BY DANIEL TAYLOR. FROM THE ATHLETIC, April 15th 2021
A great piece from the Athletic. A magazine worth subscribing to.
It hasn’t always been easy to congratulate Ed Woodward for his decision-making during the long periods of drift, otherwise known as the post-Alex Ferguson years, when Manchester United could be found grubbing around for points in a league they used to dominate.
Woodward and his aides can presumably reel off all sorts of financial figures to demonstrate that he excels in various parts of his job. It just hasn’t always felt that way when United have been held back by so many self-inflicted troubles since he became the club’s highest-ranked executive eight years ago.
A plane went over one game pulling a banner calling him the “specialist in failure”. United’s fanzines have devoted pages after pages to his alleged failings. Twitter has frothed with anger. Gary Neville has called for changes at the top of his old club — and he didn’t mean the manager.
All of which puts us in a slightly unusual position now United are finally getting some reward, it seems, because of Woodward’s rigid belief that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was a more accomplished manager than many people realised and would eventually put the club back on an upward curve.
Even when Mauricio Pochettino was available, free of compensation wrangles and itching to get back into work, Woodward decided to stick with Solskjaer rather than turning to the man who had taken Tottenham Hotspur to a Champions League final and is now one round away from doing the same with Paris Saint-Germain.
Many of us thought Pochettino would be an upgrade. We had started to think the only plausible reason Solskjaer was being kept on was because, 20-odd years ago, he had flicked out his right boot to score the goal that put United’s ribbons on the Champions League trophy. “Football, bloody hell”, and all that.
Not Woodward, though. All the time, the message from Old Trafford has remained consistent: they trusted Solskjaer, they liked what he was doing and, if everyone would just calm down, their firmly-held belief was that short-term pain would be worth the long-term gain. And, bit by bit, we are increasingly seeing the evidence to back up that theory.
Woodward won’t get many accolades, of course, because he has been too accident-prone, too unreliable and — in the case of some players’ salaries and transfer fees — too starry-eyed, perhaps, to make a credible case that this is part of a wider series of personal victories.
There are also a number of caveats that need to be attached before anyone can say, categorically, that Solskjaer is capable of reinventing United as serial collectors of trophies. Their play can still be confusingly erratic, perhaps best summed up by the three-day period in January when they beat Liverpool then lost at home to Sheffield United.
They are, to quote Gary Neville, “the odd bunch”. They are still playing catch-up to Manchester City and it would be a sad day for United, 20-time champions of England, if they could ever feel entirely satisfied with a second-place finish and the prospect, yet again, of seeing their neighbours having all the fun.
Over time, however, it has become easier to make a case on Solskjaer’s behalf and recognise that the decision to stick with the Norwegian was not just blind faith from the people at the top of the club.
United have been in the top two every day bar one since December 29. They have lost one of their last 25 Premier League fixtures and have accumulated as many points, or more, at the 31-game mark as Ferguson managed in six of his first 10 full seasons. In that decade, Ferguson’s United averaged 57.7 points at this stage. Solskjaer’s are on 63, up from 49 last season. Different times, yes, but still relevant when Solskjaer’s first, and potentially biggest, battle has been to show he is not out of his depth.
It is true, of course, that United cannot be happy to be in City’s wing-mirrors and, naturally, there will always be frustrations for a club of their size and ambition to be embroiled in the Thursday-night churn of the Europa League. But who would have thought the team from Old Trafford would be 11 points clear of Liverpool at this stage of the season?
Who would have imagined that United would be nine points ahead of Chelsea, 14 in front of Tottenham and 18 above Arsenal? Or that a Twitter post would have gone viral this week pointing out that, in two years, Solskjaer has beaten Pep Guardiola on four occasions, won three times against Frank Lampard, twice each against Pochettino, Jose Mourinho, Thomas Tuchel, Carlo Ancelotti and Marcelo Bielsa, and once versus Jurgen Klopp?
“Time to put some respect on Ole’s name,” was the message. And fair enough.
It hasn’t been a quick process, by any means, and Solskjaer is lucky to have such understanding bosses when, let’s face it, there have been plenty of occasions when United could have moved him out without too many people arguing it was an injustice.
