THERE were 1,913 days between Manchester United tweeting David Moyes’ view that the club needed to improve in a number of areas, including passing, creating chances and defending, and Rio Ferdinand declaring that Manchester United were officially back, after Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had guided them to a 3-1 Champions League win in Paris.
Half a year later and it feels like Moyes’ verdict on the club who won 13 of the first 21 Premier Leagues is still the more accurate one. The cathartic sugar rush of the interim-Solskjaer period last winter has worn off to the extent that his league record in his 27 games in charge of the club is now identical to the final 27 games of the Jose Mourinho-era, which begs the question: are United locked into a permanent repetitive gloom loop?
It’s first worth considering whether United have a specific style of play and whether it even matters when the club can announce record revenue of £627.1m like it did earlier this week. The only thing worse than a run of bad form is a run of good form that nobody talks about, and fortunately for Manchester United, everyone will be talking about it, whether it’s a surprise 4-0 win against Chelsea on the opening weekend or a failure to beat Rochdale in 90 minutes in the Carabao Cup.
Talk of the ‘United way of playing’ tends to emerge when the club has either enjoyed a big win, or after a defeat when fans and pundits attribute the latest setback to the team forgetting about the ‘United Way’. This ignores the number of times the club’s greatest manager built and re-built his team in the 1990s and 2000s. To paraphrase Baudelaire, the finest trick the pragmatist Alex Ferguson ever pulled was to persuade you he bought into the ‘United Way’.
The weight of expectation has understandably weighed heavily on each of the four subsequent managers at Old Trafford, and each has tried their own variation to try and adequately replace their irreplaceable forefather: David Moyes: 1.65 goals per game | top involvement: Wayne Rooney 15G 10A. He did get the job on the recommendation of a legend, and the fans did stand by their manager… for a few months at least, but David Moyes’ time in charge was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most meat and potatoes approach of the four post-Ferguson managers.
His goals per game rate of 1.65 is actually higher than the three men who have followed but he had a still just about functioning strike force of Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie, who scored 26 goals between them in the 34 matches Moyes was given. At a time when United failing to be involved in the title race was still a novelty, Moyes’ approach was to interpret the United Way as a system whereby you got it wide and put it in the box. 26.7 crosses per Premier League game is considerably more than any of his successors, helped by that game against Fulham when a barely conceivable 81 of them were pumped in, to little avail.
David Moyes says #mufc must improve in a number of areas, including passing, creating chances and defending.
— Manchester United (@ManUtd) December 9, 2013
Louis van Gaal: 1.46 goals per game | top involvement: Wayne Rooney 20G 11A. In an interview with The Guardian this year, van Gaal said of Wayne Rooney “I’m sorry but he was over the hill. But in spite of that he was one of my best players” and the numbers agree. It was also the last real hurrah of Juan Mata, who contributed 15 goals and nine assists to van Gaal’s technical but largely unexciting team. 1.46 goals per game is the lowest of the four post-Ferguson managers, and came an era in which teams have started scoring 100+ goals in English top-flight seasons for the first time since the 1960s. United faced fewer shots per game under van Gaal but they had fewer themselves. It was controlled, it was measured, it… wasn’t the United Way.
Jose Mourinho: 1.62 goals per game | top involvement: Anthony Martial 20G 11A, Paul Pogba 14G 17A. Next came the man who probably should have been appointed when Moyes was, if at all. Jose Mourinho’s first season saw the club land two trophies, his second saw them finish as technically the closest challengers to Manchester City, although the gap between first and second was bigger than ever before.
The third season descended into acrimony and insularity. Paul Pogba contributing to the joint-most goals in the Mourinho era is bittersweet given that their fractured relationship was the major ongoing drama of the period. Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s injury towards the end of 2016-17 was a bigger problem than it seemed. With him on the pitch Mourinho had a roving sergeant major to call on; without him the younger players seemed exponentially more distant from their brooding coach.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer: 1.63 goals per game | top involvement: Paul Pogba 10G 8A. Like the exquisite substitute he was as a player, Solskjaer’s impact last December was immediate and it continued throughout the winter until the unlikely Champions League recovery at Paris Saint-Germain made his permanent appointment inevitable. Stylistically Ole’s United have been remoulded as an occasionally effective counter-attacking side (15.2 crosses per game is more than 10 fewer than the high-Moyes era), who are having more shots and shots on target per match than they did under any of the previous three managers, but still the results won’t come with any consistency.
On the road United look feeble, at home they’re reliant on teams attacking them so they can counter. If Solskjaer could roll back the clock and have a late-career Rooney or a late-career van Persie or a mid-career Juan Mata or even a good three months from an Angel Di Maria things might be different, but the Norwegian is not in that reality, and as it stands, United still to need improve in a number of areas, including passing, creating chances and defending.
