How Come Manchester United Aren’t Getting More Credit For Finishing Second?
Depends who you ask, to be honest. There are large portions of fans from five other top six teams who’d make a pretty virulent argument that The Red Devils aren’t getting much credit on account of how trash they’re playing. To which the natural response has something to do with looking at the table.
Manchester United may be about to finish with weeks of daylight between them and Manchester City but they’re also well ahead of the rest of the challengers and with an FA Cup final to prepare for. To be fair, Liverpool do have a Champions League final on their calednar and fourth with a Champions League trophy > second with an FA Cup… but does that make up for the complete narrative disparity? Nope. There’s plenty more going on here than mere priorities.
Jose Mourinho’s made the argument that, in a normal season, this points total might have won them the title. Which is true… but not very often. United won the 98-99 season with 79 points. They’ve also twice won with 80 points. Other than that it’s just Leicester with 81 points. United are on 78 with one game to go, if they lose that then they’ll end up with a points tally that would’ve had them fourth on goal difference last season. Which doesn’t sound as great, all of a sudden.
The modern Premier League is a new beast. There’s no point in saying that this campaign could’ve been a title-winning one twenty years ago unless you were playing twenty years ago, although comparing himself to archaic watermarks is classic Mourinho. While we’re at it, the absolute closest United can still get to City is 16 points back. At worst 22 points, most likely 19 points. Those are some PSG or Bayern levels of comfort. The biggest ever gap between first and second in the Premier League era was an 18 point deficit for Arsenal as Manchester United won it in 1999/00.
So fair play to City for being incredible but that doesn’t excuse the rest of the league for falling so far behind, particularly their closest rivals. There’s a zero sum effect here. If Manchester City succeed, they do so at the expense of Man United. It’s a negative reflection. Can’t go giving United a free pass when they hired their manager at the same time as City hired theirs, when they have also spent ridiculous quantities of cash rebuilding their team, when they’ve been so completely left in the dust by the Sky Blues, one 45-minute Paul Pogba super show aside (and even a win over City is overshadowed by what Liverpool repeatedly did to them because Man City are Mo Salah’s bitch).
Everyone else got left eating dust by the champs too, but United have to cop that pasting the worst even though they got the closest to them. It’s an unfortunate parallel. But don’t worry because the Manchester United pile-on goes a lot deeper than that. Beginning with that old thing about perception being reality.
Manchester United began this season with four 4-0 wins in their first seven PL matches. They damn sure got credit for that. Problem is, most Premier League fans don’t watch teams other than their own ones on the regular. Even pundits don’t seem to watch the full slate, which maybe goes some way towards why they always tend to regurgitate the same old arguments. Fans hear that and absorb it. Nobody remembers Man Utd beating Brighton 1-0 thanks to a Lewis Dunk own goal in November but people remember the shock losses… and they remember the big games.
Those are the dates when a team with title credentials gets to stake their case. Curiously, United had a surprisingly good record against the rest of the top six. They won six games, drew one and lost three. That’s very decent. Compare that to Arsenal who won one, drew three and lost six against the five teams that finished ahead of them.
Yet most people aren’t going to assume that of them because football’s about more than just the end result and, jeezus, United dragged their way to the finish line in a few of those games with manic, bloodshot fury. Hardly what people pay to see when Manchester City are winning games by three or four goals on the regular with swagger and elegance just down the road.
And that’s the problem with this Manchester United side. They’re bloody ugly. Jose Mourinho has won a lot of trophies by doing this but there’s a very legit argument that football has long since moved past Mourinho’s methods. He peaked a decade ago and is still trying to repaint those masterpieces whereas Pep Guardiola, his arch nemesis, has constantly evolved to stay ahead of the times. The Premier League is one of the most widely viewed sporting tournaments out there. It’s not only a sporting spectacle but an entertainment spectacle, those massive transfer fees are paid for by TV money which exists thanks to an enormous quantity of fans around the globe.
Style isn’t the be all and end all, results still take priority. But if you still don’t get the results then you magnifying that element. And even when you do get the results, if you spend the entire second half kicking the ball away and defending with nine men behind the ball then you kinda make a mockery of things. Because, once again, they aren’t doing this in a vacuum. They’re doing this in direct comparison to Manchester City’s opposing values. Pretending you have no responsibility to the fans is a massive middle finger.
Then there are the stink ones. In the space of six weeks earlier this year, United beat Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester City in three of their better performances all season. They still played dismantling footy, they still shut it down in the latter stages of those games, but they got the wins. However bookending those games were a 1-0 loss to Newcastle and a 1-0 loss to West Brom. They also lost 1-0 to Brighton and 2-1 to Huddersfield.
Only seven losses all season yet they managed to lose to all three promoted teams and to a relegated team. Every time Jose’s side got some momentum, they blew it with a headline defeat. And the longer the season got, the more they settled into the grind. It was never pretty.
Like, God forbid that Jose Mourinho allow his fullbacks to make a few overlapping runs. God forbid he let Paul Pogba play football and trust that an unleashed Pog more than makes up for the occasional defensive mistake he might make. God forbid that you ever try turn a 2-0 lead into a 3-0 lead, rather than subbing on centre backs for wingers. God forbid that Marcus Rashford be allowed to start a few games in a row.
Which is another issue with this team and it comes back to that perception thing again. Mourinho – spoiler alert: it’s all his fault – is constantly complaining about his team not getting enough credit and then with his next breath he’s supplying negative storylines about his team by openly criticising his own players. His blatant bullying of Luke Shaw was the worst but there were constant shadings aimed at a variety of dudes, often easily disagreeable ones too.
People hear that and the talk’s all suddenly about Paul Pogba’s shocking form when Pogba hadn’t even been playing that poorly. Not only that but you put doubt and confusion into your own players’ minds. Watch them in some of their weaker showings and they sure looked like a doubtful, confused team, terrified to take a risk in case they get hung out to dry in the post-match. That’s the manager’s fault and nobody else’s. Maybe the players didn’t perform to their peak but shredding them to the media doesn’t do much to solve anything. Not that Mourinho cares, it’s always been his way or the highway with him.
Right, so we’ve got a boring football team with unhappy players playing for a grumpy manager who keeps reminding everyone how grumpy he is with a season full of shock defeats and ugly wins, does that about cover it? Well, there’s also the small matter of that Champions League exit.
With City running away with the league, United seemed primed for a good dig at the UCL. Instead they cruised into the round of 16, drew the weakest available team, and barely even tried. They went to Sevilla who were regularly shipping in goals in La Liga and they settled for a 0-0 draw. They took them back to Old Trafford and were incredibly somehow even worse, losing 2-1 after a quickfire Wissam Ben Yedder brace.
It was their whole season in a nutshell. Across 180 minutes against a compromised defensive unit they managed a meagre four total shots on target. They lacked urgency, they lacked flair, they lacked absolutely everything. Frankly it was pathetic.
And what’s worse is that their manager came out afterwards and launched a scathing attack on the history of the club, trying to justify the insipid failure of this defeat with his own cherry-picked context – effectively throwing his employers under the bus that he’d parked on their famous pitch. Way too much of his chatter has stunk of Mourinho putting his own reputation ahead of literally everything else. The fact that he started Marouane Fellaini ahead of Paul Pogba in a Champions League knockout will only get stupider as time goes by.
Why don’t Manchester United get more credit for finishing second? Because they’re bloody miserable, is why.
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