Perhaps you recall the 6-1 clobbering at home to Spurs when Solskjaer’s team seemed intent on morphing into Old Trafford’s Slapstick XI. Or maybe you regard the nadir as the Champions League defeat against Istanbul Basaksehir, featuring the tragicomedy of Demba Ba’s goal and the Mysterious Case of the Missing Defence that ultimately led to United dropping out of the competition before Christmas.
That, however, would be to pick out just a couple of ordeals and ignore all the other occasions when Solskjaer’s team have put in spectacularly bad performances and had to face down the kind of crises that, to put it bluntly, would never have been tolerated by more trigger-happy clubs.
When Lampard lost his job at Chelsea in January a statement from their owner, Roman Abramovich, explained it was because the deterioration in results had left “the club mid-table without any clear path to sustained improvement.” Lampard, in Abramovich’s carefully presented words, was an “important icon” whose status at Stamford Bridge from his playing days would never be diminished.
Still, though, Chelsea took the decision to abandon a club legend at the first real sign of trouble. Chelsea were eighth when the news broke that Lampard’s job was in danger. Since then, it has emerged that Abramovich and his colleagues were discussing a change of manager even before this season started. At another club, it would seem far-fetched, absurd, implausible. For Chelsea, it is just the norm. Boom and bust, on repeat. The same tape, looped over and again.
Guardiola made an interesting point earlier this season about the lack of patience within his own industry. “People talk about projects and ideas,” the Manchester City manager said. “They don’t exist. You have to win, or you will be replaced.”
At City, maybe. Chelsea, undoubtedly. Various other clubs, too. And, confusingly, this has also been the methodology at Old Trafford during other parts of the Woodward era.
Something, though, has changed in United’s thinking since the pattern of sackings that took out David Moyes, Louis van Gaal and Mourinho, all complaining that they did not get enough time in the job or the right amount of backing from the top of the club.
It certainly hasn’t been an orthodox success story for Solskjaer. To highlight just a few of the indignities since he took charge in December 2018, his tenure has included United’s first home defeat by Cardiff City since 1954, their first against Burnley since 1962 and their first to Sheffield United since 1973.
Against that kind of backdrop, Woodward and his colleagues may have to understand why it hasn’t always been easy to regard Solskjaer as an elite coach or fully understand, looking at what happened to Moyes, Van Gaal and Mourinho, why the former manager of Molde and Cardiff was being spared the same treatment.
Woodward has certainly been a supportive boss given that it was he, not the manager, who was targeted with mutinous chants last season about being put on top of a bonfire (“and burn the fucking lot”) when the team were an irrelevance in the title race and Solskjaer’s results were inferior to those of his three predecessors.
Another club would not have tolerated the various slumps that, on Solskjaer’s watch, saw United register only six league wins at Old Trafford during a nine-month period in 2019. A less understanding regime might have pressed the eject button when all sorts of statistics were flying around to show it was their worst start to a league campaign, two seasons running, for such-and-such amount of years.
Even in those more joyless moments, however, Woodward refused to bend from his starting position that Solskjaer was a better manager than results showed. Did Woodward consider the merits of other managers? Yes, of course he did. But Solskjaer, he always said, would come good. He liked what he heard behind the scenes. The reports from the dressing room were positive.
Sure, the media scrutiny was tough. But then again, there were stalls on Sir Matt Busby Way, pre-lockdown, that were flogging T-shirts showing Ferguson’s infamous quote — “youse all fucking idiots” — from a press conference almost 20 years ago. And if United can finish the season as the Europa League winners, maybe some of us football writers should wear one for the trophy presentation. Not many people — fans, media, anyone — can legitimately say they have never had misgivings about Solskjaer’s credentials to hold down a job of this size.
A more cynical view, perhaps, is that Woodward stuck by Solskjaer because he was acutely aware that, having already sacked three managers, to do away with a fourth would be an admission that his own work had not been good enough.
Alternatively, maybe this time we should give Woodward the benefit of the doubt and recognise it for what it is: an old-fashioned show of loyalty, entirely out of keeping with modern football, and a stubborn, principled decision to stick with a long-term vision, no matter how many people were calling for change.
It doesn’t exonerate Woodward for some of the blurred thinking and transfer-window ordeals that have undermined the club more times than he would probably wish to remember. It might, however, turn out to be his greatest victory if Solskjaer can maintain this upward trajectory. And it is fair to say that there are plenty of other managers in the football industry who must be wishing their own bosses had been this supportive.