For Cristiano Ronaldo, it was the loose, chipped tiles in the players’ swimming pool at Carrington. For Zlatan Ibrahimovic, evidence that Manchester United were no longer the big club he had imagined came in the form of a £1 deduction from his salary for drinking fruit juice from a hotel minibar on a club trip.
‘Everyone thinks of United as a top club, one of the most powerful in the world,’ Ibrahimovic wrote in his autobiography. ‘But once I was there, I found a small, closed mentality.’
The penny dropped for Alexis Sanchez after just one training session. The Chilean, one of the worst and most costly signings of United’s grisly recent history, called his agent to see if he could abort his move from Arsenal, having had the briefest of glimpses behind the Old Trafford curtains.
‘I would have loved to play, win everything, and make the fans happy,’ Sanchez said later. ‘It didn’t happen because of things at the time that weren’t suited for a team of United’s size.’
Two of United’s biggest signings of the past decade quickly realised that the empire Sir Alex Ferguson built had fallen into a state of decay since his retirement in 2013. They were right. And nowhere has all that manifested itself more than in the playing squads that have dragged United towards the bottom of the ocean over the past decade.
Around the modern United, there is always going to be one bad guy, or bad family: the Glazers. Absentee owners for the vast majority of their time at the club, the Americans and those doing their bidding tend to get the blame for everything. It’s understandable. A fish rots from the head and all that.
Sir Alex Ferguson brought the greats to Manchester United, such as 2013 title winner Robin van Persie – when Fergie left the recruitment began to rapidly go downhill
But what about everybody else? United have flatlined because of years of underperformance on the field and that is on the players – and the ‘experts’ who bought them.
It’s also on Ed Woodward, in thrall to star names and flashy agents and far too interested in social media metrics. It’s on Richard Arnold, who followed him into the CEO’s office. And on the numerous faceless men who United have asked to do their work for them in the market all these years and have failed. Men such as John Murtough, now at Atalanta after a disastrous spell…