It all started with a brewer and a butcher. In 1892, Manchester United became an official member of England's Football League. By 1902, the club was about to go into bankruptcy, only to be saved by a wealthy local brewer named J.H. Davies. He poured money into the team and oversaw the construction of its striking new stadium, called Old Trafford. United won a bunch of trophies and earned the nickname "Moneybags United" from critics who thought the club was just spending its way to success.
Some 50 years later, Louis Edwards was making his living selling meat in Manchester. While he wasn't an oil baron or an inheritor of a familial fortune, Edwards did occupy an exploitable economic niche. World War II had just ended, and the United Kingdom's Treasury was nearly bankrupt. The country couldn't afford imports, and austerity measures kicked in. Except, everyone still had to eat and everyone still wanted to eat meat, so the neighborhood butcher had the one thing that everyone else lacked: money.
And what do you do when you're the only one with money? You buy your local football club.
- Sources: United to name Rangnick interim manager
- Insider Notebook: How Rangnick became top choice
- Dawson: Why Solskjaer's United tenure fell apart
At the time, most clubs were joint-owned by "normal" people: Upon their inception, club shares would be given out to people in the local community and then passed down the family line. Clubs still rarely made money at the time, and you didn't collect a sizable dividend on your ownership. You just felt pride -- or you forgot that you were an owner.
Edwards eventually found a copy of Manchester United's share register and paid an infamously corrupt local councilor to go around the city, knocking on the doors of shareholders, offering to buy up their shares for a little bit of money and -- seriously -- a little bit of meat. Plenty of these people didn't even realize they were shareholders -- a deceased husband or a parent or grandparent had been given an ownership stake, and the certificate was passed on in the same way a lamp or a wig might be -- so it wasn't hard to persuade them to sell.
By 1964, Louis Edwards had secured control of what would eventually become the richest club in the world.
A succession of improbable events and once-in-a-generation individuals would combine to turn United into a team that was seemingly too big to fail. "The problem for business strategy is that, while we can understand how Manchester United became successful, it is harder to explain how to copy it," the economist Stefan Szymanski wrote in a 1998 paper titled "Why Is Manchester United So Successful?" for Business Strategy Review.
"The analysis shows that much of what explains Manchester United's success is contingent, driven by good and bad fortune, and hardly the outcome of a conscious strategic plan."
While that is true, there's one animating impulse that, well, united all of United's stewards over time: the desire to make money. It's obvious now -- and cute, even -- but Manchester United was one of the first clubs that viewed itself as a means to generate revenue. By making more money than its competitors, the club won more games than its competitors, and so the team became more popular than its competitors, and so the club made more money than its competitors ... and on and on until today.
The accounting firm Deloitte has published an annual leaderboard of the richest clubs in the world for the past 16 years. United have never been lower than fourth, and they've been the richest club in England 16 times out of 16. That's about the only thing they've been winning in recent years. They're currently in eighth place in the Premier League, and super-sub-turned-interim-turned-permanent-manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was finally shown the door.
This team can obviously improve, but how much better can they actually be?
Are they worse than they should be, or were they better than they should have been last season?
Last season, Manchester United finished second in the Premier League, their highest placing since Sir Alex Ferguson stepped down in 2013. They were third the year before, and sixth the year before that. Over the summer, in came Jadon Sancho, one of best wingers in the world, Raphael Varane, one of the best centre-backs in the world, and Cristiano Ronaldo, a little-known Portuguese attacker who has scored 483 domestic goals in his career and won the Ballon d'Or three times.
This team was only supposed to get better -- or was it?
Before the season, the Sporting Index betting market pegged Manchester United's projected point total at 75 -- just a one-point improvement on the 74 points from the season prior despite the influx of new talent. That number also put them behind Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool. This tells you two things:
1. They weren't as good as their position in the table suggested. United had an incredibly low point total for a second-place finisher; the average in the 10 previous seasons was 82 points.
2. They weren't as good as their point total suggested.
Per the site FBref, United produced an expected-goal differential (plus-18) that was significantly worse than their actual goal differential of plus-29. Both Liverpool and Chelsea went the opposite way: xG differentials that were way better than United's, but goal differentials that were worse. So, essentially, United benefitted from the double-whammy of good luck for themselves and bad luck for two of their closest competitors. That's the ideal recipe for a nice finish in the table, but also a significant drop-off the following season.
So, it's not that the markets thought the additions of Ronaldo, Sancho and Varane were only worth one point; it's that they thought United weren't a true-talent 74-point team last year. Of course, United haven't even met that expectation this season. They're currently on a 54-point pace, a cool 21 points behind the market's preseason view.
Quite often, teams will experience an immediate improvement upon switching managers, but it's not necessarily because they switched managers. Teams tend not to be compelled to fire a coach until a run of especially bad results, but results usually become "especially bad" because of unsustainable factors such as poor finishing, bad goalkeeping or great finishing from the opponent. Then a new coach comes in and gets to ride the wave of positive regression to the mean.
Except, that's not really the case here either. Despite some truly awful results over the past month, United's goal differential is slightly better than their xG differential: minus-1, compared with minus-2.6. United haven't been playing at a fifth-place level while getting the points of an eighth-place team; they've been getting the points of an eighth-place team while playing at the level of a 13th-place team.
Is it the players or the manager?
Over time, there is a very strong correlation between team performance and player wages. United make more money than any team in the Premier League, and according to Transfermarkt, they have the third-most valuable squad in the world, behind just Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain. Neither one is a direct proxy for wages, but both work well enough, and despite paying their players more than just about any club in the world, United have been deservedly getting results at the level of a mid-table Premier League team.
This raises two possibilities: Solskjaer's 12-game stint to start this season is one of the worst managerial performances we've ever seen, or these players just aren't as good as we think.
