Man United are Sky's flagship TV drama, and relegation no longer feels too contrived a script

Gavan Casey

MANCHESTER UNITED FANS must now yearn for the days when Marcus Rashford’s body language was considered among their most serious problems.

Rashford didn’t help himself at times, certainly. There was the well-documented Belfast incident in January 2024, in which he reported ill for training under Erik ten Hag after being photographed in Thompson’s nightclub across the Irish Sea a night earlier. He was also reprimanded for turning up late to a couple of team meetings.

Rashford would soon afterwards begin to cut a solemn figure on the field, his gaze so often fixed upon his boots as United endured their worst league season in 35 years, finishing eighth with a negative goal difference.

Looking sad is one of the biggest mistakes a footballer can make while standing before the court of public opinion, second only behind looking too happy while their team isn’t winning games.

Long before Rashford’s long sulk to freedom, Jesse Lingard and Paul Pogba were among the players whose apparent joie de vivre even during United’s continuous decline was framed as a cultural issue, even internally. Both men, as well as the cuckoo chick in a wren’s nest that was Cristiano Ronaldo, were moved on in 2022. Famously, all of United’s environmental issues were resolved as they finished eighth and 15th over the course of the next two seasons.

Well, then, it must have been Anthony Martial. Or Jadon Sancho. Or Alejandro Garnacho. Or Rashford.

Ten Hag’s final game in charge, United’s FA Cup final success over Man City in 2024, was instructive at least as far as Rashford was concerned: having played a key role in United’s second goal, scored by Kobbie Mainoo, and played impressively in general, the England forward was in floods at the final whistle.

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Whether pure joy or tinged with melancholy (linked with a move away that summer, Rashford may have figured — wrongly, as it transpired — that it would be his final game for his boyhood club), Rashford’s tears laid plain that United still actually meant something to him. Those at the club who would routinely bump into the England international at academy games during his spare time could have said so in any case.

The likes of Lingard, Pogba, and even Ronaldo were equally not mercenaries, each of them raised by United in footballing terms and, in Ronaldo’s case under Alex Ferguson’s tutelage, in an even more profound sense. They each surely felt some kind of duty of care towards the club.

United’s most recent scapegoat, Rashford, looked positively invigorated during a broadly successful sojourn at Barcelona where, among other things, he scored an iconic El Clásico free-kick to help the Catalan giants secure their 29th league title.

It took only a handful of games upon his return to United this season before the life drained from his eyes once more. But this time, rather than be seen to emblematise United’s institutional decay, Rashford should be considered merely a symptom of it — because right now, everyone looks sad.

For over a decade, Rashford has experienced first-hand United’s dysfunction. It’s likely that he long ago arrived at the conclusion that he is powerless to prevent the club from sliding further into disrepair and that, somewhere along the line, he chose to dissociate from his job to preserve his sanity. Most of us have been there at some point.

Bruno Fernandes, whose contract expires next summer, appears well on his way to getting there. The captain is almost certain to be United’s next fall guy.

In reality, though, there likely exists no ‘cancer in the dressing room’ — Fernandes remains a hugely popular figure among his peers and non-football staff — but rather an illness that has metastasised to all corners of the club.

Ralf Rangnick proclaimed in 2021 that United as an institution required “an operation of the open heart”, but his diagnosis five years ago, made from a virtually independent standpoint during a brief interim reign, may have come too late.

Michael Carrick was always likely to go under but those at United who wield power above him are also demonstrably out of their depth.

Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos have transformed OGC Nice from an also-ran in France’s Ligue 1 into a don’t-even-bother-running, an ethos which United’s players would appear to have taken fondly to heart. That Ratcliffe believed he could successfully oversee the football department of a club more than 10 times the size of Nice is a testament to the billionaire’s self-belief, and that self-belief has incidentally come at a great cost to Manchester United.

Having trimmed almost a third of the club’s workforce — or 322 jobs in total — and scaled back on such indulgent expenses as the £100 cash Christmas bonus for behind-the-scenes staff, Ineos have blown tens of millions on a succession of failed managerial hires. Morale in the canteen might sink lower only if Ratcliffe affords manager Mauricio Pochettino a tracksuit allowance in his new role.

Ratcliffe and the heads of United’s football department — chiefly Omar Berrada, Jason Wilcox and Christopher Vivell — have thus far combined to make such a hames of things that the Glazers are now having to think about soccer, which feels a more perilous prospect than the 21 years they have spent not thinking about United at all.

The hiring of USA boss Pochettino is understood to have been an executive call made from America, with United’s football decision-makers unable to reach a consensus on other candidates including Julian Nagelsmann and Eddie Howe.

Things have become so bleak for 18th-placed United that some supporters have taken to reminiscing fondly — albeit with an ironic nod — about the era of the much-derided Ed Woodward, whose approach to recruitment appeared at least partly influenced by how many likes an official announcement would receive on social media.

In the club’s seemingly inexorable march towards doom, United have since devolved into a full-blown content machine, churning out slop on and off the field at a volume unsustainable even for a data centre the size of Lancashire.

It’s a club so badly run that next year’s fly-on-the-wall Amazon Prime documentary will probably require a suspension of disbelief.

This is no longer ‘Manchester United we’re talking about’, per se, but Harchester United, more or less. And not even relegation would feel contrived in this season of Sky’s flagship TV drama.