The weight of an empire

Man Utd move on from another manager and another failed project, and return to the warm bosom of ex-player familiarity.

I’m reticent to write too often about Manchester United, mainly because there already exists a never-ending tsunami of content surrounding the club, from every possible angle.

Secondly, because there’s some far better writers out there with a far better handle on things that I could ever match up to. And thirdly, they ruined much of my childhood. Growing up a Liverpool fan in an Irish primary and secondary school, surrounded by United fans, throughout the entirety of the Alex Ferguson era. I’ve been mentally scarred, and only just coming out of the light on the other end. Maintaining an unbiased overview to anything United is immensely difficult and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve taken a fine deal of satisfaction in their downfall.

I do however have this bizarre thought process that a lot of people tend to differ from when I bring it up, with a mixture of judgmental outrage and get-this-guy-medical-help responses - I actually think a good Man Utd would be good for the Premier League, and I’d prefer Liverpool to be competing for titles with them rather than the likes of City or Chelsea.

I really am a bit disappointed that we never truly got a Liverpool and United title challenge during that era where Liverpool became sort of good again, just as United crumbled into oblivion. Sure, the years against Man City were fun and amounted to some titanic battles and never-before-seen points tallies in the Klopp and Pep era, but, and no disrespect to any City inboxes, it would’ve felt far more substantial if those wars had been against United. There’s nothing worse than losing to United on a normal day, putting that concoction into the melting pot of a title challenge would really get the juices flowing.

Anyway, what I see with United, something that’s edged back to the fore now that the Ruben Amorim era is shuttered, is a club falling over and crumbling under the immense weight of the empire it’s been built on.

There’s almost a cruel monkey’s paw allegory to the club. They had decades of success under arguably the greatest manager ever, a force of nature who ruled the club with an iron fist, which happened to coincide with a conveyor belt of some brilliant talents either emerging from the academy or joining the club and becoming folk heroes, who rose up and delivered, sometimes against the odds, under the guidance of Ferguson.

It’s like someone came a long and asked for sustained dominance, a powerful identity, and greatness built around one man and one generation. That receipt has now come due over the last decade with institutional dependency on the ghost of Ferguson following his retirement, who hovers over the club despite remaining physically present at Old Trafford. Symbolically, every manager works under his shadow.

In an effort to reclaim that identity, some of those ex-players are teed up to connect that great past with the new. A thread to the era of success when things were better. They know the club. But with each failure deepens the sense that the past is judging the present and that while many ex-players may know the club, the club has simply become too big and immovable to be steered forward now that that era is in the history books.

In addition, you have several more ex-players sprawled across the media, adding narrative and discourse on TV and podcasts, shining a blinding microscope on everything the club does. They are part of the problem and the hamster wheel the club finds itself, putting forward their old comrades for the role of manager, delivering a thumbs up to a Roy Keane, a man who hasn’t managed a club in over 14 years, and a thumbs down to the reigning FA Cup manager in their latest viral video effort. Keane is perhaps the biggest cult of personality to emerge from the remnants of the club after the very manager he most publicly fell out with. In the middle stands dozens of ex-players who must eternally offer sigils of deference to both figures.

In another corner is Gary Neville, Sky Sports lead commentator and who’s built an empire of his own in podcast form, almost off the backs of several of his ex-teammates and even rivals, into a steamship that almost exclusively fuels itself through the United of the past.

The loop wheels around once more as United turn to Michael Carrick this time, and for a second time, to carry the club forward until the summer when another outsider will be given perhaps the greatest poisoned chalice in sport.

It will be the twelfth instance of a new figure in the dugout since Ferguson’s departure, five of them being former players of the man who’s shadow looms large.

Amorim’s departure at this juncture, with the club in seventh place in the league and performing well beyond last season’s measly 15th, shows a club that has an ambition for the future but no clue on how to get there, or at least an uneasiness with truly committing to something. Amorim’s spell saw the club marry itself to a very specific system that needed very specific system players to deliver it, something the club was in the process of overturning. But results were inconsistent, performances often lacking, and despite several clear issues to mask over, Amorim, clearly a strong personality himself, eventually had enough and clashed just enough with the football directors that triggered an end to his time there.

The new ownership structure, led by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a force of personality himself as a businessman but so far floundering helplessly in the business of football, has committed and then changed his mind on two managers, while in the middle pursued sporting director Dan Ashworth at great expense and then binned him months later, and are now immediately back in the ex-player carousel of legends who dominated Old Trafford at their peak but are now mere mortals in the dugout as the empire continues to crumble and crack at the seams.

The club’s suffering is the bill coming due for a period of success so complete, so all-encompassing, that it eliminated the need to plan for a future without it. United didn’t just win under Ferguson, it outsourced everything to him and is doing it again with it’s ex-players - direction, identity, standards and evolution.

And that, perhaps, is the final curl of the monkey’s paw. United got exactly what they wished for: dominance so absolute it became their defining feature. But now they are trapped in reverence, unable to move forward without constantly checking back over their shoulder, stumbling under the weight of the empire it had became.