Manchester United are stuck in limbo: they need to fail properly and get relegated

As Manchester United were beaten again midweek and were exceedingly tedious and boring on Sunday and look set to finish somewhere between 12th and 16th, I wonder how long some of their current supporters – all the tourists, megastore dwellers and once-a-season day trippers –  will stand this level of not just failure, but sheer dullness, before walking away and not coming back?

There’s no reflected glory for these supporters in such tedious mediocrity. Not even many goals. Only Everton and West Ham have scored fewer outside the bottom three. There’s no reward for their extravagant spend. No galacticos to admire. You can’t get a sense of dominance or superiority after another defeat or eye-meltingly boring draw. It all starts to look bloated, flatulent and self-regarding.

In my life, only Liverpool in the ’70s and ’80s have attracted so many casual fans, there for a day out, just needing the validation of supporting a successful club, unlike the rest of us who use different cultural metrics to decide who to support. Clearly, you’d think money spent will induce a revival at some point, but we’ve been saying that for a decade and it’s no nearer now than it ever was. Further away if anything, even despite the regular trophy wins. They somehow don’t count.

The game against City was laughably bad – it was fourth-tier standard. Imagine paying to see that dirt? It has to erode support because it’s become endemic. They’re almost always boring and useless. You can’t keep being like that and expect the fickle proportion of the crowd to keep paying to endure it. They offer nothing at all to the glory hunter.

The fact it’s been worse than ever since Jim Ratcliffe arrived is in part due to his masquerading as some sort of ruthless businessman but coming across as a petro-chemical Worzel Gummidge. But fans have a long history in football of being able to support the club even when the owner/chairman/Middle-Eastern fascist autocrat is turning it into a despicable hell hole. But is this true of United? There’s an argument that they have a bigger but more fragile fanbase than most, based on tourists and indeed have actively pursued those people.

Until recently the support in general has never had to question itself the way most of us who stick with a club through the trophyless decades do. Never got to that ‘think I’ll give it a miss this week’ stage. So now is a real test the likes of which only old gadgees will ever recall having.

MORE MAN UTD COVERAGE ON F365
👉 Gary Neville picks out ‘five’ Man Utd signings needed ‘straight away’ with quintet ‘not good enough’
👉 Pep Guardiola slams Man Utd fans over ‘shameful’ chants about Phil Foden’s mum

The 1973/74 campaign when they were relegated was my best ever season. Boro won the Second Division by a record amount, losing only four times and beating Sheffield Wednesday 8-0, and it’s often forgotten Carlisle also got promoted to the First Division with Chris Balderstone, unusually a midfielder who was also a first-class cricketer for Yorkshire and Leicestershire with 19,000 runs to his name and two caps for England. Denis Law sent United down. Oh how we gloated.

Because even back then Manchester United attracted kids in my class to support them just as Liverpool did too. They did seem glamorous somehow, though it was six years since the European Cup triumph. But that was never attractive to me. The immutable relationship between the distance of Boro’s ground to my house somehow seemed to trump such shallow behaviour. I was only two miles away from supporting Darlington, if you can imagine such a curse.

Anyway, when they were relegated, kids stopped supporting them for a few months, until they started burning up the Second Division because, as we know, despite the Premier League’s desperate attempts to convince us that just being in their league is better per se, they lie because winning loads of games, no matter the division, is actually brilliant. And they all flocked back. The same thing may happen again, except they’ll never be relegated.

Ruben Amorim has one window to fill the squad with players who will slot into his system. And you can’t transform a side in one window, of course, but can you see being 15th by November being tolerated by anyone, let alone a clueless scarecrow like the extraordinary thick-but-thinks-he’s-clever Ratcliffe? I don’t even think Amorim can. He seems almost amused or embarrassed by how awful they are.

Relegation would reboot the club and success in the second tier would, counterintuitively, give supporters something to bind them to the club anew. But since that is unlikely to happen, they’re stuck in limbo, building a circus tent for the clown car of a team to park a dysfunctional club’s history with a fading support. Who wants to buy the club’s official packet of egg noodles when you’ve just been beaten for the 13th time this season? The whole edifice is built on big success, not abject, limp losses.

And as revenues fall and fans stay at home, United will have to pull their horns in, somehow get rid of the Glazers and Ratcliffe and all the pointy-shoed execs who aggrandise themselves but are useless. But then for that to happen, they’ll need a season where they fail properly and go down, otherwise this mediocrity will continue to dominate and they’ll never recover. Funds will dwindle as the chopped liver supplier and others withdraw their sponsorship, slipping behind others who are more monied, who do attract the plastic fans and tourists. United have always benefited from – I won’t call them fans, that’d be an insult to their real fans – followers, who just want the reflected glory or the spectacle. When they go, what will be left? Not a 75,000 stadium and certainly not a 100,000 one.

They need to get much worse to get better, but without the courage to be more hopeless, they’ll continue to be a bit hopeless, very, very uninteresting, but with a dwindling support.