Ronaldo & Barcelona are starting to engender sympathy for the Red Devils

Man United have been at the sharp end of two transfer sagas, but Cristiano Ronaldo and Barcelona’s self-centredness has not been their fault.

So, has this been a successful pre-season for Manchester United or not? Opinion is divided. On the one hand, the appointment of Erik ten Hag seems to be an example of the stopped clock that is the club’s hierarchy telling the right time. He has both a philosophy and a plan, and seems well-respected by those who have worked with him in the past. Performances in pre-season, to the extent to which they should be considered a barometer of anything, have been encouraging.

But this summer has also been characterised by two big transfer stories, neither of which reflect particularly well upon the club. The transfer sagas concerning Frenkie de Jong and Cristiano Ronaldo have swamped media headlines, washing away discussion of the positives that Ten Hag has achieved since he arrived. But these two stories both have one thing in common: neither of them are problems of Manchester United’s making, to the point that I’m close to being in the most unusual position of having a degree of sympathy for these particular devils.

There is one common theme running through them, and it’s that both have curdled for reasons that are not Manchester United’s fault. The cause of the rancour has not been United, but those that they have been dealing with.

Over De Jong, they have got caught up in a fight between player and club that is categorically not of their making. Barcelona are a football club that seems to have decided that it will have its cake and eat it now, regardless of the ethics or financial ramifications further down the line of doing so. De Jong, and there’s no way of sugar-coating this, simply doesn’t seem to want to sign for Manchester United.

While it is possible to wonder why they have seemed to fixate entirely upon this one player to the exclusion of so many others, to hold United responsible for De Jong’s reticence to leave or Barcelona’s abject behaviour over his deferred wages seems pretty risible. It does at least finally seem as though they are giving up on what has long felt like an increasingly fruitless pursuit.

And this isn’t the only headline-hogging issue that has been forced upon United this summer. There still seems to be no route through Cristiano Ronaldo’s impasse. Having announced at the start of July that he wanted to leave because they couldn’t offer him Champions League…