Rashford’s value, it can’t get worse, Europa glory: Five reasons to be cheerful for Man Utd
Manchester United are out of the FA Cup, the one tournament that over the last couple of years has provided significant respite and shelter from the abject sh*ttiness of literally everything else the club and team have been up to.
That is bad. But it’s not all bad. There is still good news to be found at United, if one is simply willing to search really hard for it through all the crud. We’re sure we can find five reasons for Manchester United to be cheerful.
After all, This Is Manchester United Football Club’s Reasons To Be Cheerful We’re Talking About.
Marcus Rashford’s value is increasing
Look at him there over at Aston Villa. Having a wonderful time, isn’t he? Looks like a man who has remembered a previously lost time when he actually truly loved football before the sheer relentless miserabilism of the club he adored robbed him of any joy.
Now admittedly this doesn’t yet sound like much cheerfulness for Manchester United, but we’re getting to that. Rashford having a brilliant end to the season – perhaps even winning the FA Cup that was once United’s, who knows – means his value will go up for the inevitable summer sale.
Villa will be interested, of course, but so will plenty of others if there remains a keen sense that he’s got his mojo back.
Think of all that lovely lucre to spend, and it’s basically free money because Rashford is a) an academy product and be) is neither wanted by nor wants to be at Manchester United. If that seems a grimly transactional way to view football then, well, welcome to 2025. It is what it is and we are where we are.
With a significant windfall from the sale of Rashford, there may be sufficient funds in the kitty for Sir Jim Ratcliffe and pals to make as many as three or four catastrophic multi-million-pound mistakes before they have to close the staff canteen altogether and replace it with a dusty and unreliable vending machine that sells nothing but out-of-date Kit-Kats for £2.60 a pop.
MORE ON MAN UTD FROM F365:
👉 Lineker makes Klopp comparison as he fingers Ferguson for start of Man Utd decline
👉 ‘Naive’ Ruben Amorim somehow resists Rooney manager dig: ‘Really easy’ to be pundit
👉 Man United crash out of the FA Cup to Fulham and it feels more mundane than magic
The Fulham performance wasn’t actually that bad
Again, how much actual cheer to derive from this fact is open to debate. Should Manchester United ever really be satisfied with a situation where positives can and are being taken from a cup exit? Your mileage may vary.
But while United have managed to eke out the occasional result despite themselves because such is the financial lopsidedness of the Premier League that no matter how bad a wealthy team gets there are never any actual real consequences for them as a football team (see also: Tottenham) they have never really looked at all like a compelling or convincing team under Ruben Amorim.
They have never really even particularly looked like they understand what is being asked or expected of them.
Against Fulham, though, there really were tantalising glimpses of a coherent and functioning structure emerging from the chaos. Matthijs de Ligt was very good indeed in what was surely the best performance of his United career to date and the back three with Harry Maguire and Leny Yoro didn’t even look like one to fill you with complete hopeless despair and/or dread fear of imminent catastrophe.
Sure, there was another disastrous attempt to defend a corner in which United managed to be hopelessly second to the ball not once but twice, but Rome wasn’t built in a day and a coherent 3-4-3 wasn’t built in four months.
Even Christian Eriksen and Casemiro seemed to have their uses in a system that finally looked capable of exploiting De Ligt’s range of passing from deep and managed to avoid its usual trick of leaving United constantly appearing like a side playing with 10 men, forever and always seemingly stretched and one man short no matter whereabouts on the pitch the game happens to be at any particular time.
This is a low
Always a risk, this. We’ve had years and years of experience with Spurs of thinking ‘Well at least it can’t get any worse’ and then it subsequently getting much worse.
But we are ready to get hurt again. We are ready to say it. This is the low-water mark for United. Things are going to get better. They must. They will have at least a few more players next season who are capable of playing the football Ruben Amorim wants to play, and Ruben Amorim remains one of the best and brightest young coaches in the game.
Sure, the fact that United’s low point may well mean finishing somewhere between 14th and 16th in the Premier League and not winning anything is a sharper, harsher and darker bottoming-out than anyone might have expected, with United currently somehow far, far worse than any of the assorted terrible United sides we saw stink the place out under David Moyes or Louis van Gaal or Jose Mourinho or Ole Gunnar Solskjaer or Erik Ten Hag but maybe that’s the point.
Maybe the mistake those daft managers made was only taking United and making them quite bad rather than leaning totally into it and making them completely dreadful. What Amorim has so cleverly achieved is to completely rid the club of all hope and joy and confidence, to the extent that even rival fans who grew up despising United in the 90s and 00s are now very swiftly drifting from schadenfreude into something approaching pity.
We, um, we have slightly drifted again from the ‘cheerful’ remit here, haven’t we? But the point is only by taking United to the absolute lowest point imaginable can they truly be rebuilt into something meaningful. We’ve read enough superhero comics to know this is a foolproof strategy that will definitely work if everyone just sticks with it.
The Europa Invincibles
Unusually for a big club in this kind of existential crisis, United don’t necessarily need a trophy to paper those widening cracks and lift spirits and convince everyone everything will be all right.
And that’s because one of the undeniably great bits about Banter Era United is that this decade-long Banter Era they’ve endured has contained more silverware than most clubs muster in their entire existence.
It even includes a Europa League for crying out loud.
Erik Ten Hag’s United reign will be remembered as a terrible one, and yet both his seasons at Old Trafford saw the bulging trophy cabinet burdened with yet more baubles.
United win trophies despite themselves. And that means that winning a trophy while things appear to be going all manner of tits skyward won’t necessarily convince anyone inside or outside United that it’s the start of a meaningful journey of improvement. Everyone has heard this song before.
That said, it can’t hurt, can it? And no season in which you are second favourites for a competition in which the favourites are bloody Spurs can ever yet be entirely written off.
Especially when you are the one and only club across the Champions and Europa Leagues still unbeaten after the cumbersome league phase and play-offs. European Invincibles, is it?
Until the inevitable underwhelming 1-0 defeat at Real Sociedad on Thursday night, yes it is.
Manchester City are also rubbish
Sure, they’re not as rubbish as you, City having reached a Fergie-era United kind of level where finishing third constitutes an unthinkable crisis and yes we are again in danger of losing touch with the whole ‘cheerful’ idea and descending into reverie for lost days of swaggering dominance, but it’s not nothing, is it? City being this rubbish? Only having an FA Cup to show for their season and still technically a chance that they might not even win that?
At least the ol’ noisy neighbours are a bit quieter this year, eh? Been annoying haven’t they? But who knows, maybe if you’re really lucky when Pep Guardiola eventually decides to sod it all for a game of soldiers they might spend the next decade being as miserable as you are? That’d be nice? Yeah?
What’s that? Who? Liverpool? No, never heard of them. Are they any good?
