A lot of people don’t seem to like this, but isn’t it bloody brilliant when Manchester United can feel like they used to even when signing one of the top players in the world?
After years of signing big name after big name for the sake of it, it’s wonderful to see United make an astute and considered move for a player of that calibre who has been coveted for so long.
If you’re a supporter who has backed Ole and has wanted him to succeed even when it seemed as though it would be inevitable he would lose his job, then you’ll be familiar with other people who claim to support the club abusing you for backing the manager.
You can rewind five years ago and ‘Top Red’ meant something quite different to what it means today, but maybe that’s a sign of the times – language evolves, as do most of us as humans. Within evolution we do like ourselves some tradition.
It’s tradition that ties us to our football clubs, mostly. The comfort of routine and knowing what to expect from that routine. For United fans it was mostly the comfort, for a generation, of expecting United to win, but occasionally put you through the ringer for it, and in those situations sometimes give you the most incredible moments, either through mind-blowing quality or nail-biting tension. Supporters of other clubs – if they’re lucky enough to still have a club to follow following the multiple financial disasters which have impacted clubs – turn up on a Saturday maybe expecting not to win but hoping to anyway, hoping to have a moment to remember, and if not, they will have enjoyed themselves with friends at the football.
To paraphrase Yeats, a terrible beauty was born over the last 25 years. One of my favourite things has been meeting supporters, wherever they are in the world, and talking about our shared love for the club. Friends in America, South Africa, Hong Kong, Scandinavia, Australia. The advent of technology has made these conversations as commonplace as the ones I have with the people I’ve spent time with at Old Trafford, and sometimes, the two have overlapped.
Is it technology or is it simply time? Perhaps it’s the latter… you look at the last 10-15 years, you see City spending obscene amounts of money that a club that small could not ever hope of generating itself (and you see their fans defending it) and you can accept that is confusing to a younger or newer fan of United, the club who proclaim to be the biggest in the world and have the grandest stadium (albeit in need of a paint job or two) in the land, who doesn’t understand why his club don’t do things the same way.
Why can’t they sign players for £40m and give them away for free when they don’t need them? Why can’t United buy a full-back for £30m to provide competition to the new ones they bought for £50m each in the same summer? They see Guardiola win trophies, they see him discard players without a second thought and that to them is what is normal for a team that ‘has serious ambitions of winning’.
United, meanwhile, have had to be patient. It has meant more investment in time for Luke Shaw, a second chance after a modest signing was brought in to give competition. The left-back area, twelve months ago an emergency in the team, is now one of the thriving areas of it – put this down to good patient coaching and man-management.
It’s this attitude that is anathema to some fans of today. And you can sort of understand why. They’re being asked to place faith where the richest club don’t need to. If you weren’t born into it and the habitual ritual of the cyclical suffering of supporting a football team (even relatively speaking) hasn’t been explained to you, then your demands of what you perceive as reasonable might well be incompatible with the very notion of patience.
If you were being cynical you might call the Varane signing one for the new generation. You might even call it a celebration for Ed Woodward, who resisted the idea of signing Maguire in the 2018 window when Mourinho wanted him under the seemingly ludicrous notion that he could get Varane. At the time he got neither. Three years later United will line up with both.
Perhaps the most grating element has been the dismissal or dilution – or at least the attempt of this – of Solskjaer’s legacy at the club. That he wasn’t a legend. He was a tap-in merchant. One goal wonder. PE teacher.
The two biggest concerns I had at his time of hiring – one, that he might not have the experience needed to deal with the scale of the transition he had to oversee, and two, that in that understandable scenario, there would be a section of the support who would hold that against his legacy.
The transition has mostly been positive and it depends on how you define success whether you would see it as that – I think it has been, for what that is worth.
Yet there is still a percentage who have that narrative of the above insults.
Of course he is a legend. Not just for ’99, but especially for it, of course. He came in from being unknown to partner Eric Cantona and score eighteen league goals to help us win the league. He showed loyalty when he could have moved to help us achieve our greatest moment. The word legend is thrown around too liberally (much like the phrase “the word legend is thrown around too liberally”) but if it is earned in a single moment then it is earned for scoring a winning goal in the Champions League final. Statues have been built for less for players at other clubs in England.
But it wasn’t just that goal. Six league titles. Two FA Cups. The Champions League.
Tap-in merchant? He scored goals against Sturm Graz and Bordeaux that I think even some of the top five strikers in the world today would struggle to score.
