Roy Keane, appearing as a BBC pundit as Manchester United made an FA Cup exit at the hands of Arsenal, had the following to say about the future of his old club. “Louis van Gaal is going to get criticised, you’d expect that, but he’s only been in the door two minutes. Give the man a chance – two or three years. They should have given David Moyes more time but didn’t. What are they going to do, chop and change again? It’s literally a rebuilding job. United not finishing in the top four would be a disaster.”
That seems sensible enough. Fair and calmly reasoned even, all the things one would not normally associate with a Keane reaction. But if United are “literally a rebuilding job”, why exactly is that when they have had 20 years at the top of English football? How can a winning machine that has brought in so much success, money, talent and worldwide acclaim for so long fall to pieces merely through a change of manager?
Granted, Sir Alex Ferguson was never going to be easy to replace. In a quarter of a century at Old Trafford he stamped his personality on the club and made sure he knew about just about everything that was going on. But he left the team as champions, the scouting set up and youth teams were in good working order, a new training facility at Carrington was fully on stream and though Moyes never saw all that much of a transfer kitty it turns out there was £150m in the bank to spend on new players. In his single season at the helm Moyes did not dismantle Ferguson’s old team, nor did he demoralise them, if anything the opposite seems to have been the case. So as United are shopping at the very top end of the managerial market, why could a new boss not come in and carry on pretty much as before? Why is it suddenly a two- or three-year rebuilding project?
Anyone tempted to suggest that carrying on pretty much as before is glib and unrealistic, easier said than done, is advised to study Chelsea’s recent history. Did Chelsea fall apart when José Mourinho left in 2007? No. Despite employing seven subsequent managers in as many years – two of them Avram Grant and André Villas-Boas – Chelsea carried on pretty much as before to the tune of becoming the first London club to win the European Cup, following it up with the Europa League, and won the Premier League in 2010. Only once in the seven-year interregnum between Mourinho’s first and second spells at the club did Chelsea finish outside the top three, and that was the year they won the Champions League under Roberto Di Matteo. The core of Mourinho’s first winning side survived until his return, and perhaps more importantly so did the team’s ethos. Chelsea managed to look like a Mourinho team all the time the manager was away – apart from the odd blip when losing to Sunderland or Wigan – and now he is back they are top of the Premier League table and looking set for another title.
So the question has to be, how did Mourinho manage to put in such strong foundations in a little over three seasons at Stamford Bridge when Ferguson was in charge for more than two decades and now the edifice is crumbling? One accepts that the parallel is not exact. Chelsea were already an accomplished team when Mourinho took over and significant money was available for instant upgrades, whereas United were underperforming badly in 1986 and it took Ferguson several years and quite a bit of lost sleep to sort them out. Yet even if one dates the modern United from their treble win of 1999, that is still 14 years at the top under Ferguson, a full decade longer than Mourinho got at Chelsea first time round.
If the answer to the above question is that Mourinho is some sort of genius, and you never know it might be, then United must be prepared to be reminded over and over again that they could have approached the then Real Madrid manager as a direct replacement for Ferguson. Mourinho was available, and he was interested. United were not, for reasons that do not look any more convincing with the passage of time. Mourinho, it was said, was too full of himself and would divert publicity from the team and the club. A bit like Van Gaal then. Chelsea played boring, defensive football, and the United crowds would never put up with it. Again, see Van Gaal. Mourinho would only sign up for four or five years, he would not be there for the long term like Ferguson. That could be true, except that as he showed at Chelsea he could achieve quite a lot in four or five years, and it is not as if Moyes turned out to be a stayer either. The only thing likely to have put Mourinho off United in 2013 was the apparent financial restrictions being placed on the club by the American owners. It seemed at the time that Moyes was a conveniently cut-price option, though that theory was disproved a year later with the money put at Van Gaal’s disposal.
With hindsight it was probably unrealistic to expect anyone to stay anywhere near as long as Ferguson – however commendable the intentions – because the game has changed so much since the mid-80s and United have grown so big. Van Gaal is only a glorified stop-gap solution, since quite apart from his sticky start in England he is 63 years old and at the wrong end of his career to build a lasting empire. Which brings us back to Keane’s original point.
If Van Gaal gets the two or three years Keane says he deserves, will United like the end product? It already seems clear that his basic philosophy involves patient, possession-based football, a bit like the formula Ferguson used for Europe except that Van Gaal deploys it against Burnley and Sunderland. Without quite such a tradition for attacking football to live up to Chelsea also like to be solid at the back, keep hold of the ball in midfield, and be quick and decisive on the break.
It is just that Mourinho’s version of the same thing manages to be a lot more dynamic than Van Gaal’s. Maybe he has better players to execute the style, but maybe that is because he is shrewder and sharper in the transfer market. By all means give Van Gaal the time he requires – United probably don’t need to be chopping and changing again – but don’t imagine either that two or three years down the line they will be stacking up titles or bringing the crowd to their feet with attacking verve. Because Van Gaal has not even sorted out the defence yet, almost a full season and two transfer windows into his United career. Without that there is no platform on which to build the rest. If this is a reconstruction job, it is already running behind schedule and there is no guarantee that the finished project will be universally admired.
