Modern football now lives in a different world than the one it occupied in 1986 when Alex Ferguson took over as Manchester United manager. Football – the game – has changed dramatically, too.
And like a life-sentence prisoner who suddenly finds himself on parole after 26 years inside, Manchester United came into the real world a gibbering wreck, frightened by their own shadow, ill-equipped to cope with the outside world, and completely stunted by the weight of their own institutionalisation. Struggling to adjust to the world, at various points during Louis van Gaal’s regime they looked so oddly close to dressing up in their best suit, stepping onto a chair, carving ‘Brooks was here’ into the wall, and ending their misery.
United find themselves stuck in a stormy present; caught between the sepia-tinged nostalgia of their glorious past and the prospect of a cold, corporate future. A future for football more generally, too, inclusive of business-types with incomprehensible job titles, sinister-sounding ‘transfer committees’, and ‘Moneyball’ policies seeking to reduce a sport with a rich cultural heritage to some sort of academically-understood science.
21st-century football is a lot like 21st-century business, a manager is just someone who makes sure that the quality of the product matches what the advertising, marketing and branding says that it is: this is the manager as a quality-control officer, inspecting the product on the conveyor belt.
The battle between old and new protrudes visibly at United, a club now trying to make a very difficult transition, and one that has never been managed successfully. But it is also important to note that United is not simply a club coming out of a lifetime of institutionalisation and finding that it’s a brave new world out there.
The situation described above is the situation taken to its dystopian extreme, and it reads like something George Orwell’s Manchester United-supporting alter-ego may have written in the 1980s. But we must also remember that the United managed by Sir Alex Ferguson was a deeply progressive club.
Take any popular monarch or leader who spent a long time at the head of a country – or any institution, for that matter – and what characterises their tenure is usually a willingness to modernise, not to fight the tide of time. Human advancement is, by its very nature, exciting and often quickly embraced. Any great leader will lead his followers into that advancement, not try to fight it. In the end, human advancement creates a better – or at least more desirable at the time – quality of life, and that will always be the people’s choice.
So it’s worth remembering that Ferguson may have been a wonderful manager in 1986, but he was still a great manager in 1999 and a remained a great manager in 2013. That wasn’t simply because of his own natural ability as a football manager, or the fact that he had all the attributes that great football managers must have, but it was also because of his willingness to accept modernisation. Indeed, he didn’t just accept it, he was at the forefront of it.
During his tenure, football changed and Ferguson changed with it. He understood the power of it all: larger squads, player rotation, sports science, the changing face of the media and how it could be used to his advantage. Importantly too, Manchester United became one of the world’s biggest clubs under his management; that is, his football club garnered a worldwide following, tapping into global markets in a business sense as well as a footballing one.
So whilst we might caricature Manchester United as a club undergoing a tug-of-war between the traditionalists (Ferguson and the Class of ’92) and the modernisers (Ed Woodward and his merry marketing men) it isn’t strictly true. United are not a club who have resisted modernisation for years. But they are a club suffering from institutionalisation.
At the end of last season, United found themselves at a crossroads.
Ferguson’s retirement has so far precipitated three years of mismanagement and unrecognisably poor Manchester United performances; and it has precipitated, most importantly, three seasons of football with only one winners’ trinket to show for it. The appointment of Jose Mourinho seems to signal the triumph of short-term success, the quest for shiny things – the victory of the cold corporate suits over the so-called traditionalists.
That’s the road they’ve taken.
But the whole debate must bow its head to the context in which it is discussed: namely the fact that United have endured three turgid years without Manchester United-levels of success, and that Ed Woodward has spent over a quarter of a billion pounds and appointed two failed managers with only an FA Cup to put on his CV.
Far from being simply a problem related to winning trophies, though, over the last few years, the biggest criticism levelled at United has been their style of play. Stodgy and hard to watch, it is a long way from the swashbuckling, caution-to-the-wind attacking swordsmanship Manchester United are supposedly known for.
The problem is, with Jose Mourinho in charge, will Ed Woodward really find a solution? The style of play will surely become much more pragmatic and direct, it will surely bring trophies back to the cabinet, but will it be entertaining? Will it live up to United’s attacking tradition? And if it doesn’t, is that as much a problem for the club’s marketing department as it is for the fans who pay for their season tickets?
Despite being the club with the most league titles in England, only three managers have actually won league titles at United: Ernest Magnall, Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson. There are 20 titles between the three of them, 18 between Busby and Ferguson. Clearly, United have always liked to build dynasties.
