Manchester United: a tale of mediocrity and greed finding its own reward

Medieval English poetry loved nothing better than a beautiful ruin: moss-encrusted decay, dying grandeur, the empty hearth. Although, to be fair, medieval England was also cold, damp and prone to violent marauders.

Unsurprising, then, that medieval English poets should get a little tearful at the thought of wet rot and not being able to light the fire. But it seems fair to say they would have found a source of transcendent inspiration in the current, gorgeously decayed iteration of Manchester United: the waving arms, the tortured faces, the uncanny melancholy of those cold white midweek lights.

The day before Atlético Madrid’s brilliantly executed 1-0 win in Manchester, a defeat that casts a shadow not just over the current United season but the next one too, the news broke that Old Trafford could be flattened and rebuilt from the ground up.

This probably makes good economic sense. But there is an aesthetic concern too, because there is an irresistible beauty in the gargoyles, the bowed walls, the mouldering buttresses, the wreckage of two decades of parasitic ownership. Just listen to those howls again, the acoustics that make every sound, every song, every attempt to jolly up these post post-industrial ruins sound like an achingly empty Joy Division bass riff. Perhaps Andy Burnham should slap a blue plaque on this place before they can call the bulldozers in. Because this is also a kind of art.

Not to mention, once the ledgers of overspend and underachievement have been tallied, a kind of natural justice. Rejoice, for Manchester United will win nothing again this year. And it seems that elite sport, or at least the part we see on the pitch, still has some kind of logic to it.

This is not tribalism or a comment on the fitness of football governance elsewhere. Other deeply cynical Premier League ownership structures are also available. But the subject here is the unique Old Trafford take on where elite football finds itself. And this is, above all, a tale of mediocrity and greed finding its own reward.

Manchester United will now cruise past five years without winning a trophy. During this time the club have employed three laughably disconnected managers, done nothing to promote or protect their own infrastructure, splurged on an incoherent jambalaya of starry players, tried to join a super league and, as a kind of sparkly distraction, elected to pay half a million pounds a week to a non-essential 37-year-old celebrity.

What message, as we say in football journalism, would it send out, what template would it set, if such multi-layered ineptitude were to result in success? As opposed to the just rewards of haunting and cinematic failure?

Make no mistake, this runs deep. There is still a temptation to be wowed by the moth-eaten pageantry, by the spectacle of Rio Ferdinand and Paul Scholes sitting like ancient sad dying gods around the TV punditry table, and to seek overly simple one-shot solutions.

Scholes, who looked genuinely soul-sick in the post-match chat, kept suggesting that “a really good manager” could solve United’s on-field problems. There is even a hint of the obsession with the past, with that great lost Fergie-land in the skies. Clubs are no longer governed by a single personality. Success flows from policy, clarity, interlocking corporate tiers.

But Scholes has a point. Since Alex Ferguson retired United have hired three managers, including the past two, who have never won a major league title. Louis van Gaal and José Mourinho were doomed attempts to import instant success. Ralf Rangnick, almost touchingly, is a doomed attempt to bolt on a soul, a method, a sense of someone here actually having a plan. Yeah, let’s get one of those method guys in. Bring me a sensitive German.

The real issue is that the head coach is just the part you can see. Safe to say that same level of competence has been applied to every level in between. The playing squad was described repeatedly this week as “the most expensive ever assembled”, but this ignores the reality of overpaying for overpraised footballers.

Harry Maguire is the most expensive English defender by an absolute mile. Is he the best English defender? Is he even a very good defender? Is he, in reality, a game and eager footballer who played at a decent level for Hull (54 games) and Leicester (69) before this inexplicable garland was placed on his slab-like brow, and the game became unwinnable?

The players have suffered in this confusion. The suggestion of a kind of sickness, of toxic characters, of a group who are simply not trying reached its apogee after the 4-1 defeat by Manchester City, spurred on by some classic chuck‑a‑circle‑around-a-player-and-say-look-he’s-not-running style of TV punditry.

The reality is that the players are not corrupt, flawed human beings. Like less famous clubs, Manchester United can also lose by not being good enough. When Atlético scored their expertly worked winning goal on Tuesday Maguire and Diogo Dalot looked lost, outgunned, defeated by a greater intensity and precision. Is this because of some deep cultural dressing-room sickness? Or is it because they are Harry Maguire and Diogo Dalot, being asked to perform without any real sense of a system or a plan?

Later on, as United chased a game that was always out of their reach, Rangnick sent on Nemanja Matic, Edinson Cavani and Juan Mata (combined age: 101). Is this what a Champions League quarter‑final looks like? Does this vision of success deserve to defeat the thrillingly dark, deep notes of Atlético, whose wage bill is less than half that of their debauched and sclerotic hosts, but who at least present a coherent picture; some sense of team-building, of the ways sport can be uplifting and instructive?

As Ferdinand noted on BT Sport, a “holistic” solution is required. But give some credit. What United are currently producing is an entirely joined-up, perversely logical vision of incoherence, from the vacuum between head coach and owners that has been filled by endless floating blokes (so, so many blokes), to the obsession with branding and eyeballs that has infected every part of this organism.

Never mind the soulless, highlights-reel quality of the football, the emptiness of winning just enough games by producing just enough moments of brilliance. This is a fully realised vision of profiteering waste, one that can only be interrupted by the distant prospect of a change of ownership. There is even a kind of beauty, a glory in that ruined structure; albeit one that will before long, without a little care, a little love, find itself vanishing into the soil.