Manchester United: how did they get into this mess?

Indeed, over the last few months the ongoing crisis of Manchester United has been discussed so widely it has become an object of daily fascination, like the weather forecast, or the collapse of Ukraine. This is the way of these things now. Consumed by rolling news and social media, English football finds itself in the grip of an unceasing background din. It is a place where enraged public opinion has become an event in itself, and where everybody on every side of the argument is simultaneously distraught and consumed with gurgling triumphalism pretty much all the time. And yet, for all the talk, there are plenty of questions to be answered as Britain's most celebrated football club of the last 20 years embarks on its date among the Euro-giants. Are United really in crisis? If so, is this the kind of crisis most people seem to imagine - a business of botched succession and managed corporate shrinkage - or another, more insidious, kind of crisis altogether? All that is certain right now is that it seems to matter, on some level, to a great many people, Kazinform quotes the Guardian. In outline the facts of United's case are fairly plain. The team has struggled on the pitch and in the transfer window from the moment last July when David Moyes was first unveiled as Alex Ferguson's replacement, posing for the cameras by the home dugout with a pallid grimace of a smile, like some incredulous new father about to wander out of the maternity unit for the first time with his papoose on upside down. United have lost 10 times in the Premier League this season and will fail to finish in the top four for the first time in 23 years. They have been repeatedly cuffed aside by more powerful Premier League opponents. More bafflingly, their football has been callow and cautious, lacking in a familiar sense of United-tinged dash. And tellingly it is this change of tone that appears to have been most disorientating. Football teams will lose, empires will crumble, but there is a deeper sense of status-anxiety here. Historically, United have been portrayed as a kind of footballing Camelot, its greatest teams providing an ideal of youthful attacking brio, a vehicle for a terribly seductive kind of red-shirted romance. This is the key to the United identity, although in reality this sense of fearless attacking vim has diminished in recent years as the late stages of Alex Ferguson's time in charge coincided with some cautious, austerity-era winning football. But under Moyes, a worthy if unremarkable organiser, a curtain seems to have been swished aside, behind which this state-of-the-art United stand revealed as ... well, something that doesn't particularly look like United any more. Full story