The Anatomy of a Fall

On Manchester United's plunge into a dark abyss

On May 21st, 2008, the rain fell in sheets on Moscow. At the Luzhniki Stadium, the biggest game in European club football was given a new layer of drama, to go with the sharp neon floodlights and bright jerseys. The moisture in the outfield made the wet ball skid; the dampness of the penalty spot played havoc with balance. John Terry slipped, Nicolas Anelka disobeyed instructions, and Manchester United were champions.

The large, silver Champions League trophy fit their hands, sparkling against the backdrop of their trademark red shirts. It felt like a just reward for a stunningly talented and successful team. United had won the domestic league a week prior, won it the previous year, and would win it the following year.

For twenty-two years, Sir Alex Ferguson stood on the touchline - inevitable like Manchester rain, temperamental like Scottish wind. He had, nearly by sheer force of will, turned Manchester United into a winning machine. He could take a midfielder from Crewe Alexandra and turn him into a Premier League champion; and he could, just as easily, decide to axe a peaking David Beckham.

In his tones, the shapes, and even the colour of suit, Ferguson felt like a natural extension of Phil Jackson, and Manchester United football’s equivalent of the Chicago Bulls.

And yet, there was an earthiness to United that wasn’t quite there with the Bulls, or your Real Madrid and Bayern Munich and other European football giants.

Football’s Michael Jordans and Kobe Bryants played at Real Madrid. At one point, Madrid could put out match lineups that were hard to assemble in video games: Zidane, Figo, Ronaldo, Beckham, Roberto Carlos, Raul. Bayern Munich had all of Germany’s best players under their wing; when they didn’t, they just turned up with a cheque. But, Manchester United grew their own stars, under tall pine trees and the stare of grey-haired British coaches. The Class of '92 wasn’t bought; they were raised. Six lads who’d kicked balls together since they were children, who understood Manchester weather and Manchester wit and Manchester expectations without translation. This was a thread running back through time, through Busby and Magnall, into the early days of English league football.¹

For obvious reasons, the night in Moscow felt like a pit-stop, not a summit. Patrice Evra, United’s left-back in the game, remembers Ferguson’s words as he climbed inside the team bus, confetti still glued to his drenched windcheater, gold medal hanging around his neck: “Congratulations, but anyone who doesn’t want to win it again next year, I’ll rip up his contract.”

Manchester United returned to the Champions League final again the next year, and then again in 2011. Between 2007 and 2013 - Ferguson’s farewell summer - United won five league titles and lost the other two by margins you could measure with a fingernail. In the twenty-year period between 1993 and 2013, they won thirteen. Such dominance breeds its own mythology. Success begins to feel inevitable, ordained, sewn into the badge itself.

But more damaging was the assumption that United had created such strong foundational pillars that, even after their chief architect decides he’s had enough, the edifice will endure. On a rainy May afternoon in 2013, as Ferguson delivered his farewell speech - looking every bit a man who had earned his rest - the sadness was profound, like watching your grandfather board the last train of summer, knowing the house would feel different without him. But there wasn’t any fear. As we know now, there should’ve been some.

Before we move on to the post-Ferguson life, it’s important to revisit one incident from when he still had the keys at Manchester United. Let’s call it the Horse-Cheeseburger Festival.

In the early 2000s, Ferguson co-owned a champion racehorse with Irish tycoons John Magnier and JP McManus. These gentlemen who would soon discover they defined the word ‘gentleman’s agreement’ differently. The horse’s success - winning seven consecutive Group 1 races - sparked a bitter dispute when Ferguson claimed entitlement to half its stud fees, valued at £50 million, while Magnier argued the agreement covered only prize money. Ferguson initiated legal action in 2003, straining his relationship with Magnier and McManus, who collectively owned 28.7% of Manchester United. Magnier and McManus responded by doing what wealthy Irishmen do when angered: they made life complicated. Public criticism of Ferguson’s management followed demands for inquiries into transfer dealings.

Enter Malcolm Glazer, a billionaire from the land of cheeseburgers. For years, he had been buying Manchester United shares in small stocks. With Magnier and McManus selling their stake to Glazer in 2005 - presumably to spite Ferguson - his ownership surged to 98%. The leveraged buyout that followed saddled United with £790 million in debt. The legal battle concluded but could not undo what economists call structural damage and the rest of us call being properly fucked.

For a while, Ferguson’s genius papered over the cracks. The man could have managed a Sunday league team to respectability if you’d given him enough time and enough fear. But when he departed, we discovered that he had shielded the football team from a clueless ownership group.

David Moyes arrived with impressive spirit but the general demeanour of a bassist asked to follow Eric Clapton. But Ferguson had handpicked him, so there was a bit of a Pope announcing the next Pope air to it all. Spoiler alert: Moyes, for all his endearing earnestness and work ethic, wasn’t quite the Vatican resident.

