You don’t have to work hard to convince Manchester United fans these days that their club is in trouble. Kicked out of the Champions League in the group stages and increasingly unlikely to finish in the Top Four, the play is so dull and unimpressive that a win over Derby County, a team not even in the same league, is clung to like a life jacket during a shipwreck. With Louis van Gaal threatening to stay in charge at least for the rest of the season, there is little reason for hope among the Old Trafford faithful. And now, with Pep Guardiola making his choice of Manchester City official, there is much to dread.
Guardiola’s reputation is perhaps a little exaggerated at times. Undoubtedly a master of his craft, he has done little to prove he has a fully fleshed-out set of skills in the management position. He has never built a team, for instance, or repaired a broken squad. What he has done, though, and what is most dangerous for United and fellow title hopefuls in the Premier League, is take an already great club and make them exceptional. The play at Barcelona during his tenure was some of the best in the sport’s history. And his Bayern Munich is not much short of that. Should he win the Champions League this year with the German giants, he will have won everything at both clubs.
More importantly than international accolades, he has been indomitable in the leagues he works in. Of his seven years managing in La Liga and the Bundesliga, he has finished first six times. And that one second-place finish only happened because Real Madrid managed an unfathomable 100 points from their season.
Obviously, United are nowhere near that kind of feat. Not only is their rebuilding project crumbling around them and their manager failing, they now have a very real chance of becoming the second team in Manchester, a possibility that was once the stuff of comedy.
City already have better players, and Guardiola is only going to be able to attract better ones. Meanwhile, United’s current stock look more and more like the lineup at a second-tier club every week. They have become a team of desperate wooers, chasing after the best players only to have them chose more impressive suitors every time.
Perhaps the one silver lining is that the Guardiola move should clarify things in the management spot. First of all, van Gaal has to go. And second, this is no time to test Ryan Giggs. As Gary Neville is currently proving at Valencia, simply being a successful player with half a mind for strategy does not mean you are a born manager. If United have any hope of avoiding a near decade-long shutout in the league, they need a top manager, and they need him now.
Perhaps the fact United reportedly didn’t even make an offer for Guardiola means there is a plan in place, but fans would be right to worry whether any plan could be an improvement if it was dreamed up by Ed Woodward.
If United don’t want to become one of the also-ran clubs they used to mock, they better start making changes quick. Otherwise, they’ll find they are suddenly the “noisy neighbors,” or worse, the cranky has-beens dreaming of the glory days.
