They say money corrupts the soul. At least, that’s what my employers tell me. So is Manchester United’s being corroded by their aptly named ‘Gaalacticos’ – the host of summer arrivals under new manager Louis van Gaal that cost the Old Trafford club a combined £150million?
It certainly feels that way; that figure constitutes the second-largest spend in a single window in the history of the sport, only bettered by Real Madrid in 2009 when they welcomed Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka, Xabi Alonso and Karim Benzema amongst others to the Bernabeu for a whopping £195million.
The result? Unquestionably the most foreign-influenced first team in Red Devils history, the transformation inspired by the powers of the purse. They have a foreigner manning the dugout Louis van Gaal who devoted just a fifth of his summer spending to a single English player, Luke Shaw.
Not that I’m attempting to moralise or exaggerate the situation. Manchester United still boast a larger cohort of home-grown players than any Premier League club, represented by recognised Three Lions internationals in Luke Shaw, Phil Jones, Chris Smalling, Michael Carrick, Wayne Rooney and Ashley Young as well as a plethora of incredibly promising, albeit rather raw, young Englishmen. Shared membership with the national team and a loose synergy of philosophies has always been at the heart of Manchester United’s identity, something only a fool would be actively unwilling to maintain.
But the United squad that thumped QPR 4-0 at the weekend contained just three players legible for the national side, compared to the six included in the 3-0 victory over Aston Villa in 2013 that effectively won the Red Devils their last Premier League title. Nine England internationals were included in their 3-2 win over Manchester City earlier that season.
Likewise, Tom Cleverley and Danny Welbeck were forced to make way this summer. The latter’s loan move to Villa Park felt inevitable but Welbeck, through his combination of hard-graft, home-grown status, determination, loyalty and tactical flexibility, epitomised the old United and their core characteristics under Sir Alex Ferguson. He was a walking, breathing effigy of how United as a club was run and how they went about their football.
Spending was stringent under Ferguson too – United’s club-record £30.5million spent on Dimitar Berbatov in 2008 was trumped by Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester City and Chelsea until the Red Devils splashed out £37million on Juan Mata in January and £59million on Angel Di Maria this summer.
But many of those ideals have been exiled in the space of a single transfer window. Van Gaal is attempting to install a more technically demanding style of football, which inevitably means less English players, whilst chief executive Ed Woodward claims the club now have the financial muscle to ‘buy a Luis Suarez every summer’. Financial Fair Play laws, counter-intuitively, also increases United’s ability to spend in comparison to their Premier League counterparts.
Clearly, Manchester United as we know it are changing. Their manner of recruitment, which previously depended on players who had already proved themselves or shown great potential in the Premier League, has developed into something less organic and their style of play, although not completely alien, is as far away from the natural traits of English football as it has likely ever been.
Even back fours and widemen, crucial parts of the club’s traditional philosophy, have been done away with in a bid to accommodate for Van Gaal’s expensive foreign signings and the vogue 3-5-2 system he developed with the Netherlands at the World Cup.
Manchester United’s identity is being transformed, and apparently that’s now dependant on a significant level of spending every summer. But is that necessarily as negative as I’ve suggested thus far throughout this article, or is this the modernisation the club has desperately needed for years?
Under Ferguson, there was little need to spend for spending’s sake. It cost Manchester City £1billion in transfers to claim their first Premier League title and Roman Abramovich had invested around double that in ten years to see Chelsea pick up eleven trophies. Meanwhile, United remained the most dominant club in the Premier League and the most dominant English club in the Champions League – making statements in the transfer market or paying over the odds for top quality players could be left to the divisional rivals. United were making superstars, not buying them.
The sorry tenure of David Moyes however proved that Sir Alex Ferguson had been paving over the cracks at Old Trafford for some time. He could motivate and command top performances from players of questionable quality but that method, in the long-run, was always unsustainable.
Every department of United’s first team, with the exception of the strike-force, had lacked the investment required throughout Fergie’s final stretch and perhaps his greatest mistake as United boss was leaving his successor with a corroding squad that drastically overachieved the year before. When Moyes ascended to the Carrington throne, the United side presented to him was not fit for the purpose of defending a Premier League title.
Tactically, they required modernisation too. Of course, systems, styles and philosophies move full circle but even amid their title-winning 2012/13 campaign, the Red Devils and Ferguson were hardly at the intellectual forefront of European football. They could compete with neither the tiki-taca of Barcelona or the bullish breaking play of Bayern Munich, and in truth, they were rather fortuitous regarding the lack of competition in the English top flight that year. At least van Gaal, through his tactics and popularity, is currently considered a trend-setter.
So perhaps the Manchester United as we know it – the faith in young English players, their clinical, aggressive brand of football, their reluctance to set the example for others at the top end of the transfer market – will no longer exist. Perhaps money has changed them, perhaps it will change them to an even greater degree in the future. Perhaps their transfer policies will eventually become as farcical as Real Madrid’s and their style of football as exotic as Barcelona’s.
But this process, even before Sir Alex Ferguson’s resignation, was always inevitable, just as enormous wealth is now an inevitable part of the Premier League. When looking at how Manchester City and Chelsea competed with United over the last few years, financial muscle was always at the heart of it.
Perhaps United have sold their soul to the devil as they search for a path back to the top. But when compared to modern transfer policies, the standards set by City, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Barcelona, PSG and even Bayern Munich, they are probably the last major European club to do so.
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