The excruciating pain of being a Manchester United fan

Can there be a more wretched existence in football than being a Manchester United fan? Well, yes, would be the instant retort from legions of supporters around the country whose teams never get anywhere near the glamour palace of the Champions League; for whom grim, gritty survival in crumbling urinals is the order of the day. But at least those fans have the dignity and fellowship of the underdog, of hope, or a local derby drubbing of a hated rival, a cup tie giant-slaying.

United fans have almost none of these thrills. For a club as proud as Manchester United, nothing less than domestic and European glory will really do, and those baubles seem forever out of reach. And we are not talking tantalisingly out of reach either but bargepole length distant: United haven’t got within ten points of the Premier League title or past the Champions League quarter finals for ten years. They are now regularly eclipsed and even humiliated by their bitterest rivals. This year has started badly and mid-table looks distinctly possible.

This week’s defeat to Bayern Munich in their return to the Champions League was a typically excruciating, chaotic experience. A promising start then a goalkeeping howler, a few glimmers of hope quickly extinguished, before the inevitable… defeat. And then the well-worn post match excuses from the manager (‘injuries’), some knife twisting in the studio, and then the postmortems ‘Where has it all gone wrong?’’What can Ten Hag do?’ in the press. It has become rather repetitive.

Unlike other rich doom-loop legacy clubs that never quite seem to rediscover the winning formula, United’s most successful period is recent enough to have living reminders as a constant, almost ghoulish presence. Alex Ferguson doesn’t say much these days but he’s at nearly every home game, a brooding, judging presence; and the still-fit-enough-to-play-looking Gary Neville makes up for the Govan Growler’s reticence with pithy and passionate ‘it wasn’t like that in my day’ denunciations of the shortcomings and seeming indifference and personal failings of the current and recent crop of players (Ronaldo, Antony, Sancho, etc). And then there’s Roy Keane…

The problem is, on the crucial question of commitment to the cause and esprit de corps the old pros may have a point. Liverpool had a long, long spell in the wilderness when they couldn’t quite make things work, but there were never accusations that it was down to a lack of effort or poor morale. Much the same can be said of Arsenal and Spurs. Questions of competence, recruitment and tactics are far easier for the fans to deal with as they offer easier solutions and allows fans to opine knowingly on how with a few basic adjustments – buy this player, sell that, move this one here and that one there – all will be well.

United’s troubles seem to be more fundamental. There is something rotten in the heart of Ten Hag’s club that seems to filter through to the players. Many would identify that rottenness as the owners, the Glazers, whose dubious debt-fuelled takeover has been characterised as the dawn of a dark age, the moment the club sold its soul to opportunistic profiteers and abandoned its principals. United have been a sour and fractious mess ever since with no coordinated strategy for success, just a succession of seemingly randomly chosen managers with diverse ideas and backgrounds and desperately purchased players on ludicrously generous salary packages thrown together in the hope that it will all somehow, eventually, work.

That may be unfair. It overlooks the fact that Alex Ferguson took five years to win his first trophy and he didn’t have petro clubs with almost unlimited resources to compete with, and he won his last five Premier League titles and a Champions League under the Glazers. And his tenure was hardly free of internal division as Roy Kean and David Beckham (the flying boot incident) could attest to. And if the Glazers are far from the fan’s idea of responsible custodians of the club, were the Edwards who preceded them really any better? As Brian Glanville would point, out the Lancashire businessmen were firmly in the ‘butchers bakers and candlestick makers’ mould of often shady characters who ran northern clubs very much with their own interests in mind. They were never popular with the fans either.

The true agony of being a Manchester United supporter lies in the club’s almost unique position in the bifurcated modern football world – a super club trapped in the no man’s land between the game’s two meaningful spheres, the truly competitive elite and the relegation/promotion borderland. They are in danger of becoming the Norma Desmond club, glittering back story, and still with the trappings of stardom and expectations of further glory. But dislocated, if not yesterday’s news, and struggling to come to terms with that fact. It’s painful, but strangely compelling, to watch.