I resent Manchester United for being ‘weak’ and ‘softer’ than at Ferguson’s peak

Manchester United are so frustratingly poor in 2025 that Johnny Nic feels compelled to indulge in some ‘In my day…’ nostalgia about Sir Alex Ferguson.

There is usually a gap between memory and reality, between what you remember and what actually happened. That gap is fiercely exploited by politicians standing on a ‘everything didn’t used to be this rubbish, here’s who to blame’ ticket and Channel 5 programmers who commission ‘what we loved about the 1970s/80s/90s’ type programmes.

By any rational study of the important data, we are immeasurably better off than 50, 70 or 100 years ago in pretty much every way. That’s not to say there aren’t problems – ironically most of them can be traced back to the ‘everything didn’t used to be rubbish, here’s who to blame’ people who have politicised and weaponised nostalgia by removing context and facts and instead concentrating on feelings. We’re all about feelings these days, baby. We have alternative facts to prove there really was once a golden age. You remember it, don’t you? Exactly. Facts are overrated.

If you are not older, you won’t know of some of our acute disgust of contemporaries born in the ’60s and ’70s who believe there is no gap between memory and reality. I call them the ‘there didn’t used to be…’ people, most often seen on Facebook. They are usually the ones who say kids were naughty, not autistic, think anyone on benefits is a skiver, think disability claimants are all swinging the leg, think working from home is for the workshy. On and on it goes. You know what they’re like, I’m sure. Add in a few conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers and you’ve got the full unsympathetic toxic right-wing bigot set who love to think they’re just sensible but have been led by the nose to the extreme.

It’s infuriating because they’re never satisfied by anything modern and still start sentences ‘In my day…’ the exact same way our parents did, having lived perhaps 60 years and are still unable to see how gullible they are and how easily they can be exploited by big-mouthed, frog-faced, nicotine-stained bad actors cosplaying as truth-tellers. Weak, stupid and malleable.

I mention all of this having watched a documentary: ‘Sir Alex’. Ferguson, that is, who as you’ll know was brought up in thoroughly working-class Govan, the son of a shipyard worker, which shaped his management style. It’s at this point the ‘In my day…’ people look back on those times, not at the insanitary, abusive, grinding poverty but instead, imagine a mythical noble working class with frost on the inside of the windows and blue tits pecking at milk bottles.

‘We were poor but happy,’ they’ll say, forgetting the priest who abused kids for 40 years who came by every Friday.

That said, to compare Manchester United players today with those from the 1980, ’90s and even 20 years ago, they seemed invested with a resolution and grit sorely lacking in 2025.

The difference was profound and I resent them for putting me on the same side as blinkered nostalgia trolls. Yet, today’s crop seemed, by comparison, weak and simply not driven to succeed to the same extent. Ferguson wouldn’t have tolerated only turning up for the big games, whereas it seems in-built now.

Indeed it seems like they had already succeeded just by being there. And of course, they have. They are fabulously well-remunerated and that seems enough in itself today. That ’90s side had obvious well-paid talents like Eric Cantona and Ryan Giggs but they didn’t seem distracted by their money and fame from the business of football. This may have been Ferguson’s discipline at play, but that apart, they seemed made of tougher, more resilient stuff, often breathtakingly so.

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I hate the idea that somehow, this group is objectively softer, mentally less capable and more weak-willed, because that’s real old-mannish thinking, yet that seems to be the case. They might not be the very best players, but then Ferguson didn’t often try to buy the finished article, except with Robin van Persie, perhaps. They became great at Old Trafford and we think of them as great players because of what they did there.

The idea that you buy in ready-made talent to win was, to anyone who had been paying the slightest bit of attention, not what Ferguson regularly did and he also assessed the sort of person players were. That was seen as really important. I don’t get the impression that is given a second thought now and is frequently what disgusts Roy Keane when he sees them behaving in an inappropriate way. He rightly saw the better performance on Sunday as almost insulting because of all the times they haven’t turned up, saying, effectively, ‘oh so you can play, but the rest of the time you can’t be arsed.’

In fact it seemed as if absolutely everything that had led to the clubs’ dominance was junked and some people Ferguson wouldn’t have given the time of day started making decisions, pretending they were knowledgeable – and look where it has led them. Perhaps money and status has driven this but to hear some of his Aberdeen players talk about him, was to hear them talk about a man they held in the highest regard with a vast hinterland who, in common with greats like Shankly, Stein, Busby and Paisley had interests in life beyond football and brought with them ethics and principles that were not to be broken. He talked about collectivism and pride in work. And it stayed with them. But do these things mean anything any more to the players and officials? Gritty, hard-worn principles that came with mother’s milk for people like Ferguson seem peripheral now.

And to look at those teams in the ’90s and 2000s, whatever he was putting into their brains made great, dynamic, exciting football that the Premier League is still trading off now. Clips from as recent as 2008 with a front three of Rooney, Ronaldo and Tevez are thrilling. Such a team would win the league by 30 points, so much better are they in every way even than today’s best. We and Manchester United have slowly become used to accepting average and fooling ourselves that it’s greatness, vaunting the average and expecting greatness.

I don’t think it’s controversial or blind nostalgia to say football was more entertaining in the ’90s; it’s self-evident. Sides that play to entertain are now actually criticised, for God’s sake – players who can’t and don’t play football but can score goals are vaunted. Ferguson, admittedly an extraordinary personality, would have had none of such vacant stupidity. Only in the context of the collective was individualism allowed to flourish, whereas now it seems to be the opposite, as they try to craft a team performance out of 11 individuals.

All the lessons learned in all those years under Sir Alex appear ignored or lost. Failure, and worse, dilettantism, seems baked into such a degree it has become their identifying characteristic and one draw at Anfield won’t change that.