United’s seventh-place finish in Moyes’ first season wasn’t shocking. Everyone understood that following a deity requires time. The shock was how quickly the cathedral became a classroom, how rapidly twenty-six years of unspoken law dissolved into negotiable suggestions.

Under Ferguson, the dressing room had operated on the simple fundamentals of a high-performance team: you ran until your lungs burned, you fought for every ball because losing a battle was unthinkable, and you did it every week because you owed that to your teammates, your coach, and the thousands of fans wearing your colours every weekend.

But when Moyes walked in, the players looked at his empty trophy cabinet and suddenly remembered they were millionaires. They started asking “why” instead of “how fast?” Tactical instructions that would have been gospel under Ferguson became gibberish from a man who’d never won anything bigger than Manager of the Month. The hierarchy inverted overnight.

Once a dressing room learns it can eat its teachers, it’s a hard way back.

What followed was a parade of distinguished names, each arriving with their own philosophy, their own methods, their own ideas about what Manchester United should be. Louis van Gaal brought a three-ring binder full of instructions so detailed they included where players should look when they didn’t have the ball. There was control, certainly, and thought in abundance, but most days it felt like watching someone working a canvas using only beige paint and a ruler.

José Mourinho came next, which was like hiring an arsonist to renovate your house. He won some trophies - he always does - but he also created a toxic atmosphere, alienated everyone, and left behind scorched earth.

By the time Mourinho’s reign collapsed into familiar pyrotechnics, the diagnosis was obvious to everyone looking from afar: the albatross around Manchester United’s neck was called Manchester United. The brand and the MANU symbol on the New York Stock Exchange demanded everything, immediately, perfectly. You couldn’t just win; you had to embrace tradition while staying metrosexual. You had to play football that gave the audience goosebumps, yet take pride in running yourself into the ground; you had to exhibit weekly tableaus of homegrown academy graduates and global superstars standing shoulder-to-shoulder; you were expected to dish out hundreds of millions for the shiniest piece in the market, yet stay a team that represented Manchester’s working class origins.

Who knew this approach was unsustainable?

The problems compounded with every quarter, and every decision became a panic response to the last crisis. The Glazers’ threw money, but in the stupidest possible way. They’d neglect the stadium - Old Trafford started leaking when it rained, which in Manchester is like saying it leaked on days ending in ‘y’ - but spent £89 million on Paul Pogba because he had his own hashtag. They’d let the training ground facilities decay while paying Alexis Sánchez £500,000 a week to warm the bench and occasionally play the piano on Instagram.² Each summer became a rerun of this grotesque pageant of waste. United would identify a player who was famous, available, and expensive, and then pay whatever it took to sign him. No one bothered to check the fit. If it looked good, it was coming home.

Ole Gunnar Solskjær brought a flicker of life back into the club, only to see it extinguished from the gale of unplanned marquee signings. Erik ten Hag won two cups but forgot how and what to coach midway through this spell. Ruben Amorim is learning that tactical sophistication has its limits when your midfield treats the ball like it’s radioactive.

Over the years, new players arrived at Carrington - United’s training ground - expecting to find the epicentre of football excellence. Instead, they found a place where world-class talents forgot how to play. And all this while, the wage bill bloated annually, into a number that made seriously rich Premier League clubs rub their eyes in disbelief.

United’s two biggest rivals, Liverpool and Manchester City, first crept closer, then overtook them while laughing with the kind of hysterical joy reserved for watching Humpty Dumpty fall.

Alongside United’s power and influence, one more thing started chipping away: the relationship between the club and its fans. The cycle of rage, disappointment, and elation has remained. As long as a thing called sport exists, those emotions will be evoked. In fact, they’ve now amplified a hundredfold because the whole idea of a moment has changed for all of us, with our ability to capture and broadcast our tears in HD.

But, otherwise, United entered a prolonged period of instability at the point when we were fundamentally changing how we engage with a public entity. Gone were the days of sending agony letters en masse, or using a stadium’s terraces to voice discontent. We now had Twitter and Facebook, direct access via public profiles and private messages. And it emboldened us to go further into the inner sanctum.

Next to those who visit stadiums and watch from distant continents, a new creature emerged: the camera-loving live-streamer, or the social media celebrity. And they had a tangible impact.