One-goal wonder? He was so good on the right-wing that Ferguson had planned to replace David Beckham with him. Then he got injured. And for two years we waited as he tried to comeback on numerous occasions but kept breaking down. Just when it seemed he would have to retire, he came back and scored in the last minute as a substitute at Charlton in 2006. Not a dry eye in the house.
All of this happened in an era before Manchester City were even really known to foreign players. Mention Manchester, as Robinho famously explained, and you thought United. It was an era of patience, faith and perseverance. All of these qualities needed to overcome a free-spending Chelsea side. It was one of Sir Alex’s greatest successes.
When Ole came back to the club I was less worried about what might happen to us as a club and more concerned about what might lay in wait for him.
Unfortunately some of that abuse still exists even though he inherited a toxic and logistical mess and has largely unthreaded it all. I respected him anyway, but how can you not feel even more respect for someone doing this without that experience and in the face of the criticism he has faced every time something went slightly wrong?
But I will look at this summer – whatever happens from this point – as another period of time where Ole has strengthened the bond with what the club is supposed to represent. He has made sensible decisions. A sensible move to bring Darren Fletcher into the fold. A sensible move to bring Tom Heaton back, an experienced and top-class goalkeeper who knows and loves the club. A sensible and possibly innovative move to bring Paul McShane in and bring some of the old-school reserve team education to younger heads who missed out on that process due to the evolution of those secondary competitions.
Jadon Sancho was next through the door, a statement signing for and by Ole. It was an investment of faith in his choices and vision by the club. If you are excited by the signing – and who shouldn’t be? – then you have to be excited by what the manager has planned.
And the Varane transfer has carried all the hallmarks of a quintessential Ferguson signing. Maybe not so much in terms of age or stature – it was a rare move indeed for the greatest of all time to go to one of the top clubs and poach one of their best players – but in the sense that this is a player who has been liked by the club for such a long time, that efforts have previously been made to bring him in, and they’ve finally been successful. So many times Ferguson would sit at his press conference after announcing a new arrival and he would speak of how he had wanted that player for a long time.
Ferguson, indeed, wanted Varane, back when he was 17 in 2011. Then at Lens, the defender had eyes of all the top clubs in the world on him. Arsenal expressed their interest and it prompted United into action. Unfortunately, that then prompted Real Madrid into action, and this was a club who were still in the midst of their heavy-spending period.
It feels good to know that Varane clearly had a desire to play for United. That this is a straightforward and low-cost move for one of the best defenders in the world tells you everything you need to know about that – no other clubs are all over him when they should be. Maybe that will come back to bite us, like the Schweinsteiger deal, but for now it feels like we got a coup because of his desire to come to the club.
Varane has learned under some of the best. Jose Mourinho, when he was still at his own peak, Carlo Ancelotti, Zinedine Zidane and even Rafael Benitez, who knows a few things about miserly defending and unattractive football, which is not a bad thing for a defender to experience.
There should be no doubting his pedigree, no matter what Danny Mills says, even if there remains a fair question mark over his ability to adapt to the Premier League, as is the same for every player, even Sancho.
He’s a player who has been watched by United for over a decade coming into what should be his peak years.
It’s a signing that does elevate expectation levels, even from those of us more prone to giving patience. We have seen progression and we expect to see more – that will mean hopefully winning something and a serious push for the title.
Let’s take aside the Glazers for a moment. This does not let them off the hook. It doesn’t make the debt better and it doesn’t make them better owners. It is one summer where the manager is being backed.
From all accounts it looks as though Solskjaer’s sensible approach has centred on making the team and squad the best-equipped it can be rather than just peppering it with names. He’s focussing on the areas we can all see need improving. Yes, United are spending, but as we are all well aware, they’re having to do it with Eric Bailly and Phil Jones still at the club on long-term contracts. No writing them off in the short-term, not without some financial consequence the club will feel.
We saw what happened with England this summer that success (again, relatively speaking) is the greatest unifier of all. If we can extend the benefit of the doubt to those supporters because they were not brought up in an era where the qualities Solskjaer personifies were so crucial, hopefully they will be able to celebrate in ten months knowing exactly what the benefits of patience and faith are.
TL;DR? United are in the healthiest position they’ve been since Sir Alex Ferguson retired. You can thank Ole Gunnar Solskjaer for that. But with the signings of Jadon Sancho Raphael Varane, it will finally be reasonable to expect what has been unreasonable to expect for the last two years.
