Hot off the back of another defeat, this time against Spanish giants Atletico Madrid, Lisandro Martinez was sent to bat for the club in front of the broadcasters’ rolling cameras.
Martinez’s time at the club has been tarnished by injury, intermixed with spells of decent play and noble exhibitions of his “Butcher” nickname.
Speaking to Amazon Prime, Martinez’s didn’t skirt from his true feelings following the defeat, and following years now of the club lurching from calamity to calamity, pointing his ire squarely at the boardroom suits that have become the sometimes seen, yet never heard puppeteers pulling the strings across football’s biggest clubs.
“We have to bring in more players to compete, I expect more from our technical director, I have to be honest.”
It was a deliberately cutting comment, and couldn’t be excused by a hot-headed reaction following the full time whistle, as he followed up his sentiment with an equally pointed interview to Peter Schmeichel on American broadcaster CBS where the Argentine doubled down. “Every season we are saying the same thing,” he said. “If we don’t say the truth, nothing will change.”
All of it contributes to the never-ending basket case that Manchester United has become in recent years, trailed almost exclusively back to the departure of Sir Alex Ferguson. Martinez, a decent but oft-maligned player who arguably hasn’t earned the position to point fingers at others, but has clearly seen himself as a sort of martyr for change.
He’s certainly not a Roy Keane figure who, back in 2000, famously called out fans for feasting on “prawn sandwiches” and not knowing enough about the football after a poor atmosphere at Old Trafford in a Champions League win over Dynamo Kyiv. Keane, always outspoken, but he and his teammates tended to always back it up on the field. If you were to transplant that version of Keane, and not the one that we’ve come to know at The Overlap breakfast table, into this squad, God only knows how vicious he’d be towards the suits in charge.
Of course, the landscape is relatively different going on 25 years later. Now led by an ever more feeble manager in Michael Carrick, who should probably be the one fighting his and his players case at boardroom level, granted going as nuclear as Martinez has done in the public domain likely hastens his departure, just like the man he replaced.
The irony of it all being the performance against Madrid wasn’t even that bad, all things considered, granted it follows an awful one against Tottenham at the weekend, and a record-breaking bad start to the league season.
Ignoring the messenger for a second, the simple conception of publicly calling out the boardroom boffins is a welcome introduction to football’s discourse. For too long now they’ve been insulated deep within the bosom of plushy offices and cordoned-off executive suites, calling the shots on coaches, dropping enormous sums on player signings and overseeing departures, yet remaining utterly out of the picture when those decisions begin to fail.
You need only take a look at, until recently, a supposedly well-run club in Liverpool. For sure, they’d nowhere near been the soap opera across the M62 in Manchester, but the mask has slipped slightly as the Macbook gets passed from figure to figure in a game of Director of Football musical chairs. And as the club floundered last season under Arne Slot, it was the head coach who was left doing damage limitation with the circling media, while fans were left totally in the dark.
At no point did Richard Hughes, who has now conveniently fled to Saudi Arabia to continue his chequebook football over there, have to square up to the media. At no point was he asked to justify the outlays paid for Alexander Isak or Florian Wirtz, nor was he ever put in a position to even articulate the plan for bedding in such a swathe of expensive players, or what the future they had in mind looked like.
Back at United, there is clearly discontent that the club didn’t strengthen accordingly in the summer following the unlikely progression into Champions League football this season. Three senior players arrived, all at centre midfield, and although Martinez has been yearning for a new contract with his set to expire next summer, would likely have been on the butcher’s cutting board had United been able to add some much needed defensive recruitments.
United missed out on a host of players in the summer, linked at various times to the likes of Elliot Anderson, Sandro Tonali, Matheus Fernandes, Ederson, and Alex Scott. They failed in a pursuit of Lewis Hall, and chose not to sign a striker to support Benjamin Sesko, who is out injured and hasn’t been involved much at all.
To credit Martinez, at some point the focus needed to stop being pointed at the managers and beyond the hallowed halls. It was Wilcox and the laptop class who chose to extend Carrick’s deal on the basis of last season’s European qualification. It was their decision to back Erik ten Hag after he won the FA Cup, then renege on that just as quickly. Ruben Amorim was sacked due to the breakdown of his relationship with Wilcox.
If this coaxes Wilcox out of the woodwork and into the media limelight to start explaining the decisions he is extremely well compensated to do, then Martinez will have done football a great service.
It’s time for these guys to stop hiding behind the dual-monitor screens and start facing the music.