecisiveness and Woodward’s intention on keeping Louis van Gaal proved costly.
This is after Pep said he saw himself at Old Trafford. He got his wish granted but on the blue side of Manchester.
Klopp’s Liverpool team played a fine match against Chelsea on Friday night but he too tweaked some things. The pressing wasn’t that intense and it wasn’t all heavy metal football. But he kept true to this philosophy of pressing high and quick transitions in the game.
This was accomplished by some poor Chelsea play as well, but Liverpool gave Mane freedom and the midfield and attacking trio indulged in some quick one-touch passing. He adjusted to Chelsea’s style but the team’s identity was intact.He has now drilled his team with his tactics and they are loving every second of it and so are the fans. Big things await Liverpool?
Coming back to United, Mourinho has now lost 13 of his last 31 games as manager. This is a damning stat for any top manager. The thing with building an identity is that it gives the players purpose and drills intelligence into them.
Manchester United under Louis van Gaal were brilliant at times – playing Liverpool off the field at Anfield or when they totally dominated Manchester City in the 4-2 win at home.These were after years of dogged performances against their arch-rivals even under Sir Alex Ferguson. But the very next match, the players wouldn’t know what to do if the opposition did something different that they weren’t prepared for.
An example is the Manchester derby and even the Feyenoord encounter. Players looked disjointed and taken aback.United resorted to long balls against City, which seems like a good plan, but they had the quality to beat them on ground. They looked promising when they put in 5 passes together. Pep’s little dig at United about the long balls they played was amusing and true.
Against Feyenoord, they made them look better than they were. Didn’t press enough. Maybe Mourinho needs some pointers from Pep. Don’t always sit back and think that counters will work.
The Way Forward
Trust your team and players and they will repay the faith. Try to build your team’s identity so that they know how to play and react to situations naturally; not just waiting for the half time to ring the changes.
The process is not easy since any loss is met with a string of trolls and ridiculing articles from the fans and media.
The idea is to keep it simple and help build Manchester United. I’ll quote Mourinho again “Rome wasn’t built in a day” but people did try to build it in the right way.
The same applies to Manchester United. Now Mourinho’s biggest task is not just rebuilding United but also building its identity. Hopefully, Woodward and the Glazers help him with this huge task.
