Oh yes, Europe. Now you see it. Now you understand why we’re harvesting your players, hoovering up your football culture, poaching your 27-year-old rollerblading hyper-nerd coaches. This is the spectacle we’re creating over here on our island of trade and innovation. Beholdour Europa League final, our Wednesday nightfield of the cloth of gold. Look on our works and … well, maybe go out for a sandwich instead.
The all-English Europa League final has already taken some stick for not being a spectacle worthy of the occasion. Or at least, for looking like what it was: two muddled teams scrabbling for the last escape ladder. It would be normal at this stage to bring out the phrase about a pair of bald men fighting over a comb. But baldness at least has a pattern. Baldness is orderly. Baldness is noble. This was more like two men with bad, failing hair transplants fighting over an emergency toupée.
But Wednesday night was also a significant outcome for English football generally. From a neutral perspective the correct bad team won. The good bad guys beat the bad bad guys. The people for whom this was the greatest moment of their supporting lives got to go berserk at the end, rather than a fanbase for whom this would always have been a consolation, a make-do after another lost season, like scraping the burnt top off a frazzled lasagne and grimly serving it up anyway.
The second half was also a properly absorbing spectacle, if only becauseManchester Unitedhad most of the ball and were forced to just exist out there in all that light, confused by the space, the angles, by the inflated sphere at their feet, a non-team applying itself earnestly to some incomprehensible task, like a labrador trying very hard to drive a steam engine.
Tottenham are at least a well-run club. There is merit in their success. This is basically what Ineos would like to create. Small wage bill. Managed discontent. Big stadium that makes money. A modern football club has been called into being here, in contrast to the Glazer‑sphere, where just walking up to Old Trafford feels like the most grudgingly tolerated consumer experience, a place where some day soon they’re going to start stopping you at the perimeter in order to pour water down your neck, steal your iPhone, laugh at your shoes.
This will be no comfort to United’s supporters, who will stage another protest against the ownership before Sunday’s final home league game against Aston Villa. But more widely there is a reassuring sense of logic in Manchester United failing. This is what should happen right now. The people running the club do not deserve success. Failure suggests, at the very least, some sense of order in the universe. It speaks to meritocracy, to social mobility, to non-negotiable sporting standards.
And yes, with all due apologies, it is also fantastically entertaining. This is the brand now: Epic Failure. Even the scroll of score-settling agent-sourced headlines after Wednesday’s defeat were totally moreish. Amorim Curls Into Ball In Laundry Room as Showdown Talks Loom. Revealed: Hidden Message as Wantaway Ace Posts Cryptic Pic of Wheel of Cheese. Arrogant Ratcliffe ‘Ate Entire Packet of Chewing Gum’ in Front of Crying Nurse.
There are just so many layers now. One of the best currently is the way United’s players will improve, unarguably and dramatically, the moment they leave the club. Were the players always better than they looked? Does the act of leaving release its own high-performance endorphins? There must be some way of harnessing this. Perhaps United could hypnotise their players into believing they’ve already gone. No, you’re at Sporting Gijón now. Everyone loves you. The climate is nice. Tell him he’s Antony and send him back out there.
And if playing for United really is the equivalent of running inside an oxygen chamber then the club should seek to monetise this, reposition itself as some kind of rehab or rest cure. Send us your sullen, underperforming stars. They’ll absolutely hate it. They’ll hate it so much they’ll be back in six months playing like maniacs. Although of course strict controls are needed. If United’s malaise really is a performance-enhancing drug, how many times can you leave and come back flaming with hater‑silencing energy before you turn into a fentanyl zombie?
Obviously Ruben Amorim is still fascinating, still locked in a managerial reign marked by highly visual mini-eras. Amorim turned up swaggering about the place like the handsome, successful man in an advert for caffeine-powered shampoo. Within two weeks he was already fumbling through the press conference doors looking haunted and hollow-eyed, a hostage shuffled from safe house to safe house.
Right now he can’t stop talking about how much he very obviously wants to leave, one step away from “I will literally pay money not to manage this team”. The queen had a code where she would place her handbag discreetly on the table as a sign to her handlers she wanted to leave a function. Amorim is basically standing out there on his touchline every game shadowed by his own giant handbag, hauling it out at himself at the start of every half, scanning the stands for the rescue squad. As a wise man once said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the Manchester United.
Amorim is still likely to survive all this. He’ll go on and do well at Milan. He’ll defeat an English team at the Club World Cup five years from now and you’ll catch his eye, sigh a little, and say: “Yeah, we used to have a scene, didn’t we. You look good. You look … happy. You look… less visibly mad.”
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For now his role is to highlight the deeply muddled nature of United’s executive, the madness of appointing an evangelical systems coach with an ill-fitting squad and no budget for parts, of crashing the team, Liz Trussing an entire season rather than compromising the one sacred principle, the one red line he can never cross, which is, er, having wingbacks.
There is a great deal more incidental comedy here. The vast payoffs. The hiring of a 67-year-old fitness coach. Asking Joshua Zirkzee to lead a press, a player so slow time seems to catch up with him as he runs (note: Zirkzee will, of course, be second top scorer in the Bundesliga two seasons from now).
Losing in Bilbao speaks to all of this. It fits. It feels right. Nothing should ever be too big to fail, as United were during the ghost-ship years, when it didn’t matter how badly you treated this thing, money still came pouring in through the portholes.
It doesn’t feel like that now. United have£113m annual losses. The newly roided-up Champions League has entirely left them behind. There is a sense for the first time that maybe some things really do get lost, that no mega-brand is an island. And really, this might be good for everyone.
This club has semi-failed for long enough, still pumping out cash even as the Glazers shaved a little more of its mane every year. Maybe it needs to fail properly, to fail in a way that might finally hurt those who actually own it, not just those who will follow it wherever it goes.
It is self-evident that nothing really good can happen here until the Glazers are dislodged. It will take plenty of macro-turmoil before United finally becomes too cold to carry, not to mention a stream of sustained, cleansing failure along the way. If we’re clutching at straws, there does at least seem to be no shortage of that coming down the pipe.