Both Ferguson and Busby built various starting elevens during their reigns. Over their years, they didn’t simply build one great side and move on three or four years later when the success fell apart. Instead, they both remained a firm constant at the club, below which players came and went.
By staying in control for so long, and having the power to shape events at the club, Manchester United’s legendary managers could act as the river banks to the club’s river, directing the flow.
The transient nature of football usually forces managers to leave. Players grow older and move on or retire, tactics evolve and managers must evolve too, apathy sets in as things get stale. These are things that haven’t happened Manchester United, traditionally. United’s legends have been above all this, shaping the flow of that river by making sure that the club could replace players when needed by promoting young talent from within the club, supplementing their homemade wares with talented players brought in from outside. A culture was created where longevity was something to aspire to.
That’s not the Jose Mourinho way. Indeed, nastiness, infighting, and the constant igniting of his players’ passions is more Mourinho’s style. He winds them up and away they go, but that’s hardly conducive to long-term success at a football club. It’s conducive to titles over a two or three year period before the springs break, and at that point winding things up just makes everything worse.
Mourinho’s place in football is now as the manager of one of the world’s biggest clubs, and one of the only clubs that have an established tradition. That acts as a huge selling point. United’s past, the titles the club has won, the players it has produced, and its sustained success over decades make it a club whose manager is expected to continue the tradition – though tradition is a slippery concept.
Mourinho, on the other hand, is a very modern football coach. His tactical nous, his attention to detail, and his ability to identify strengths and weaknesses in his own team as well as in the opposition allows him to impact football games almost as much as the players on the pitch. That skill set in the modern game is important, but they are skills that might also be applied to Sir Alex Ferguson.
Especially the ‘modern’ aspect: the bit that makes Mourinho a coach for the 21st century. Ferguson moved with the times, and Mourinho, too, captures the zeitgeist.
Manchester United are a club that has, for years, built a marketing strategy around its tradition. But in a way, their tradition was being a club who could move easily with the times, building new teams who won trophies, and doing it in the traditional way: that is, with homegrown players and modern coaching methods; and more recently modern business practices.
The problem is that creating a ‘brand’ based on ‘tradition’ is a jarring concept. It’s one that works whilst you can still point to a tradition being upheld. After years of being able to point to the guiding hand of Sir Alex Ferguson, the club wanted to be able to point to that of his hand-picked successor, David Moyes instead.
But the fight between modernisation and tradition was a fight United always seemed to win. A fiery Scot like Ferguson could never have been seen as part of the changing face of the game – or at least never was. Claudio Ranieri was the tinkerman, and ridicule was heaped on Rafael Benitez and Gerard Houllier, too, for player rotation policies. Arsene Wenger has also had those sorts of critics, those who mock his ‘professorial’ approach to football management.
There is an inverted snobbery leveled at the managers Ferguson rivalled with, and that snobbery was never leveled at him. Even though he followed the same principles, the same tactics. His ability to couple the tradition with the modern was unparalleled.
But the modernisation and the tradition are coming apart now. The marketing trick was to convince the world that United’s tradition was to be a club at the forefront of modernisation; it was not simply a tradition that endured despite the changing of the modern world, their tradition was to change the modern world.
But somewhere along the line, modernity caught up with United and overtook them. Because when Ferguson left, United found a footballing world outside which no longer favoured monarchies. If United’s tradition was to shape the course of modernity, it is now the modern world that is forcing United to take a risk on a manager who looks very much like he could erode their tradition.
Long-serving managers are, for the most part, a thing of the past. There are simply too many jobs in football, too many leagues from which to scout players, too many tactical intricacies to spot in the next opposition. It can’t all be done by one man alone.
The experiments with David Moyes – the hand-picked successor – and Louis van Gaal – the failed master builder of a club identity – didn’t work. But they were a sign that the club was easing itself to a more modern framework, bit by bit.
By appointing Jose Mourinho, Ed Woodward may have made a deal with the Devil; a Faustian moment that could ruin United in the long term, but bring riches and trophies in the short. Or maybe this is just a sign that United are now a modern football club like every other club, with no special traits.
Either way, Monarchs come and go, but entire Republics remain. United have put Jose Mourinho in charge of theirs as they sell yet another piece of their tradition in order to stay at the top of the game. That might very well have been a necessary move, but you get the feeling that they’ll have to do it again in three years.