Last May, it didn't seem like Manchester United were that far away.
They'd just finished third in the Premier League. They'd won the Carabao Cup. Although they lost the FA Cup final to Manchester City 2-1, it wasn't the no-contest kind of match we've seen these sides play in the past. And while United have beaten City during the Pep Guardiola era, most of those were smash-and-grab, hit-them-on-the-break wins. This loss, though, looked a little more like a very good team losing to a great team. United outshot City 13 to 11.
All told, last season was a pretty great start to Erik ten Hag's tenure -- and then it all fell apart.
United finished the 2022-23 season 14 points behind City. This year, they're 16 points back ... with 12 games still to play. And City aren't even in first place. United are 14 points back of third, where they finished last season. And they're eight points back of fourth, the final guaranteed Champions League place.
The only good news, really, is that there's a new rich guy in town to tell people what to do. Jim Ratcliffe finalized his minority stake in the club last week, and thanks to an unusual agreement with the majority owners, the Glazer family, Ratcliffe will oversee football operations.
"We have a lot to learn from our noisy neighbor and the other neighbor," Ratcliffe said last week, referencing Man City and Liverpool, with a nod to a famous Alex Ferguson quote. "They are the enemy at the end of the day. There is nothing I would like better than to knock both of them off their perch. They have been in a good place for a while and there are things we can learn from both of them."
If Man United are to ever knock Man City off of their perch, how might they do it? Here's the step-by-step look at everything that would need to happen.
1. Establish the "Manchester United" identity
This might sound like vague corpo-speak: something someone who loves talking about core competencies and synergies might say. But pretty much every great club in world soccer has an identity.
The sport is so unpredictable and so random that it's basically impossible to look at the entire global player pool and know who the best players are without knowing exactly how you want to play. There's no better example of this than United themselves. They spend tons of money on players who were good before arriving at Old Trafford and who often are good once they leave Old Trafford, but almost everyone who joins the club under-achieves while they're wearing the Manchester United jersey.
To sum that up with some numbers: Since 2013, United have brought in more revenue than all but two other clubs in the world, per figures from Deloitte. And yet, over that same stretch, their average Premier League finish is worse than fourth. This isn't a club where players come to succeed -- it's a place where the handful of successful players have succeeded in spite of the club.
It's so hard to succeed at United because you're walking into a stylistic and strategic vacuum. Because there has never been any kind of sustained thematic unity to what the team wants to do on the field, the players don't complement each other, and they have no real long-term, consistent direction when they take the field.
Take the two clubs that have successfully challenged City since 2018: Arsenal and Liverpool. The latter's success has come from a high-energy, vertical approach. Every player the club has targeted has fit within that vision. It helps that the club has been better at identifying talent than any big club over the past decade, but it's easier to identify the right talent when you actually know what kind of talent you're trying to identify.
Arsenal, meanwhile, have done the opposite. While Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp loves to take risks, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta does not. Pretty much everyone signed by Arsenal over the past few years is a great passer in a very specific way. These aren't players who are completing a higher-than-average percentage of highly difficult passes -- they're players who simply just rarely ever lose the ball. None of Arsenal's 11 most-used players this season complete fewer than 75% of their passes -- and three of Liverpool's do.
In a way, the contrasting approaches show how the specific identity doesn't quite matter that much. As long as you're keeping the ball in the other team's defensive third, it's not that important how you do it. Rather, it's important that you know how you want to do it, and then you sign the players who might help with that approach.
2. Find the right manager (not Ten Hag) but don't get too attached
I said it when he said he was leaving, and I'll say it again: Anyone trying to replicate what Klopp did at Liverpool -- or what Guardiola is doing at Manchester City -- is chasing after a past that likely no longer exists. If you're hiring a manager today, he's probably not going to be at the club for just short of a decade. The average Premier manager lasts for two years -- double that, and you've done well.
This isn't to say the coach isn't important. Klopp and Arteta are the ones who help make the vision of the club become real on the field. But I think the identity needs to come first and the manager needs to fit within it -- not the other way around.
It seems like Ratcliffe & Co. are aware of this, as their very public pursuit of Newcastle United's sporting director, Dan Ashworth, suggests. I don't have any real opinion on whether Ashworth is the right guy for the job -- his track record is more of a mixed bag than it seems at first glance -- but I do have a more broad opinion: Manchester United need a sporting director/director of football. The club never even had one of these until 2021.
