Solskjaer lacks the spark to light Manchester United

Manchester United with a great manager would send a shiver down the spine, but Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is probably not that manager.

To be the manager of a Premier League football club is to assume a hefty degree of responsibility. These clubs now operate at a financial level where the slightest incremental changes can cost eyewatering amounts of money. There are countless examples, but just one would be that Newcastle United finishing above Wolverhampton Wanderers on goals scored last season earned Newcastle an extra £1.9m in prize money alone for finishing a place higher in the table. Qualification for the Champions League, now the base requirement for clubs the size of Chelsea or Manchester United, is worth tens of millions of pounds.

All of this makes it somewhat surprising that ‘big’ clubs have gone all in on head coaches with ‘club legend’ status but little actual experience of managing a football club. Chelsea made this mistake with Frank Lampard and it took them a year and a half to realise the error of their ways. They were ninth in the Premier League by the time they corrected their course, and to say that they’ve recovered quickly under Thomas Tuchel would be something of an understatement.

So what’s Manchester United’s excuse with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer? He is already the longest-serving manager that United have employed since Sir Alex Ferguson, but for all the optimistic social media activity, there really hasn’t been that much of an improvement in the two years and nine months that he’s been in charge. His first two seasons have brought no silverware and, despite substantial amounts of money spent on rebuilding the squad, signs of improvement remain fitful.

Considering the money that he’s had to spend, it’s difficult to see why this remains the case. Over the course of two-and-a-half years, £441m has been spent on the Manchester United team, yet the transfer policy remains bizarre. They spent £73m on Jadon Sancho, one of the very best young players in Europe, and then completely abandoned whatever plans were in place for the new season to accommodate an aging Instagram star with a very hastily decided contract offer. The extent to which Juventus were willing to bite their hands off to get him off their wage bill was reflected in the £12.86m transfer fee.

But perhaps this is a bit harsh. After all, Cristiano Ronaldo has scored some goals. David De Gea saved a match-winning penalty. They’re in fourth place in the Premier League, but then there’s only one point between the top six at the moment. Just about everybody has at least had one off-day already so far this season.

Except that’s a highly partial reading of Manchester United’s season. They have already been knocked out of the Carabao Cup and lost to Young Boys in their first group match in the Champions League. Should they also lose their next game, at home to Villarreal, they would be four points off a qualifying place for the next round of the competition with four games to play. It’s not quite a mountain to climb, but it is hill to hike, and all this from a group that was widely considered to be a favourable draw. They’ve now won just one of their last four matches.

It’s not a calamity, but it’s also a long way from beating Leeds United 5-1 on the opening day of the season, when they played among the best 15 minutes of football that any Premier League team has played this season, or even from Ronaldo’s triumphant homecoming, when the sun was shining on Old Trafford, new replica shirts were flying out the door and all seemed right with the world. But since those halcyon days, things have started to turn again.

The Young Boys defeat was a result which really came from out of nowhere. The win at West Ham United in the Premier League might have been a draw, had their opponents not brought on Mark Noble to take the penalty which would have tied them the game. West Ham made a return trip to Old Trafford in the Carabao Cup five days later and came away with a deserved 1-0 win; David Moyes seemed to have learned more from the Premier League match than Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. The Aston Villa clash was obscured by the drama of its closing minutes, but the other 87 were pretty bad from Solskjaer’s team too. With no bite in his midfield, Ronaldo looked isolated up front and Aston Villa found it easy to control the centre of the pitch.

Perhaps the question we need to be asking here is what success looks like under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. Manchester United are now on their fourth manager in eight years since Alex Ferguson retired, and it’s a sobering statistic that United won 18 of their 20 English league titles and all three of their European Cups under either Ferguson or Matt Busby. And if Manchester United, a club with the capability to resemble a soap opera, does need a strong personality to march in, grab the club by the collars, and tell it to start living up to its bloody potential, can Solskjaer be the man to achieve this?

Great managers are seldom anonymous. They cannot afford to be. It takes a strength of character to take a group of footballers and meld them into a team capable of being the best on its continent, or in the world. The managerial greats, whether Matt Busby or Alex Ferguson, Bill Shankly or Bob Paisley, Stein, Herreira or Lobanovskyi, all had that in swathes, and in the modern game you can see this in Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola. But there’s no sign of that spark in Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, no matter how much many Manchester United fans wish it to be there. His team plays in streaks, fits and starts. It can look like a potential European champion one minute and a relegation candidate the next, sometimes within the same match. And they do much of this while being considerably less interesting to watch than it sounds.

The big stars will still turn out because they can play in front of more than 70,000 every week, United can meet the wage demands and can offer Champions League football. The club’s transfer policy has reflected this. No-one doubted that Manchester United would sign Jadon Sancho or Cristiano Ronaldo, even though they haven’t won the Premier League in eight years. But having expensively assembled this accumulation of talent, it’s not enough to simply send the players out onto the pitch. There needs to be a system. There needs to be proper planning. There has to be a properly co-ordinated transfer policy. Manchester United with a potentially great manager would send a shiver down the spine of the rest of the Premier League, but Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is not that manager.