This
is a Champions League week in Europe, but the United brand is missing
from the tournament. Worse, the team had to fill the Monday night
television slot reserved as a warm-up for the bigger shows to come.
Alas,
United cannot even win before the national cameras. Having spent almost
$300 million on big-name players during the summer transfer window, it
scrambled to a 2-2 tie at West Bromwich Albion, needing a late goal to
even achieve that.
Woe
is United. Its sponsorship contracts with Chevrolet and Adidas are
among the richest in the game, yet it plays right now in the shadows of
where it needs to be.
Manchester
United is owned by an American family, the Glazers, and its shares are
floated on the New York Stock Exchange. The laws of finance and sports
may not be far removed from each other: What goes up can go down.
Way
back in the 1960s, the Green Bay Packers dominated the N.F.L. as United
recently dominated English soccer. Green Bay’s spell was broken once it
lost its domineering coach, Vince Lombardi. The Red Devils of
Manchester are now broken after they lost their domineering coach, Alex
Ferguson.
Lombardi
reigned for just nine seasons, though it felt like a lifetime. Ferguson
governed his club for 27 years, and winning became almost a perennial
expectation throughout his span of 1,500 games.
A
team, goes the cliché, is never about one man. But after Lombardi,
Green Bay suffered a quarter-century of drought before being revived
under Coach Mike Holmgren. After Ferguson retired, it has been two
seasons with two different successors trying to emulate his style, as
well as his success.
An
even greater parallel once existed. Manager Matt Busby prevailed at
United from the end of World War II until the late ’60s. Busby, like
Lombardi, built more than a club — he built an ethos that a team becomes
great not just by winning, but by mastering the sport with a beautiful
panache.
Style
mattered to Sir Matt Busby. Style was restored, eventually, by Sir Alex
Ferguson. And that requirement — also shared at the pinnacle of the
sport by Barcelona and Real Madrid — is taxing Manchester United to the
limits.
Is this in any way Ferguson’s fault? Does it tarnish his legacy?
In
a way, yes. Ferguson had emulated Busby in that he built up a youth
structure that provided the stars of his team, or at least some of them.
No one personified this more than Ryan Giggs, who finally left the
field of play last season and now is an assistant coach at the club.
However, Ferguson left his post rather abruptly after winning the Premier League
with a team that, he surely knew, was in dire need of rebuilding. The
defense was old, apart from the young Spanish goalkeeper David de Gea.
The leaders of Ferguson’s last line — Nemanja Vidic, Rio Ferdinand and
Patrice Evra — have moved on to new clubs.
Ferguson’s
own chosen replacement, David Moyes, lasted less than a year into his
six-year contract, during which he made only two notable signings.
Neither were defenders. He brought in Marouane Fellaini, a tall,
ungainly Belgian midfielder, and the Spanish playmaker Juan Mata.
Moyes
had the misfortune of arriving not only with Ferguson newly retired,
but with the club undergoing a change at chief executive. And the C.E.O.
is the man, rather than the manager, who negotiates for new players.
United’s
new chief executive, Ed Woodward, hired the Dutchman Louis van Gaal as
manager and spent the kind of money this year that the club failed to
spend last. It has became a middle-of-the-standings Premier League team,
an outsider in Europe and a rather desperate buyer.
Among
the new players, the winger Ángel Di María has excelled. Radamel
Falcao, still being used sparingly after major knee surgery last
February, plays only bit parts. Robin van Persie, who captained his
Dutch national team (coached by van Gaal) to the World Cup semifinals in
July, is not yet fresh or enthusiastic enough to score the goals that
he did so often under Ferguson.
“Judge me and my team after three months,” van Gaal said three months ago.
The
judgment has to be harsh. After eight games, van Gaal’s United is one
point better in the Premier League than it was under Moyes last year.
The team’s struggles for style, for cohesion and for results mirror what
happened last year, when Woodward and the board began to lose faith in
Moyes.
There
is a major difference. While Moyes was thrown in at the deep end, with
comparisons to Ferguson’s reign still prevalent and with a brutal slate
of games to open last season, United this time around has mostly played
opponents from the middle or bottom of the standings.
And,
of course, no opponents at all in Europe. The lack of Champions League
play was meant to free up United to rehearse and adapt to the methods
that van Gaal himself admits are unlike anything most of the players
have experienced before.
That
supposedly easy early season run is over. Next up is Chelsea on Sunday.
The following Sunday, United visits its neighbor, Manchester City.
Three weeks after that comes Arsenal.
So
from here on, the Reds need to be Devils against the bigger teams in
their league. Van Gaal can hope that his team gets some benefit from the
fact that Chelsea, City and Arsenal have all that extra travel and
distraction of the Champions League.
Meantime,
he has to be grateful that Fellaini, with accomplished chest control
and then a thumping shot, scored once for United at West Brom. And Daley
Blind, a defender who followed the manager from Amsterdam to
Manchester, strode forward to save the team with an equalizing goal,
struck sweet and low from 23 yards.
“I am happy with our playing style,” said van Gaal. “But not happy with the result.”
At United, with all that history and expectations, one without the other is failure. And time is no excuse.
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