Manchester United finished playing in European competition this season

The main loser of the Champions League group stage was Manchester United. He ended it with a home defeat – 0:1 – from Bayern, which left the Manchester team in last place in the quartet and deprived not only the play-offs of the Champions League, but also the European Cup spring in general. However, this terrible result of the tournament as a whole fits into the sad trend of the season for Manchester United, suggesting another crisis that has overtaken the club.

After the Manchester match, in which everything was decided by a goal scored in the second half by Kingsley Coman, Bayern head coach Thomas Tuchel, who himself worked in England and experienced both ups and downs, tried to console the losing coach Erik ten Hag. Tuchel said that he understands how he feels because just a few days ago he personally experienced terrible pain due to a sporting failure. Before the English departure, his team in the German championship managed to be butchered – 5:1 – by Eintracht Frankfurt.

The consolation turned out to be sincere, perhaps, but clumsy. It’s clear to everyone what the fundamental difference is. For Bayern, the surprisingly big loss to Eintracht is a strange one-time setback that does not spoil the overall picture. She is not the leader in the national championship now, but she will definitely fight for gold. In the Champions League, we secured access to the playoffs from first place ahead of schedule and without any questions.

In the case of Manchester United, everything is different. And it’s not even about the volume of his individual European Cup failure. And he was, without reservation, insanely loud. “Manchester United” managed to win only one match in the group stage, and approached the final round in the position of a team that needs a real miracle to get a ticket to the play-offs (it requires both its own victory and a draw in the parallel match of “Copenhagen” with Galatasaray, which, by the way, did not take place: the Danish club prevailed with a score of 1:0), and finish in last place, that is, without even the right to continue playing in the spring at least in the Europa League, with a measly four points to their name (Manchester have never scored so little in the main European Cup) and a dozen and a half goals conceded – a statistic worthy not of an English giant, but of some crazy fellow from a league far, far from the “Big Five” who has crept into the elite. And all this is in a rather weak Group A. Galatasaray is an ordinary middling team. And the budget of Copenhagen, which as a result kept Bayern company in the 1/8 finals and which, if we take the entire round, looked much more like a club suitable for the cup stage than Manchester United, is two dozen times less than Manchester. Different football universes.

The point, perhaps, of this European Cup disgrace is precisely that it is not isolated, but quite fits into the trend of the season.

And it is this, this trend is that if everything had worked out as it should for Manchester United in the final round, its success should have been perceived as a biting slap in the face of logic and justice, which insisted that it did not deserve the playoffs.

For the Manchester game in recent weeks, people who know a lot about football have chosen different definitions. Former club midfielder Paul Scholes in an interview TNT Sports called her “scary.” And it is clear what he meant – first of all, the contrast between expectations and reality. After the bronze championship, decorated with winning the English League Cup, in the previous season, it seemed that Manchester United, having invited the Dutchman Erik ten Hag to the coaching post and refreshing the application, had hit the bull’s eye, cheered up that they had chosen the right vector. But today’s situation forces us to remember something else. The fact that for ten years now, since the retirement of the legendary Alex Ferguson, who turned the team into a monster capable of any feat and held the bar high for a long, long time, he has been living in approximately the same mode: a flash of hope for the return of its former status , and behind it – another crisis.

The Manchester crisis of the second half of 2023 is only part of the long list of injuries, to which Harry Maguire and Luke Shaw were added in the match against Bayern.

First of all, this is a crazy leapfrog of schemes and combinations (in defense, Erik ten Hag has already used almost a dozen different combinations), these are eternal blunders – of defenders, the new goalkeeper Andre Onana, even wise players like Casemiru, this is an abundance of terrible quality matches in which nothing sticks. Well, like the one in which, before the confrontation with Bayern, the Manchester team was smashed to smithereens – 3:0 – by Bournemouth, which is incomparable in class and power with the Munich team. And there is also this feeling that there is no system, no ideology, other than diligently sorting through the expensive deck of football players at hand in the hope that the ideal combination will appear. Sometimes it falls out, more often, of course, nothing comes together. Hence the sixth position in the championship, which in fact could have been lower, and a fresh European Cup disaster.

Hence the emphasis placed by all the British publications that covered it on the fate of Erik ten Hag. Finding themselves in similar crisis situations, the vast majority of his predecessors, including those who managed to achieve something with the club, give a ray of hope, accumulate a seemingly certain amount of credibility – such as Louis van Gaal, Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer – with their positions said goodbye. Explaining why ten Hag still manages Manchester United, the BBC recalled an important nuance after the match with Bayern. Just about, maybe next week, the deal will be closed to acquire a 25 percent stake in the club by billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, who, of course, comes not just as a minority shareholder, but as a shareholder with grandiose plans and grandiose ambitions, who wants to eventually find yourself at the helm of a football giant. This means that in the near future some kind of strategy for the development of the team will be developed, it will be determined who corresponds to it and who does not.

And in the “intermediate” period, there seems to be no point in making drastic changes: anyway, the new shareholder may have his own ideas. Although there is a suspicion that if Manchester United loses in the next match, references to the “intermediate” period will not help the coach. And in the next match, the Manchester team will meet away against the leader of the English championship, Liverpool, on Sunday.

Alexey Dospehov