Managers simply don't have enough time to oversee all aspects of the club. There are so many matches these days, and if a coach is actually going to coach, there's just no way he can monitor and manage recruitment and long-term squad planning. I mean, he can try, but he's going to get lapped by teams like Liverpool and City, where there are full departments of seasoned experts doing the same thing.
Plus, by not getting too obsessed with an individual manager, you avoid the roller coaster that the club has been on for the past decade: where you hire a coach, sign a couple players that fit his ideas, fire the coach before he has a full team of players who fit his ideas, hire a new coach, and then repeat the whole thing, over and over and over again.
Who should the first manager of the Ratcliffe era be, then? It seems unlikely, at least, that it will continue to be the current manager, Erik ten Hag. Despite his recent pronouncements otherwise, this team is not headed in the right direction.
Under Ten Hag, there's no coherent vision evident when you watch the team play, and it's not like they're sacrificing some larger cohesion in exchange for short-term performance. No, this team is terrible.
Man United have an even goal differential, and yet their underlying performance has still been significantly worse:
There's really no conceivable world where Manchester United, with a top-two wage bill in the league, could ever have the 12th-best expected goal differential while their manager was also doing a good job.
Ten Hag is not United's only shortcoming, but he's clearly one of them.
3. Get younger and be patient
The average age, weighted by minutes played, of the past 10 Premier League winners is 27. Players tend to peak between the ages of 24 to 28, so it's no surprise that, on aggregate, the teams that maximize their point totals are the ones whose players are firmly within those peak seasons.
Unsurprising, then, is the average age of Liverpool, the team in first on the table right now: 27.1. The average age of the team in second, City: 27.2. Arsenal, meanwhile, are all the way down at 25.5. If it doesn't happen this year, the Gunners are in a fantastic position to finally win another Premier League title over the next few seasons -- especially when you consider the ages of the two teams they're competing against.
That should provide an opening for United, too. Well, in theory, it should.
Beyond the broader disaster that is the club's top-to-bottom infrastructure, one of United's biggest failings over the past decade is their constant desire to sign aging stars: Casemiro, Nemanja Matic, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Raphaël Varane, Christian Eriksen, Alexis Sánchez, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Radamel Falcao, Cristiano Ronaldo and plenty of others.
These players were all beyond or at the tail end of their primes. It might make sense to make a few win-now signings when you're really close to winning a title, but United have not been close to winning a title in over a decade. So, they've signed all of these players who, in the best-case scenario, provide one or two seasons of high-quality performance but then start to decline a few years after they've been signed -- or right when United could have reasonably been expected to start challenging for titles. And since United have so much money, these players get paid a ton of money, and then they're impossible to move off the roster.
Casemiro, 32, and Varane, 30, are two of United's 11 most-used players this season. Bruno Fernandes, their most-used outfield player, is 29. Scott McTominay, their most-used midfielder, is 27. Harry Maguire, their most-used center back, turns 31 in a couple days. And Victor Lindelöf, their 10th-most-used player, is 29.
Add it all up, and United's average age this season is 26.9. In other words, they're the age of a title-winning team ... and they've conceded as many goals as they're scored this season. To ever reasonably expect to challenge for a title again, and get close to the heights of Man City, the majority of United's roster needs to be overhauled with 25-and-younger players, and then those players will need a couple years to age into their primes together.
The model, in this sense, is Arsenal. Their average age in the 2018-19 season was 26.7. In the seasons since:
• 2019-20: 25.8
• 2020-21: 25.9
• 2021-22: 24.4
• 2022-23: 24.7
• 2023-24: 25.5
Arsenal finished fifth in 2018-19, plateauing with a team right around the same age as United currently are. Then they got younger -- and worse -- over the next two seasons (eighth place both times) before ascending back up the table once they truly committed to the youth project in 2021-22. It took four years for Arsenal to go from their mediocre prime-age team to one that contended for a title. The same timeline would be a best-case scenario for a United side that are both older and worse than Arsenal were in 2018-19.
