It was Nicky Butt, a Manchester United man down to his bones, who argued recently that it wasn’t fair in these challenging times at Old Trafford for supporters to direct their anger against the small army of television pundits who used to play for the club.
It has been a recurring complaint in the years since United ceased being serial champions and morphed into their current existence as a hole-in-the-roof superpower. The volume has gone up again since Ruben Amorim’s recent departure, muttering darkly about Gary Neville’s outside influence in particular. That, says Butt, has left fans blaming the wrong people.
“When it goes bad, you can’t cry and go, ‘Oh, they’re having a go at us’,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been hearing for the last six or so months. Do you know why we’re saying it? Because it’s terrible what we’re seeing.
“We love the football club. I’ve been a Manchester United fan since the age of six or seven, as long as I can remember. I’m not saying it to go, ‘Let’s stab everybody in the back’. I’m saying it because it is genuinely c**p.”
Ordinarily, it would be easier to sympathise. Gary Neville said something similar on his Stick to Football podcast this week and, again, it was hard to disagree. “When we were playing, Sir Matt Busby was there,” Neville said. “Bobby Charlton was there. You’ve got to be inspired by the history of the club, not overwhelmed by it and melt.”
It has, after all, been 13 seasons since United, the 20-time champions of England, have been involved in a genuine title race. They have finished, on average, 24.7 points behind the eventual champions in that time. The whole of football is rubbernecking in their direction. So why is it a problem when their ex-players say what they see and choose, for the most part, not to sugarcoat the truth?
And yet, that’s exactly what it has become: a problem. It’s been heading this way for a while and, if that sounds contradictory in any way, it should be possible to recognise why that problem exists, even if you agree with everything they say.
The irony here is that, in another era, it used to be a source of irritation at Old Trafford that there were so many former Liverpool players in the television studios. Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson were Match of the Day’s regular analysts then. United, in comparison, often complained about feeling underrepresented.
Not now. In this diversified age of digital media.
Gary Neville is the dominant figure; Paul Scholes and Butt have teamed up for The Good, The Bad & The Football podcast, which is where the latter confronted the issue of pundit criticism; Wayne Rooney is all over the BBC; Rio Ferdinand has his social media masses, plus various others.
Wayne Rooney is now a prominent BBC pundit (Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images)
In a lot of cases, it’s highly watchable.
All have strong opinions and, with the exception of Rooney perhaps, all have the ability to articulate them eloquently. Scholes and Butt grizzle about the old times like a Mancunian version of The Muppets’ Statler and Waldorf, heckling the cast from their box seats. And we haven’t even mentioned all the times little puffs of toxic black smoke seem to be coming out of Roy Keane’s ears.
But it’s still a problem.
Anything they say is played on a loop and turned into headlines, to be plastered across various websites. The stronger it gets, the more prominence it receives. That, in turn, sets the news agenda and when United’s results are poor, as they often are, it cranks up the pressure on everyone.
“Ignore the noise,” is the jargon of the modern-day manager. It’s just easier said than done, in this particular case, when so many ex-players — Old Trafford royalty, in many cases — are giving the club a collective kicking and it’s gone viral on social media.
That doesn’t mean the people doing the talking have said anything wrong and the counter-argument, perhaps, might be that we, the written media, have to acknowledge our part. There is nothing more dull, after all, than to hear the same old question in the post-match interviews: “Gary Neville has just said on Sky that…”
It is, as former United manager Louis van Gaal once said, almost always a copout. It is also a trap — one that most football managers see coming — on the basis that rival bosses don’t tend to engage in the kind of verbal warfare that happened, say, with United’s Alex Ferguson and Arsenal counterpart Arsene Wenger. Everything’s too nicey-nicey these days.
But managers will occasionally turn their fire on the TV pundits — the “poets”, as Jose Mourinho called them during his time managing the club — and that is clickbait heaven, especially when it involves a club with United’s global reach.
That’s when it looks like the club are under attack. And that, in turn, is when fans tend to get upset with the former players for the constant nostalgia and references to happier times. Because, let’s face it, we all know Benjamin Sesko is no Ruud van Nistelrooy.
An alternative view is that, if you are managing a club of United’s size, you should be able to withstand this level of scrutiny. It is far more intense in other countries, as Neville can testify from his brief stint in Spain as Valencia manager. And if the players are getting needled by it, as we are often told they are, perhaps that says more about their strength of personality than the people delivering the criticisms.
As for the people at the top of the club, it can seem strange that United’s fans are campaigning against the Glazer regime but might also take exception to some of the pundits whose argument, in short, is that the club needs to be run more effectively.
Because what’s the alternative here for a television viewer?
In 1998, United launched their own channel, MUTV, where the pundits were expected to say only positive things. Stuart Pearson, a United player in the 1970s, clearly didn’t get the memo. He remarked that their midfielder Juan Sebastian Veron “couldn’t tackle a fish supper” and was taken off the air, never to be invited back.
Sir Alex Ferguson is still close to his former players, including Nicky Butt (Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
Journalists were invited to appear on a MUTV show called ‘United in Press’, on which the unspoken rule was that they should have only nice things to say, too. It became known among the hacks as “United in Praise’.
Then, in 2005, Ferguson boycotted MUTV because one of its presenters had dared to suggest United looked better in a 4-4-2 system rather than the 4-5-1 formation with which they were experimenting. David Gill, the club’s chief executive, had to arrange mediation.
All things considered, there’s a reasonable case that United’s fans are actually lucky to have so many pundits and podcasters who care about the club and have strong opinions about what needs to be done to put it right.
Equally, there is still one subject that the relevant people, especially the players from the Class of ’92, noticeably tend to avoid when it comes to the acid test about how far they are willing to go in the name of unbiased truth-telling.
In one recent episode of The Good, The Bad & The Football, Butt could be heard threatening to boycott Old Trafford if the club appointed Chelsea’s then head coach Enzo Maresca as Amorim’s replacement. Not because Maresca had failed in any particular way, but because the Italian had previously been a coach under Pep Guardiola at Manchester City. That, in Butt’s opinion, should immediately rule him out of the job.
“If Maresca comes in — I like him as a coach, I really do — with the background (at City), I would give my season ticket back,” said Butt. “I can’t sit here and go on about United’s philosophy and DNA and then go, ‘Well, I’d love Maresca, an ex-Man City guy…’. I’m a United fan, and I can’t accept that.“
What Butt should remember is that there are only three managers in United’s entire history who have won the league championship.
The first was Ernest Mangnall, who went on to manage City for 12 years, and the second was Busby, who played more than 200 games for City and also, lest it be forgotten, had nine years at Liverpool.
The third was Alexander Chapman Ferguson, who had never played or managed outside Scotland before coming to United but went on to have so much success in Manchester that he is widely regarded as the greatest manager in British football history.
Yet, let’s be honest, Ferguson’s fingerprints are all over this mess if you consider the sequence of events, particularly the dispute over racehorse Rock of Gibraltar that led to the Glazer family taking control of the club and, as people had warned, to all this decline and regression.
Then consider Ferguson’s often impassioned support of the Glazers, and his absolute refusal to say anything against them during the many years, in retirement, he was being paid millions of pounds to be a club ambassador.
They were, he once declared, “great owners”. He would frequently criticise the “attention seekers” who requested his support, and predicted the fall would be considerable. And, to this day, he has said nothing to the contrary, even on the occasions when he must feel like he is watching a beautiful painting being ripped up in front of his eyes.
That feels worthy of some punditry, surely.
It might not be an easy conversation if you still refer to this man as “Boss”. But it’s a conversation to be had, all the same.