Man Utd Mason Greenwood plan and Antony sh*tstorm at heart of football grimness

What an utterly grim moment in football history we’ve arrived at.
Not a fun way to start a column is it, but there we are.
On a trivial level, VAR continues to eat itself. Forever inserting itself where it’s not needed and keeping schtum when it could actually help. On one hand it doesn’t matter, compared to other things going on. But also it kind of does as it continues to make football less fun, more confusing and further and further from the sport it once was.
VAR hasn’t cleared up controversies; it’s just created new ones. And by its nature, those new ones are worse and more insidious. Refereeing errors have always fuelled conspiracy theories about certain teams or outcomes being favoured and engineered by the shadowy figures of Deep Football who secretly run the game purely to stop Arsenal winning the league. But VAR amplifies and hardens those theories: one official making a mistake in real time is still just One Of Those Things; VAR making errors with multiple people and actual cameras and replays? Well it’s still just One Of Those Things, but it’s far easier to turn it into something shadowy and sinister because it’s less excusable for there still to be errors when you’ve been sold a system that will solve all your problems and make refereeing errors a thing of the past.
And that feeds into the more overtly deplorable and depressing elements of the current football frontlines. VAR is rubbish and it makes football less good and less fun, which makes us sad. But it’s still just football, and football is only the most important of the unimportant things.
But the conspiracy theory encouragement it fosters leaks into real-world viewpoints and that’s where football is currently on really shaky ground.
Saudi Arabia’s emergence as a major football power while doing nothing about its deeply regressive views on, well, just about everything is a seismic shock to the game. At the moment, perhaps harshly but also in calamitously self-inflicted fashion, the focus of that falls on Jordan Henderson.
Here’s a man who apparently stood for something but who now falls for everything when enough money is piled up on a table in front of him. We’ve dealt already with the absurd intelligence-insulting attempt he made to justify his move to Saudi Arabia.
There are ultimately two possible conclusions to draw. Either he’s stupid enough to believe the bullshit he’s coming out with, or he thinks you are.
But other players may now be looking at the righteous opprobrium raining down on Henderson and not on any of the other high-profile players to have made the same move this summer and be coming to some pretty bleak conclusions. If you want to be grimly calculated about it, Henderson’s error hasn’t been taking the Saudi cash, but being an LGBTQ+ ally and supposedly a good guy. It’s the apparent dichotomy and hypocrisy of his current situation set against the values and beliefs he has overtly held that has got him all this unwanted attention.
Players may now be reluctant to do good things – and Henderson did do good things – if they fear those things may be used against them down the line. Head down, look after number one, and you won’t end up making a complete fool of yourself in an interview with The Athletic.
It’s not to say Henderson doesn’t deserve or shouldn’t receive the criticism that’s come his way. He absolutely should and must, because the alternative is worse. But we must at least stop and consider that the outcome of Henderson’s fall may not be fewer players willing to move to places like Saudi Arabia but fewer players willing to put their heads above the parapet in the first place.
And then there’s Manchester United, a club that appears to have entirely lost the run of itself at every level from boardroom to changing room and manager’s office, a gigantic institution with a rotten culture.
Mason Greenwood’s loan move to Getafe confirmed what was widely suspected from United’s tin-eared yet carefully worded statement basically saying he was a good boy but you lot with your noise weren’t going to let him carry on playing for Manchester United, which was jolly unfair of you really.
The key line, after three paragraphs that genuinely read like they formed the basis of a previous draft of this statement intended to be used to announce that Greenwood was staying at United – before public outcry made clear just how untenable that dream was for player and club – was this.
All those involved, including Mason, recognise the difficulties with him recommencing his career at Manchester United. It has therefore been mutually agreed that it would be most appropriate for him to do so away from Old Trafford…
Initially, most reported this as United binning Greenwood off. They’ve got rid of him! They’ve actually done it. They hadn’t, and they haven’t. He will, as they said, be ‘recommencing his career…away from Old Trafford’ having joined Getafe on loan.
But he hasn’t left United. They haven’t ripped up his contract. They haven’t taken a stance. They’ve reluctantly sent him out on loan for a year to see if this might all blow over. At the very least, they’re not willing to write off an asset that they could sell for some money; not for something so trivial as doing the right thing.
Meanwhile, the club stumbles Groundhog Day-style into a new shitstorm over Antony, releasing a statement saying there will be no statements and the dance begins again. Grim, grim, grim.
But what of Getafe. Ah, yes. Greenwood’s new home. Someone was going to sign him, and it’s possible that he remains the vastly promising and exciting footballer he was a few years ago, in which case Getafe have got themselves a player. But at what cost?
There were many ways Getafe could have tried to handle The Greenwood Situation. Because we’re on the darkest timeline, they’ve chosen the grimmest. They’ve positively revelled in it. Their English Twitter account, which didn’t even exist until July, is not far off being a Greenwood fan account as they welcome swathes of Men’s Rights Activists into their fanbase.
🫶 We are already 𝟯𝟬 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗚𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗳𝗲 𝗳𝗮𝗻𝘀 in this account!
💙 We are excited to keep growing in the English-speaking community 💙
𝐋𝐞𝐭'𝐬 𝐠𝐨 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞, 𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐬! 😇😍 pic.twitter.com/5ke0YaHvLH
— Getafe C.F. English (@GetafeCFen) September 5, 2023
Post after post of young, male fans cheering and posing for pictures with their new hero. Wholesome stuff that in no way leaves a feeling of gnawing dread in the pit of the stomach.
Meanwhile the chairman insists signing Greenwood is fine because he was cleared by a judge in court (still not what happened, lads) and the manager insists signing Greenwood is just like signing any other player. Because of course England’s brightest young footballing talents turn up at Getafe all the time. There’s definitely nothing unusual about that.
Elsewhere in Spain, the Luis Rubiales saga rumbles ever on as he finds himself in the position of having done something that prompts Woody Allen to come to his defence. Definitely something that should give a man pause.
And we’ve got nothing, that’s the worst bit. We’ve got no solutions here. We’re just detailing a series of grim things that are grim. We don’t have answers, we don’t have a way out of this malaise. We don’t even know what we should feel about it all really.
Apart from that there should definitely be fewer international breaks.