Pochettino can fix Bermuda Triangle of talent at the club
⮞argentine long admired by Ferguson is the man to solve the mystery of why big signings turn bad at United
Since 2013, Manchester United have recruited almost every player on supporters’ wish lists and succeeded only in making each one of them worse.
Harry Maguire, who arrived as an established England centre-half, stands today at the heart of a defence that has kept just two clean sheets in 25 games. Aaron Wan-bissaka, once perhaps the most highly regarded young right-back in Europe, serves merely to send Roy Keane into more splenetic rages. An institution that used to be a dream factory is now a Bermuda Triangle of talent.
The money-to-silverware ratio is so scrambled that in eight years, £840million has been lavished on one FA Cup, one League Cup and one Europa League. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, despite the decency he has shown under merciless questioning, must accept his share of blame for this pitiful conversion rate. If nothing else, his sacking is justified on the basis of sending out teams who delivered barely a fraction of their potential.
In years to come, United’s slide will offer business students a case study in how to squander a reputation. Their summer outlay on Jadon Sancho, Raphael Varane and Cristiano Ronaldo was the envy of their rivals. But just look at what has happened to Sancho since. Last season, the winger was Borussia Dortmund’s most prized possession, whose signature United supposedly could not secure fast enough. Four months and £73million later, he has been reduced not simply to a spare part in their plans, but to a lost soul whose confidence is ebbing by the week. He symbolises, whether Solskjaer’s apologists like it or not, a failure of coaching.
The sense of decay is similarly stark at the back. How do Maguire and Luke Shaw go from being toasts of the nation at the European Championship to laughing stocks of the Premier League? There is a school of thought that certain players downed tools, as Eden Hazard appeared to do in the death throes of Jose Mourinho’s second spell at Chelsea. But as a leader of men, Solskjaer was demonstrably deficient. Even as Bruno Fernandes professed faith in the Norwegian’s ability to arrest the tailspin, the words were uttered more out of blind faith than conviction.
When Solskjaer was given the United job permanently in March 2019, the deal was conditional on fulfilling three core objectives: restore the winning habit, prove a commitment to attacking football and promote graduates of the academy. On the first two fronts, he fell dismally short in his final days, with his side so bereft of enterprise that in the defeat by Manchester City, they recorded more shots on their own goal than they did on Ederson’s. Granted, he continued to blood the youngsters, although the development of Marcus Rashford and Scott Mctominay has arguably gone backwards.
It was with some generosity, then, that United saw fit to credit him in their parting of ways with “all the work he has done to rebuild the foundations”. For here are a club so devoid of any overarching philosophy that, after a slowmotion crash-and-burn of Solskjaer’s credentials to take them forward, they still cannot find a successor worthy of being called even an interim manager.
At least when Roman Abramovich sacked a coach, he had Guus Hiddink, a former European Cup winner, to use as a placeholder. United, in their hour of direst need, are turning instead to Michael Carrick, a man whose only experience in a technical area is as assistant to the out-of-his-depth Solskjaer. This feels less like an oversight than a system failure.
Candidates for accomplishing the full reboot United require are thin on the ground. Zinedine Zidane, who never represented an English club as a player, exhibits little appetite for doing so as a manager, preferring to complete his sabbatical and await his turn in charge of France. Realistically, this leaves only Mauricio Pochettino, long admired by Sir Alex Ferguson, as a viable option. The Argentine built his prestige at Spurs on the palpable bonds he established with his players, on his skill for creating a culture of mutual respect. These are the qualities that United, reeling from the squandered resources of the Solskjaer years, most urgently need to recapture.