File picture dated 22 April 2012 of Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson (left) checking the watch of then Everton manager David Moyes towards the end of their English Premier League soccer match at Old Trafford. Moyes, who took over from Ferguson as Manchester United’s manager later, was fired by the club on Monday.
By Owen Gibson/The Guardian
When David Moyes was unveiled as Sir Alex Ferguson’s successor after 28 trophy-laden years at Old Trafford, the rhetoric was almost biblical. One Scot passed the flame to his anointed countryman, exhorted the faithful to give “the Chosen One” time and emphasised the extent to which the club was not like any other.
The end, just 10 months after a smiling Moyes walked into Old Trafford clutching a six-year contract, was brutal and underlined the extent to which Manchester United can no longer differentiate itself.
Yet despite a widespread acceptance in the club’s boardroom that it had erred by so hastily agreeing to Moyes’s coronation by his predecessor, and in particular in ignoring the claims of the flamboyant Jos Mourinho, it has emerged that Ferguson will again play a key role as kingmaker in recruiting Moyes’s replacement.
A spectacular fall from grace on the pitch from first to seventh, playing dour football that is anathema to fans who feasted on success throughout the Ferguson era will also lead to renewed scrutiny of the club’s controversial US owners, the Glazer family, away from it.
If the stakes were high a year ago, when rookie vice-chairman Ed Woodward said Moyes was “cut from the same cloth as the Old Trafford greats who go before him”, now they are that much higher still.
Ryan Giggs, the playing legend employed as a coach by Moyes but estranged from him by the time the axe fell, will take charge for the final four matches of the season but will not get the job permanently. Instead, the Netherlands manager Louis van Gaal, Atltico Madrid’s Diego Simeone and Real Madrid’s Carlo Ancelotti are among the names on the shortlist.
In Germany, Bayern Munich’s Pep Guardiola and Borussia Dortmund’s charismatic Jrgen Klopp were quick to rule themselves out. Mourinho, who many feel would have jumped at the chance a year ago, is now at Chelsea. All told, it is a bit of a mess.
The Glazers’ leveraged business model, estimated to have cost United 680mn in interest and fees since they took over in 2005, requires consistent success on the pitch to keep the global sponsorship deals rolling in and the tills ringing. With season-ticket renewals due, and said to be disappointing, and a long-delayed 600mn kit deal still in negotiation, the Glazers felt their hand was forced ahead of a make-or-break summer of transfer dealing in which they have promised uncharacteristically to spend big.
The club regularly trumpets new money-spinning sponsorship deals that crisscross the globe and claims to have a somewhat improbable 659mn “followers” around the world. But without success on the pitch to drive it, that financial model will start to creak.
The club’s gloomy hierarchy decided in a short conference call after United’s pathos-laden surrender to Moyes’s former club Everton on Sunday that he must go immediately. A day of gathering rumours of his demise was followed by a terse Twitter statement on Tuesday morning. “Manchester United has announced that David Moyes has left the club. The club would like to place on record its thanks for the hard work, honesty and integrity he brought to the role,” it said.
If his unveiling was accompanied by flowery rhetoric about the club’s glorious history and a “commitment to the long term”, its termination was as messy, unsatisfactory and gloomy as the 10 months in between.
Moyes had already described how he had fretted about his attire when Ferguson initially invited him round to discuss the biggest job in English football and how the colour had drained from his face when he was offered it. If that lack of boldness rang alarm bells over his suitability for the job, by the end he was completely overwhelmed by it.
If it was a very modern sacking the 10th of this Premier League season as clubs scrabble to retain their share of a new 5.5bn TV deal and maintain their position among Europe’s elite to comply with Uefa’s new financial rules then the reaction was appropriately devoid of emotion.
A combination of “player power” as he lost support in the dressing room and self-fulfilling crisis propelled Moyes inexorably towards the exit. It is one that Gary Neville, the former United captain turned Sky Sports pundit, said he found distasteful. “I don’t like it, it’s not the way in which the club should portray itself,” said Neville. “It’s the modern world, it’s how things seem to be dealt with now, but I’m a traditionalist and I think it could have been dealt with a whole lot better.”
Moyes will depart with a substantial payoff, although the 5mn pounds he will receive was capped as a result of a clause that restricted him to 12 months’ But the money will do little to heal the wounded ego of a ferociously proud man whose reputation is unlikely to recover from his bruising Old Trafford experience.
One by one he lost the dressing room, the fans and the boardroom. Although, by modern standards, the match-going faithful had remained remarkably patient in the face of humiliating home defeats to neighbours Manchester City and Liverpool United’s bitter rivals who look to be on the way to their first title in 24 years. It is to Anfield that United fans are casting worried glances as they consider the speed with which that club slipped from its perch following the glory days of the 1970s and 1980s.
As confidence in the team ebbed away and performances went from bad to worse, the Old Trafford hierarchy decided two months ago that they would have to abandon their rhetoric about putting in place a new dynasty and turn to the shortlist of elite hired guns who are habitually touted for the top jobs around Europe.
The only history that was being repeated was the farce of Wilf McGuinness’s tenure after he replaced Sir Matt Busby in 1969. He too found that his predecessor, who remained a very visible presence around Old Trafford just as Ferguson has been regularly pictured in the stands cast a long shadow and he visibly wilted under the pressure.
Amid repeated calls for homegrown managers to be given a chance in the biggest jobs and for owners and chairmen to calm their itchy trigger fingers, the sacking of Moyes will reverberate loudly. It is unlikely a manager similarly untested in the top tier of European competition will again be entrusted with a big club.
It also leaves Paul Lambert at Aston Villa as the last remaining top flight representative of the once-proud Scottish managerial mafia who have delivered a rich seam of success at English clubs down the decades.
Unlike McGuinness, the increasingly haunted Moyes has also had to withstand the scrutiny of a 24-hour news cycle and judgment by social media which can be brutally unforgiving.
The more cynical believed that, far from being a romantic choice, Moyes had been recruited because he was a cheap option who would not rock the boat and maintain the Ferguson model with minimal fuss and investment. By the time it emerged that he was out of his depth and had been deserted by even his most fervent supporters within the club it was too late.
The wing of the United fanbase that has long campaigned against the Glazers, pointing to the hundreds of millions they have taken out of the club since 2005, were quick to seize on the sacking as evidence of a deeper malaise. The Manchester United Supporters Trust argued that it was only the managerial genius of Ferguson that papered over cracks in the squad caused by years of under-investment that has left them lagging behind European giants such as Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich.
“The club can only spend money that it has and, unfortunately, the club’s owners have spent hundreds of millions of the club’s money on financial restructuring and debt payments and this has limited funds available for investment in the playing squad,” said Must’s chief executive, Duncan Drasdo.
“The quicker the owners realise that the club’s current problems are underpinned by the ownership model rather than just the identity of the manager, the better.”
In another reflection of the globalised nature of modern football, there was as much attention to United’s share price on Wall Street as the effect on the playing staff. It rallied in early trading to its highest point since Ferguson announced his retirement in May, suggesting the decision to bring the curtain down on the Moyes era had at least found favour with investors.
But keen students of Manchester United’s history will also note that McGuinness, after a brief interregnum when Busby returned to steady the ship, was followed by Frank O’Farrell as the next full-time manager. He lasted less than a year.