4. The kids have to work out
If we say United could realistically contend for a title again in four years, there are only three outfield players on the current roster who won't be beyond their prime years at that point:
• Winger Alejandro Garnacho, 19
• Forward Rasmus Hojlund, 21
• Midfielder Kobbie Mainoo, 18
While they've all played a lot this season, I don't see any of the three as can't-miss prospects. Of course, can't-miss prospects don't exist, but the best prospects are the ones who don't just play at a young age, but play at a high level at a young age. Of the three, I think Garnacho is the closest to it. At 19, he's in the 80th percentile for all wingers across Europe's "Big Five" top leagues in non-penalty expected goals+assists, the 95th percentile for progressive carries, and the 98th percentile for touches inside the penalty area. He's producing despite playing for a super-dysfunctional team.
Hojlund is two years older than Garnacho and despite playing as a center forward and doing much less to contribute to build up play than his teammate, he has been significantly less dangerous in front of goal. He's averaging 0.46 non-penalty xG+xA per 90, which ranks 46th in the Premier League, among players to feature in at least 30 minutes per game this season. Hojlund could become a star, he could become a squad player, he could wash out of the league. His performances -- some good, some bad -- point to a wide range of future outcomes.
With Mainoo, I'd say I'm lower on him than the consensus seems to be. Then again, I'm lower on pretty much every prospect than the consensus because the average outcome for any prospect is that he ends up not being good enough to play for one of the best teams in the world. Outside of his ability to beat defenders off the dribble, Mainoo does nothing that shows up notably in the statistical record. And there's little evidence that he's making United materially better right now. That's fine -- he's 18! Just playing a lot at 18 is a good sign. But he's playing for a team that's a complete mess; he's not beating out veterans for minutes on a team that's competing for a title. There's far more uncertainty here than I think most realize, and you can't just assume that Mainoo is starting for the next great United team.
The good news here is that it's better to have three promising prospects instead of one. This, of course, increases the probability that at least one of them works out, and there does exist the small possibility that all three work out.
One of the cheat codes for supercharging your rebuild is to have an academy player become a superstar. They cost a whopping zero dollars on the transfer market, and all of their productive years are played for you. Liverpool have it with Trent Alexander-Arnold, while Arsenal are getting it from Bukayo Saka.
That should underline the difficulty of the task here. Even if the two academy guys, Garnacho and Mainoo, both end up becoming productive starters for United, it seems quite unlikely that either is ever as valuable as TAA or Saka currently are.
5. Pray for Man City's downfall -- or for Guardiola to leave
To get to the level of Arsenal and Liverpool, Ratcliffe and United simply need to revamp the structure of the club, find the right manager, overhaul the entire roster, hope a couple of their prospects become stars, and maintain patience for half a decade. And even that might not be enough.
After all, Liverpool and Arsenal have combined for a total of one Premier League title over the past five seasons -- Liverpool won one, City the other four -- and City remain the favorites to win the current one.
While the origins and the validity of City's financial numbers remain in question -- remember: the Premier League is still investigating the club for 115 separate financial violations -- City's revenues have surpassed United over the past few years. Add in their much richer owners, and City are the only club in the league that can outspend United within the current financial constraints of the league and UEFA.
On top of that, City's performances have significantly exceeded their massive payroll. An analysis by John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times found that City have won 15 more points per season since 2015 than we'd expect from another club with the exact same wage bill. United, meanwhile, have underperformed their wages by six points per year. Those are, respectively, the best and worst marks in the league.
How much of that overperformance is due to Guardiola and how much of it is due to some of the things that Premier League is investigating -- finding ways to pay staff without it showing up on wage bills -- is unclear. But it's clear that some of the success is due to Pep. He has had a ton of resources at all three of his managerial stops -- Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City -- but all three clubs massively improved when he arrived, and both Barcelona and Bayern have been in various states of disarray since he left.
There are no culture problems when he's your coach, there are no doubts about how he sets up the team across 38-game domestic seasons, there are no worries about his inflexibility or inability to adapt to his talent, and there are no questions over whether he can oversee multiple generations within the same club. If you can spend more money than all of your competitors, he's the only coach you would want.
As long as Pep is at City, then, United don't just have to become a normal club -- one that produces teams that perform roughly at the level of their resources. No, they'll have to spend a wild amount of money and be efficient with all of the money that they spend.
The bright side of all this, for United and for their fans? Those 115 charges are still pending, and Guardiola's contract expires at the end of next year. But when Pep was asked if he might stay beyond his current contract length, he said something that might have more bearing on a potential United title challenge than anything Ratcliffe himself has said so far: "Still I am sitting here, and I am OK."