Ten Manchester United ‘worsts’ as Ratcliffe to thank for Red Devils nadir

Andre Onana did as much as he could to prove Nemanja Matic right on Thursday as the Manchester United goalkeeper failed to find a happy medium between jelly wrists and hard hands to cost his side victory against Lyon in the first leg of their Europa League quarter-final.

We don’t think he’s “the worst goalkeeper in Manchester United history” – Massimo Taibi wants a word – and we’re fascinated by the Red Devils fans forgetting almost entirely how pants predecessor David De Gea was before he left the club.

There are other ‘worsts’ at United though and we’ve come up with ten of them in what will likely be their worst season since football began in 1992, some objective, some subjective, but all correct.

Worst league finish
They didn’t finish lower than third for the first two decades of the Premier League, but have finished outside the top four in six of the 11 Sir Alex Ferguson-less seasons since. There was an all-time low last term before sticking with Erik ten Hag after that eighth place finish, handing new boss Ruben Amorim a hellish introduction to the Premier League after Ten Hag’s sacking, with the Portuguese facing the ignominy of leading United to a bottom-half placing for the first time in history.

READ MORE: Manchester United players and staff ‘risk wrath’ of Onana as ‘nobody embraced him tightly’

Worst manager contract extension
“It was too early for us to make a big decision in reality,” Ratcliffe said after admitting it was a “mistake” to extend Ten Hag’s contract, claiming it was hard to work out whether the “erratic performance was a function of Erik or the structure around him”.

Weird that such a huge self-professed Manchester United fan could think it was the darn structure that continually allowed opposition sides to wander through the Red Devils midfield and shoot whenever they fancied.

And yes, we know the FA Cup win made it a 50/50 call across the United fanbase, but thinking after a thorough post-season review during which time they scoured the market for alternatives – including Amorim – spoke to players and did a deep-dive into Ten Hag’s tactics and philosophy that the best recourse was to not only extend the contract of the guy who led them in their worst-ever Premier League campaign but also to spend £200m on new players for him was pure madness.

£21.4m worth of compensation later they had the guy in charge who should have had a pre-season to prepare rather than being drafted in mid-season and set up to fail.

Worst striker
Sure, you’ve got your David Bellions and Federico Machedas, but having watched Rasmus Hojlund bumble his way around the pitch this season, scuffing shots, failing to control the ball and misplacing simple passes, we’re not sure we’ve seen a worse starting United No.9.

Joshua Zirkzee now being so obviously the superior option having been jeered off by his own fans in December and despite having just seven goals to his name this season, says a lot about just how terrible Hojlund has been.

Worst year of ownership
Sir Jim Ratcliffe will insist he and his INEOS fixers aren’t the bad guys but the good guys cleaning up the bad guys’ mess, and he’s definitely suffering from two decades of Glazer mismanagement. But we would contend that you should still know the name of the women’s captain despite the previous regime panic buying a 30-year-old midfielder and you probably shouldn’t be thinking about revoking Busby Babe privileges and cutting disability budgets if want to avoid being seen as a heartless despot.

READ MORE: Ranking Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s 17 Man Utd f***-ups: 3) Ruben Amorim, 4) Dan Ashworth, 8) Kath Phipps

Worst year for club staff
We suspect a good number of the 400 or so staff members to have been made redundant will now see their departure from Carrington as a blessing. Those that remain tread on eggshells removed from the boiled eggs they brought from home for lunch around an INEOS spy who’s watching their every move, counting paper clips and playing the friend in a bid to lull them into a false sense of security. One poor f***er even has the job of phoning up the relatives of recently deceased Manchester United fans to enquire over the status of their season tickets.

Worst year for academy products
The PSR ‘pure profit’ hokum has made it a tough year for academy products at all clubs, but it’s been a particularly trying time for the United fans, who would like nothing more than to see a youth product emerge from their run-down training ground to star in their run-down stadium.

Scott McTominay left in the summer and has since had the nickname ‘Braveheart’ bestowed upon him in Napoli’s bid to win the Scudetto. Mason Greenwood has scored 16 Ligue 1 goals for second-placed Marseille, with the sell-on clause a scant silver lining for their great hope of two seasons ago. Marcus Rashford is doing Marcus Rashford things on loan at Aston Villa.

And Kobbie Mainoo’s career has been derailed to the point where an exit is on the cards amid Ratcliffe’s ‘declaration of war’ after a season in which he emerged as one of the most talented midfielders in Europe, scoring a goal in the FA Cup final before starring for England on their way to the Euro 2024 final.

Worst finances
United are still listed fourth in the Deloitte Football Money League, with their £651.3m revenue only exceeded by Real Madrid, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, so it’s not all bad, but the original debt of £660m placed on the club by the Glazers’ leveraged buyout now stands at £731m despite Ratcliffe’s investment.

He revealed the club would have been “bust by Christmas” without his outlay and the cost-cutting strategies he’s since put in place and the club is now faced with the reality of having very limited funds to hand to Amorim and the recruitment staff to fix an ailing squad in dire need of an overhaul.

Worst goalscoring
Last season was the only Premier League campaign which ended with Manchester United on a negative goal difference (-1). They’re currently on -4 so will be hard pushed to get into the black across the last seven games of the season, with their struggles largely down to their inability to score goals.

They will need to score 13 in the last seven games to avoid this being their worst-ever goalscoring season – beating the 49 they managed under Louis van Gaal in 2015/2016 – which will require them to increase their output to an average of 1.86 goals per game from their current mean of 1.19.

Worst sporting director appointment
Ratcliffe says a lack of “chemistry” and a “different vision for the club” saw Dan Ashworth leave after five months as sporting director. Seems a tad negligent that the very first question in an interview with Ashowrth before hailing him as a “ten out of ten” director whizz upon his appointment wasn’t ‘what’s your vision for the club?’ To which Ashworth would presumably have written ‘Gareth Southgate’ on a whiteboard and dropped the marker like a microphone.

Reports suggest they paid Newcastle around £3m to release Ashworth from his contract before handing him £4.1 in compensation, in a mistake which if avoided could have kept 177 staff members in jobs for a further year on £40k.