The optimism that greeted Jim Ratcliffe’s arrival as owner has given way to even more disappointment, with Sunday’s defeat at Tottenham the latest example
Covering Manchester United these days feels a little like being a character in Silent Witness: every week you end up writing a postmortem. Their Sunday defeat at Tottenham was an engaging if bitty affair that finished 1-0 largely because the low quality of defending on show was compensated for by the low level of attacking. It was fun in its way, but it didn’t feel a lot like Premier League football.
It also meant United dropped to 15th in the table, having won just four of 14 league games under Ruben Amorim. Under Erik ten Hag this season, United were taking 1.22 points per game; under Amorim that’s down to 1.00. Nobody was under any illusions about the scale of the task he was taking on, but four months after Amorim took the job it would be very difficult to identify any concrete signs of progress. There has been the resilience of the performance in the league at Anfield, in the FA Cup at the Emirates, and not a lot else.
Amad Diallo has impressed, raising further questions about why he was used so sparingly by Ten Hag, but he is now out for the season after sustaining an ankle injury in training. The starting XI on Sunday featured perhaps three players who feel as though they might be part of the long-term future of the club, and even that’s being slightly generous given Patrick Dorgu has only just arrived and thus hasn’t had time to be afflicted by the general malaise. In January, United seemed willing to sell one of the other two, Alejandro Garnacho, if only because as an academy product he would represent pure profit in the Premier Leagues profit and sustainability rules (PSR), thus allowing them to further restock the squad.
This, of course, is a large part of Amorim’s problem. The squad he has inherited is a shambles. And while it’s legitimate to wonder why Casemiro is still clanking around the United midfield, a glance at United’s bench, which featured eight teenagers plus Victor Lindelöf, makes clear just how few options Amorim had. It’s probable now that United will suffer their first lower-half finish since 1989-90 – the season when, by legend at least, Mark Robins’s winner at Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup third round kept Alex Ferguson in the job – but nobody should think that is the fault of anybody but the club’s owners.
This week will mark a year since Jim Ratcliffe bought just over quarter of the club and the right to run the football operations from the Glazers. He was greeted with optimism; he is local and logic said nobody could be as bad as the last lot. Since then he has imposed a bevy of cost-cutting measures – many bafflingly petty. He has done away with discounts for pensioners and children and installed an array of expensive executives. Dan Ashworth was installed as sporting director, presumably to try to ensure the sort of coordinated approach that has been so obviously lacking since Ferguson left in 2013, only to leave after five months, seemingly for opposing the appointment of Amorim.