Despite a growing body of research that managers don't have a huge effect on team performance over a long period, those studies work in aggregates. There clearly are managers capable of making their players better and ensuring that payroll isn't immediate destiny. We saw it last year with Chelsea. While that was an example of a team that was getting unlucky under the first coach, Frank Lampard, Thomas Tuchel oversaw an immediate and real improvement in the team's quality of play that wasn't just down to a couple extra shots finding the back of the net. The players didn't change at all, and yet the team improved. The conclusion is pretty simple from there.
While Lampard was perhaps fired for being unable to improve a Chelsea team that had spent a ton of money in the offseason, United got worse under OGS after adding Ronaldo, Varane and Sancho. Given how bad they've been, there are some simple fixes that seem like they will immediately improve the team.
The clearest one: play Sancho more. From the end of the 2018 World Cup through this summer, there were four players in Europe who played at least 5,000 domestic minutes and averaged at least 1.00 non-penalty goals plus assists per 90 minutes: Lionel Messi, Robert Lewandowski, Kylian Mbappe and Sancho. He was a legit superstar in Germany, a brilliant driver and passer of the ball in addition to all the production toward the goal. He's played just 40.1% of the available minutes in the Premier League this season -- fewer than Daniel James, who is currently employed by Leeds United.
There's a bunch of other lost production that's been either sitting on the bench, lost to injury, or both. Edinson Cavani has only played 19.7% of the minutes, Anthony Martial is at 18.4, Marcus Rashford sits on 16.1 and Donny Van De Beek is at 5.6. These are all established or expensive players who, you'd think, would be able to contribute something more than a minus-1-goal-differential team were they all on the field more often.
Meanwhile, Mason Greenwood, a really nice prospect who is not a really good player yet, has played 74% of the available minutes. At this point in his career, he's a decent scorer who doesn't contribute anywhere else. Shifting a chunk of his minutes toward these other players looks like the clearest path toward immediately improving the team.
- ESPN+ viewers' guide: LaLiga, Bundesliga, MLS, FA Cup, more
- Stream ESPN FC Daily on ESPN+ (U.S. only)
- Don't have ESPN? Get instant access
Then there's the Ronaldo question. He's played 91% of the minutes in the Premier League since he rejoined the club. He's scored four goals and assisted two more -- good for a per-90 rate of 0.74 goals plus assists, slightly worse than Watford's Josh King and slightly better than Liverpool's Trent Alexander-Arnold. That's pretty good production (13th-best in the league), but it's also nowhere near what Ronaldo was doing at his peak or what the best attacking players in the world are producing nowadays.
Plus, it's pretty clear that at 36-going-on-37 Ronaldo is a big negative when United are out of possession. Per FBref, he's last among all forwards in pressures per 90 minutes and he hasn't even attempted a tackle in the Premier League this season. Is that kind of profile -- pretty good goal output, awful defensive output -- really worth 90-plus% of the league minutes (at the expense of some of the aforementioned names) for a team with designs on domestic dominance?
Yes, Ronaldo has bailed them out again and again in the Champions League this year, but maybe they wouldn't need to be bailed out as often if there were a more dynamic attacker in his place for a bigger chunk of the minutes.
Man United won't win without a plan
These, of course, don't really seem to be the kind of subtle questions that the club ever considers. Liverpool have a team of physics PhDs helping drive decision-making. Chelsea have built out a so-called "army" of young talent to buttress the money hose controlled by Roman Abramovich. And Manchester City essentially hired out the brain trust that built the great Barcelona teams of the early 2010s. Each club has a clear plan, even if the degree of clarity may vary.
While there's a lot of talk about the need to restore the "Manchester United DNA" on the field, the lack of an identity is especially obvious in the way the team makes decisions. As Gab Marcotti wrote on Monday: "Ultimately, it comes down to Joel Glazer and chief executive Ed Woodward talking on the phone. The former is the guy who thought the Super League would be well received by supporters; the latter is leaving the club in a few months and has been the poster boy for on-field underachievement since Sir Alex left."
With tons of money and no plan, you end up with what United have been for the past decade: a collection of talented, highly paid, previously successful stars that look good on paper, but always underachieve on the field.
While Sancho's skill set really does seem like it can fit any tactical situation, think of the rest of the team's recent big signings. Ronaldo needs everyone behind him to do extra work. The same goes for Paul Pogba. Bruno Fernandes was easily United's best player of the OGS era, but it's unclear if he can be as effective when he's not on the ball all the time.
Aaron Wan-Bissaka is a fantastic defender, but he just isn't anywhere near the kind of attacking force you see at full-back for the elite teams across Europe. Harry Maguire's limited athleticism means he can't quite cover all the space behind the defense if United play a high line. And Van De Beek is a "tweener" -- a hybrid attacker-midfielder whose main skill is his ability to make runs into the penalty area.
Individually, these are all valuable players, but they're all slightly awkward kinds of players with lopsided skill sets who need their deficiencies to be accounted for by the way the team plays and the other players around them. If you were building a team with a clear vision in mind, you would never end up with all of these guys on the same roster.
So, in comes Ralf Rangnick, the man with perhaps the best plan, the one who developed the successful top-down approach at all the Red Bull-owned clubs. And sure, maybe he'll be the one to finally figure out how to make this mismanaged club work at a level requisite with its ability to make money. But he's only there until the spring, and we've already seen four coaches fail to meet expectations since they last won the Premier League. With each fired manager, it becomes clearer that the ultimate issue isn't actually the guy who's standing on the sidelines.
Until something changes with the way the club operates, from the top to the bottom, their success will remain contingent -- driven by good luck or bad luck, never the outcome of a conscious strategic plan.