In an ideal world, social media is just another form of expression. So, what’s the problem? Thing is, YouTube and Instagram is no space for mild, thoughtful discourse. A narrow loss to a rival means guillotines must be rolled out and heads must be chopped. Defeats become content. Grown adults livestream themselves having breakdowns, ranting about players with fury that suggests personal betrayal. The angrier you are, the more views you get. The more views you get, the angrier you have to stay. It is a perpetual machine, powered by rage and clicks, as relentless as it is hollow.³ Watch them after a match gone wrong, hear their tones, then look below at the number of digits in their views. You begin to understand why athletes worldwide lock their social media accounts.⁴

Worse still, some athletes go the other way. They gravitate toward the social media celebrities because it helps them stay visible to the internet - the most cherished audience in 2025. Every team has a couple. In the noxious chamber that is the Manchester United dressing room, their kind ends up spreading their disease. Eventually, the virus slips into the bloodstream.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe arrived in December 2023 with a £1.25 billion cheque, promising to reset the culture at United and set them on the path to glory. What he meant, it turned out, was treating the club like a distressed asset rather than a community institution. The surgery began immediately, except the surgeon seemed unable to distinguish between fat and vital organs.

Tony, a local United fan, had sat in the same seat near the dugout since the 1970s, close enough to hear managers curse. For fifty years, Tony had lived among the same faces, watching children become parents, parents become grandparents. Ratcliffe’s team looked at Tony’s section and saw under-monetised real estate. Five hundred season ticket holders received letters explaining their “migration” to make room for premium hospitality. Ratcliffe’s raspy-voiced interviews couldn’t disguise what was really happening: families who’d paid with money and loyalty for decades were being evicted so someone could pay more.

Meanwhile, at United’s training ground, staff members discovered that their free lunch had become a fruit basket. 350 employees lost their jobs. The survivors were told it was merely the first round of layoffs. The annual 5% ticket price increase continued even as the team plummeted toward relegation - a remarkable achievement in tone-deafness.

Even the old players felt it. The Association of Former Manchester United Players, which helped legends who’d given their knees and careers to the club, saw its £40,000 annual funding vanish into Ratcliffe’s spreadsheets.

Ratcliffe had arrived to save Manchester United and decided the best way to do it was to stop it from being Manchester United at all.

The 2024-25 season is guaranteed to enter the history books as the worst in forty-something years, one of the worst in the club’s long, illustrious history. The team will finish the Premier League in 16th or 17th, barely skating above relegation waters. They haven’t won consecutive league games all season. If you went back in time, even a decade back, and told a United fan these things, they’d ask you for the contact of your drug-dealer.

On May 21st, 2025 - seventeen years to the day from Moscow - United found themselves in another European final. The Europa League this time, football’s consolation prize, but still a final with serious rewards for winning. They faced Tottenham Hotspur.⁵ In this season alone, Tottenham had beaten United thrice in three games. And yet, hope, that most persistent of United delusions, whispered that maybe cup finals were different, maybe some forgotten spark of old magic still flickered in the red shirts.

Ninety minutes later, Tottenham had made it four wins from four. Unlike Moscow, there was no benediction of rain, only a faint drizzle of tears from players wearing red. The defeat cost cash-strapped Manchester United nearly $100 million in revenue, infinitely more in whatever remained of their dignity, and 200 more staff their jobs. Sir Alex Ferguson looked on from the VIP area, wearing a disgust on his face that suggested he was considering dissociating himself with the club by summer.

After the final, a young, bright United player stopped over to speak to the reporters. He spoke about his disappointment at not getting enough minutes in the final, his own contribution, and how he wanted to “enjoy the summer and consider his options.” A sign as clear as any that his agent had provided media training but forgotten to teach him shame. Not a word about the traveling supporters, his teammates, or his coach.

That, there, is Manchester United in 2025. Decay, neglect, and institutional hubris. From top to bottom. Just a bunch of millionaires, doing the rhumba without an iota of coordination, while Dies Irae plays in the background.⁶ The rot is everywhere now - in the leaking roof, in the viral rants, in the dead eyes of players who know they’re stealing a living, in the executives who issue statements about “progress” and “DNA” while the league performance screams relegation battle.

There was a time when Sir Alex Ferguson used to give lectures on management at Harvard. Manchester United’s prolonged success was a case study. And indeed, they had achieved more, for longer, than even the Chicago Bulls.

Today, they are a comedy sketch. If I wasn’t a United fan, I’d be writing this essay in a very different tone. I mean, how hard can it be to write a stand-up set on a sleazy billionaire unable to get through a day without slipping on a banana peel and spilling coffee over his crisp Armani suit?

1. For the last 87 years, every Manchester United first team match squad has had at least one academy graduate - a run stretching for more than 4000 matches.

2. Not kidding.

3. Not that you asked for it, but here’s a taster.

4. Death threats and racist comments are de rigueur.

5. United’s non-playing staff - the people who kept the lights burning and the grass green - received meal vouchers for the fan zone while Tottenham Hotspur's entire staff flew to the match as guests.

6. A Latin hymn, but so much more. Dies Irae has been a popular thematic shorthand for dark and morbid scenes, especially those involving death. Lion King is probably the most popular movie to use the theme.