WHAT IS THE UNITED WAY?
Manchester United’s identity is back under the microscope after the recent dismissal of the club’s fifth full-time manager since Sir Alex Ferguson. Erik Ten Hag’s team often played in a fashion that didn’t resemble what a neutral, or even a season ticket holder, might think a United side ought to look like.
It’s the sort of conversation which inspired my decision to write my next book - Football, Taught By Matt Busby. That said, that time was around a decade ago, when Louis van Gaal has taken over and the buzz word in the press was about his ‘philosophy’. I had actually interviewed legendary United goalkeeper Harry Gregg in 2013, and Harry spoke of United as the ‘Hollywood of football’ - it was such a unique turn of phrase that made me keen to try and articulate, if I could, what the United way actually was.
Because, believe it or not, despite the successes of Sirs Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson, they were never really credited for being tactical masterminds, or creators of a philosophy. You’ve heard the phrases - total football, tiki-taka, gegenpress, and even catenaccio, a brand of football not designed to be pleasing to the eye, yet it has a description for it, and you know what it is when you’re looking at it.
Busby and Ferguson were described as masters of personality and presence, and often underappreciated when it came to their tactical innovations, which were mostly noted by the quirks rather than the system. For example, most people will remember Park Ji-Sung’s man-marking job on Andreas Pirlo - but they might not recall that Ferguson was doing that in 1991, when he tasked Brian McClair with looking after Ronald Koeman in the European Cup Winners’ Cup final.
People may think of Busby as the antidote to structure, but there was a liberation attached to a system. The 1968 European Cup Final team had a tactical versatility that no 21st century team has matched, and, crucially, his early Busby Babes team were acknowledged as introducing the Hungarian style of play into English football - by none other than Don Revie, the man who would singularly be given that credit.
Jimmy Murphy, Busby’s assistant, was the man who gave the United youth team their philosophical introduction to the game. “The ball’s round to go round” - ostensibly simple stock phrases he had picked up from observing Jimmy Hogan, the man who most influenced his ideas of how to teach young players.
Tommy Docherty and Ron Atkinson were Hogan disciples, too; there is enough evidence to suggest that United have a stronger relationship to the Hungarian style than Ajax or Barcelona, both of whom have their identities derived from the same system. And a tempestuous one, too, as Dave Sexton, Louis van Gaal, and now most recently Erik Ten Hag have proven.
The landscape of modern football has changed. Winning trophies has become the most important currency for fans. Jose Mourinho said that poets don’t win trophies; a shift in attitude from when Busby declared that Manchester United were a romantic club, not an ordinary one. Ten Hag won as many trophies as Mourinho - but United supporters were not enjoying watching the football.
As United’s academy director Nick Cox told me in an interview for the book, there are certain non-negotiables when it comes to becoming involved with United’s identity. It’s a lesson that Ruben Amorim will have to learn.