Manchester United set for a bottom-half finish! Or maybe fifth! It’s SuperCustis v Supercomputer
Manchester United are heading for the bottom half while the Daily Star’s investigative journalists take to Fabio Vieira’s Instagram…
United punt
Manchester United are not in a good place. They weren’t great last season and they are having a difficult summer trying to recruit players without the lure of Champions League football. Everyone knows these things and everyone is rightly pointing them out.
It’s a pretty easy piece to write about a club that will always deliver returns in wonderful, delicious clicks. But the fact the problems are so real and so obvious and so easily covered means there is absolutely no excuse for hyperbolic bullsh*t.
Enter Neil Custis in The Sun, who makes all the obvious and correct points about recruitment, unpopular owners, mutinous fans and the rest. And then just can’t help himself and goes way, way, way too far.
“They may even be going backwards if you consider the players who have left, like Paul Pogba, Nemanja Matic, Edinson Cavani, Juan Mata and Jesse Lingard.”
Even if we leave aside the long history of Neil Custis and Paul Pogba – which we won’t – making it pretty rich to now paint his departure as evidence of the sky falling in at United, the numbers don’t suggest these departures are quite the problem Custis makes out. Matic and Pogba played 1383 and 1353 minutes of Premier League football respectively last season; 13 United players were more involved. Cavani (763), Lingard (355) and Mata (232) put together played slightly less than Pogba. It all feels very replaceable even with United’s undeniable problems
It gets inevitably better than that, though, Custis warming to his theme so thoroughly that he drops this bombshell in there.
“Indeed, if the season began tomorrow and squads stayed as they are, United could quite easily finish bottom half.”
Even with the caveats, it’s just not true is it? United were absolutely awful for long periods last season and finished sixth with a nine-point cushion to the bottom half. United haven’t finished in the bottom half of the top flight since 1989/90, and none of the ‘Big Six’ have done it since the ‘Big Six’ was a thing.
Chelsea gave it a good go in 2015/16, the silliest of all the seasons, but still couldn’t quite drop below 10th. Before that, you’re going all the way back to 2008 for Spurs finishing 11th the last time they actually won anything. For further evidence of how relevant that is to today’s football landscape in England, Manchester City finished ninth and United won the title.
Arguably the most interesting point here is that United can make as many bad decisions as they have for as long as they have and yet still the very lowest they can conceivably finish is seventh.
Computer says no
That said, we’re more interested in SuperCustis league table predictions than “supercomputer” ones. The Sun should have consulted their own man, because the supercomputer that has crunched the post-fixture release numbers is very clear that United will not finish in the bottom half.
In case you’re wondering, the wonders of modern science have come up with last season’s top four in precisely the same order, Arsenal and United swapping places in fifth and sixth, moneybags Newcastle seventh and the three promoted clubs relegated. This is definitely a valuable and necessary use of supercomputer time.
Dubbing latest
We’re huge fans of dubbings here at Mediawatch. Always interested in your Next Messis or Polish Ronaldos or Maradonas of the Carpathians – although Gheorghe Hagi is an exception to the inalienable rule of dubbings because he was actually good.
We’re slightly less interested in Marcos Alonso knocking about on a yacht with a 23-year-old “who has been dubbed the Italian Megan Fox” but we can see how Sun readers might feel differently.
Modern Football Journalism Headline of the Day
To the Daily Star now, who have found the crucial line on Fabio Vieira’s imminent move to Arsenal.
“Mystery of Fabio Vieira’s ‘soulmate’ who Arsenal-bound star shares dripping-wet pics of”
Now we’re very hip and modern here at Mediawatch, which is why we’re okay with ending the headline on a preposition. But the rest of it… f***ing hell. Gets worse as well.
“Soon-to-be Arsenal player Fabio Vieira might be heading to London to stay along with an elusive secret ‘soulmate’ who he enjoys sharing lewd pictures with on social media.”
There is nothing ‘elusive’ or ‘secret’, of course. There is no ‘mystery’. It’s his girlfriend. The Star even name her. Not very secret or elusive when splashed all over the Instagram account of a professional footballer. And please spare us the hypocritical curtain-twitching tutting about “lewd” or “heated” pictures from a publication positively salivating over those (neither lewd nor heated) pictures for their grubby little clicks.