Mourinho’s grip slipping as United keeps dipping
Lame effort in loss to West Ham ramps up pressure on beleaguered manager
LONDON — Manchester United is a club in crisis and Jose Mourinho is seemingly powerless to prevent a slide into mediocrity for the 20-time English champion.
The Old Trafford hierarchy preened last week after the latest financial results showed the club had earned revenue of more than $700 million for the third year running.
But United, which finished a distant second behind Manchester City last season, is going backwards on the pitch — licking its wounds after its worst start to a league campaign for 29 years.
Mourinho’s men traveled to London Stadium on Saturday boasting an enviable record against West Ham but came away chastened after a 3-1 loss killed off any realistic hopes of a Premier League challenge before the end of September.
Languishing nine points behind leader City, it now faces a battle even to qualify for the lucrative Champions League, a prospect that will give the money men sleepless nights.
Former Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand said the club faces some “big decisions” over the manager’s future after the listless display in the capital.
“There are some big decisions to be made at United now,” he said. “There will be conversations at the top level, about the future of the manager and the squad, because the basics are not being done. There has to be something said.”
Overshadowed
United’s build-up to the match against West Ham was overshadowed by the growing rift between Mourinho and Paul Pogba, who was stripped of the vice-captaincy before their League Cup exit against Championship side Derby in midweek.
It came after the French World Cup winner implicitly criticized his manager’s tacHam tics, imploring United to attack more and as rumors continued to swirl linking him with a move to Barcelona.
It is difficult to see how both player and manager can work together in the long term after such public displays of disunity.
United is anxious to hang on to one of the world’s most marketable players, but all the signs are that it is sticking with Mourinho for now despite a desperately poor start to the season that has netted just 10 points from seven games.
Pogba had another sub-par performance against West but he was not the only player to disappoint in the late September sunshine.
United is lacking in ideas, short of inspiration and shape, with many of the players looking like square pegs in round holes.
Manchester City and Liverpool have a definable ethos and way of playing but United — for so long the standard bearers of swashbuckling forward play under Alex Ferguson — is painfully lacking in identity in Mourinho’s third season at the helm.
The team has a clutch of top players in Pogba, Nemanja Matic, Romelu Lukaku and Alexis Sanchez, but they have yet to merge into a cohesive unit.
United has backed Mourinho heavily in the transfer market but its policy has been scattergun, with January signing Sanchez failing to recreate his Arsenal form at Old Trafford.
Mourinho did not look too despondent after Saturday’s result, but his attempts to shift the blame for two of United’s goals onto the officials failed to take the spotlight off his under-performing players.
United’s hierarchy might appear relatively sanguine despite the poor run but how long can it affords to wait before they reach the breakingpoint?
Defeat on penalties in the League Cup leaves only two competitions left that it can win barring a miracle in the Premier League — the FA Cup and the Champions League — and victory in Europe looks an unlikely prospect.
United is already onto its third manager since Ferguson retired as a Premier League champion in 2013.
The club used to pride itself on its stability during the Ferguson years as other clubs chopped and changed but it has to pull itself out of its current spiral of decline.