It doesn’t matter who is linked with becoming Manchester United manager, because whatever the name (and most of those in circulation have previously already been ruled out), they are set up to fail. The parasitic Glazer ownership has bled and broken the club, putting a financial noose around it. In 2024, Sir Jim Ratcliffe talked a big game about a “three-year plan” to rival and outdo Manchester City and Liverpool. But the decision-making under INEOS’ charge of football operations has not just been woeful, but costly too. There is zero accountability for expensive mistake after expensive mistake. There is still no clear direction on club identity, including style of play, which leads to profiling the right signings and manager. That was a major promise made by Ratcliffe, which hasn’t been kept. To borrow his own words: “There have been a whole series of coaches, some of which were very good. And none of them were ­successful, or survived for very long. The only conclusion you can draw is that the ­environment in which they were ­working didn’t work.” It still doesn’t. It never will as long as the people who own and run the club betray Manchester United and what is required to be successful in the modern era. You can harp on about structure, vision, and sell fanciful projects, but you will never have the right operation with the wrong people.

Lisandro Martinez’s view that Michael Carrick has been sold short and the squad has not been equipped with the depth to fight on multiple fronts is shared by several senior players - and football staff. It has been discussed in the dressing room with the club aware of frustrations around recruitment. There was a fear ahead of the campaign that the squad would not be strengthened properly - the lack of cover at left-back and striker were major concerns, which is evidenced in how much the need for reinforcements was stressed during pre-season interviews. Told the driving reason behind Martinez’s airing these grievances publicly is fury that Carrick is likely going to lose his job despite not being given the tools to have a fair crack, and players are sick of reset after reset, without questions asked of the people in charge and what direction they’re taking the club in. Carrick and the team have faced criticism, accepted it, and owned up to performances being nowhere near good enough. Where is the accountability from the people who keep leading the club to one doom spiral after another?

How long is the stench of the “sham” going to corrode the meaning, worth, and very essence of the Premier League? Listening to commentary about Manchester City’s players matching the defiance of their ownership and triumphing in adversity. Listening to fans chorusing the names of the men running the club, wearing masks or displaying banners of their faces and jibing: “We’re Man City, we’ll cheat when we want.” Victory being framed as “a lovely moment,” a show of togetherness as though some grave injustice has been imposed on City, rather than their hierarchy being found by an independent commission to have orchestrated financial doping on an industrial scale. Their opponents and the rest of us wondering if any of this actually matters now and how much of it ever did? There can be no business as usual pretence. We need a full stop to the absurdity.

Poor - and biased - response from Andy Burnham on Manchester City being found guilty of all charges related to serious breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules by an Independent Commission. He says “I can’t intervene *more* in the process,” which requires an explanation in itself. Then offers commentary on previous proceedings he felt was unfair, AND states he wouldn’t want to lose the club’s owners who have “been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester. Obviously, the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is.” How was that force built? And on the investment into the city itself, per a 2022 Guardian report: “Nine sites were sold to Sheikh Mansour at a fraction of their value, and well below what other plots nearby fetched. They were on leases lasting 999 years, well beyond the norm. And the fund shifted what had been public assets to companies registered in Jersey. “That walk along the water from New Islington into Ancoats now passes blocks of privatised land owned in an offshore tax haven, which yields millions upon millions for a key member of the wealthy elite running a surveillance state halfway across the globe. One of the greatest cities in the world has sold itself to a senior figure in a brutal autocracy – and not even for a good price.”