Magnusson: And your time starts … now! What is paleontology? Smithers: Yes, absolutely correct. Magnusson: What’s the name of the directory that lists members of the peerage? Smithers: A study of old fossils. Magnusson: Correct. Who are Len Murray and Sir Geoffrey Howe? Smithers: Burke’s. Magnusson: Correct. What is the difference between a donkey and an ass? Smithers: One’s a trade union leader, the other’s a member of the Cabinet …
One of the Two Ronnies’ most celebrated sketches involves a Mastermind contestant whose specialist subject is answering the previous question. History repeats itself: the first time as comedy, the second time as Manchester United, who seem continually to be answering not the question of who would be the best available manager now, but who might have been the best available manager a few years ago.
The problem with football is that it never sits still. What was true once isn’t necessarily true now. What is true now won’t necessarily be true in a season or two’s time. Almost nothing is absolute. What works once might not work in a different context. The key to good recruitment is identifying to what extent somebody’s past success was contingent on their environment, and how they may behave in a different circumstances. And that is very difficult, which is why only four managers have won the English league title with more than one club.
The possibility of José Mourinho becoming manager of United was first raised as Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013. Mourinho has recently claimed he turned the job down; other versions of events have him raging in a Madrid hotel as he learned that David Moyes had been hired, seemingly because Sir Bobby Charlton, then a senior board member, was worried about his impact on the image of the club.
It’s impossible, of course, to say whether Mourinho would have been a success had he taken the job then. But he had the ego to ensure he would not have lived in Ferguson’s shadow and, although he had been bruised by the Real Madrid experience, English football still recognised his aura. He was still adept enough to win a third league title at Chelsea.
By the time Mourinho finally took the United job in 2016, though, events in his final few months at Stamford Bridge had undermined him. He seemed weary and fractious, the tactical doubts raised in his final year at Madrid had proliferated and there was a growing sense his methods did not quite work with elite modern players.
There was a lot of talk about him as a guaranteed winner, but there’s no such thing in football. Very few managers last more than a decade at the very top. Only the most driven personalities, the most fecund minds, can endure the process of constant evolution necessary to stay ahead of the pack for more than a few years.
It’s easy to see why a board would have looked at his list of honours and been impressed, but United were appointing a manager on the way down. Was that obvious at the time? Perhaps not, but there were warning signs, and it’s the job of those doing the job of recruitment to identify them.
With every appointment there are mitigations. Given the immense power Ferguson had, it would have been hard not to appoint Moyes when he had backed him. Yet if there was ever a time when he might have been the right man for United, it was surely six or seven years earlier; modern managers tend to peak in their mid-late 40s.
Louis van Gaal was 62 when he took the reins at United, enjoying a second coming after winning the Dutch title with AZ Alkmaar and an impressive 2014 World Cup campaign with the Netherlands. Perhaps the comparison isn’t fair in that he arrived as an elder statesman; nobody, other than perhaps Van Gaal, thought he would be a long-term appointment. But the idea he would bring calm after a period of turbulence was to ignore everything he had previously done. Van Gaal is many things but he is not a calming presence.
But again, the timing felt wrong. It could never have worked given he was preparing a side for the World Cup, but had he come in to replace Ferguson in 2013, as a hugely respected figure with a robust self-belief that was never going to care about breaking Fergusonian taboos, he might have been the man to see United through the awkward transition.
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Erik ten Hag and Ruben Amorim were supposed to be the coming men, managers identified on the way up. Both seemed to make sense. Ten Hag’s Ajax had played astonishing football, had beaten Juventus and Real Madrid thrillingly in the Champions League, had come within Lucas Moura’s implausible hat-trick of a Champions League final. Amorim had ended Sporting’s 19-year title drought.
But it turned out they weren’t right. Ten Hag, skilfully as he managed Cristiano Ronaldo’s exit, seemed overawed by the job; Amorim’s insistence on playing 3-4-2-1 with a squad ill-equipped to play that way was one of the reasons Dan Ashworth expressed reservations, leading to his departure as sporting director.
It is possible, of course, maybe by this point even likely, that there is no right answer, that the mess United are in is insoluble, Old Trafford a meat grinder that will keep chewing up managerial reputations in perpetuity. But United’s board’s attempts to identify the rising star have been no more successful than their habit of appointing fading legends.
Which brings us to Mauricio Pochettino. He has done remarkable things: he may not yet have won trophies in England but he effected such an extraordinary transformation at Tottenham that it seemed not unreasonable they should be part of the Super League project. He found things difficult at Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea, but most people do. A last-16 exit at a home World Cup with the USA was about par. The question, now he is 54, is whether the sense of drift about his career is an unfortunate and temporary state, or evidence that he is not quite what he was.
Perhaps the United job will revitalise him and he will revitalise them. But this feels like another appointment that would have been better made a few years ago; that United, once again, are answering the previous question.
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