Man U fandom

 I met a friend who was wondering what happened to Man U... he got upset that people always made fun of Man U. I never truly understood the fandom business.

For me the Man U thing started to go south around the time that Alex Ferguson sold Ronaldo for a lot of money back then. He had won the UEFA Champions League with Man U – why would he think that Real Madrid were a bigger club? But they were. And at that time Real Madrid were on the wane. They had sold Wesley Sneijder and Arjen Robben to clubs that would win the UCL with those players in the side. But eventually Ronaldo would triumph and win 4 UCL titles.

From then, the 2008 vintage was taken apart piece by piece, without adequate replacements. At least Van Der Sar had a good enough replacement in David De Gea. But then one by one, the old guard left. Rooney, Evra, Ferdinand, Vidic, Nani, Van Persie, Michael Carrick, Jonny Evans. The players who came in were not at the same level. Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes were recalled in their mid-30s for duty.

The David Moyes era was a very damaging one for the club, first because Moyes and Woodard came in at the same time. Not only was there discontinuity with the manager, but also discontinuity with the CEO running football operations. And also there would be a discontinuity with the players.

One of the most galling seasons ever was the 13-14 season. I knew that it would be a long time before Man U won the league again, but for them to be almost a mid table team was such a dramatic fall from grace. United went from being a club who could always get who they wanted to a club who failed to land all their targets. They paid over the odds for bad acquisitions – Angel di Maria, Falcao, Anthony Martial. They turned great players into mediocre ones, like Paul Pogba, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Luke Shaw and Alexis Sanchez

They had bad scouting, bad recruitment, and an overall lack of strategy on the pitch. We could go into the Van Gaal, Mourinho and Solskjaar eras, but overall the picture was one where there wasn't a grand strategy on the football side of things. It's almost as though Alex Ferguson did several things so well that there wasn't anybody who could replace him when he was gone. Another manager who was extremely damaging was Erik Ten Hag, who came in with a great reputation for taking Ajax to the last 4 of the Champions League, but paid outrageous sums of money for underperforming players and left United with a very bad squad.

United had a a few blips in form before, such as during 2001 to 2006 when they won “only” one premier league title and were threatening to become a mediocre side. For me that was epitomised by two things. One was their inability to replace Schmeichel. They tried various people Taibbi, Bosnich, Barthez, Carroll and Tim Howard. None were particularly convincing, until they landed Van Der Sar. The other thing was the summer where they got in Veron and Van Nistlerooy. They were good players. Van Nistlerooy did very well as an individual, but whether he made Man U better was quite questionable. Veron was simply a misfit for the English league, because he went to Argentina and just made them better.

But somehow they managed to get Carrick, Hargreaves, Vidic, Evra and Van Der Sar in to build the spine of their last great side. I don't know who gets the credit for that. The downside is that they got saddled with the Glazers, who were clearly in the asset stripping business.

So that was the situation that that late great Man U side were in – things were good. The new recruits gelled well with the class of 99 veterans and the ones who came in during the lean years – Ronaldo, Ferdinand, Rooney and Saha. They had some help from Hendrik Larsson, who was on a roll – he helped Barcelona win the UCL, then helped Man U win the EPL the next season.

But that Indian summer started to crumble. Even when they sealed their title in 2011, I knew that Man U were weakening. A lot of their new recruits weren't terrible, but they weren't as great as the last great team. There was Fabio and Rafael, Anderson, Ashley Young, Phil Jones, Chicharito, Danny Welbeck, Robin Van Persie was great for 1 season before it was time for him to wane. But back then we couldn't have known that Man U were going to mess up so badly.

And another angle was that a lot of the former players who were from their teams who got media work. Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Paul Scholes, Rio Ferdinand, Owen Hargreaves. Every player who was in the same room as Alex Ferguson seemed to be touched with greatness, but most of them turned out to be mediocre managers: the ones who had careers were Gordon Strachan, Steve Bruce and Mark Hughes. And the ones who tried were Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Dwight Yorke, Paul Ince, Wayne Rooney, Phil Neville, It turns out that Pep Guardiola is better at nurturing football coaching talent than Alex Ferguson is, because Pep Guardiola nurtures hard skills whereas Alex Ferguson excels at the soft skills, which are harder to transfer.

The problem with having a lot of the old guard in the media is that after a while, a lot of the things that made them great will fade away. Gary Neville used to provide a lot of great analysis, but soon learnt that other people on youtube did it better. Then invariably the things they would talk about be about griping about how their once-great club has fallen on hard times. It would toxicify the conversation.

I saw it happen to Arsenal, during the period from 2016 to 2021 when they were the butt of jokes. The most toxic part about Arsenal was that they were a club in gradual decline, and there would be a long period when they had to be satisfied with finishing in the champions league places and then getting knocked out of the last 16 in the UCL. I think that this “managed decline” was much better than what happened to Man United, but still not very satisfying, until Arteta brought them back from missing out on the champions league to “finishing second all the time”.

Liverpool were always a good side, but there were 2 period when it was hard to watch. The Souness years and the Hodgson years. It was a lucky thing they had Jurgen Klopp coming in the save the day.

The thing I didn't understand about that friend who was a united fan was – he was one of those who switched to United around the time when United started winning big trophies, and people thought of them as glory hunters. It's a good thing that he stuck around. But you knew that the rot was setting in – why didn't you abandon hope and stop supporting that club? Because it's not your hometown club, you don't really owe them any loyalty. You supported a club because of the friends and the contacts.

Supporting a club is a very passive activity. It's one of the most passive activities of all, which is why I question why anybody at all would do it.

Liverpool are a club in danger because – even though you know that Arne Slot has done well with the team that Klopp left behind, you don't know where their future success is going to come from. And there are new challengers like Aston Villa, Newcastle, Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth who are biting at the heels and challenging for champions league places.

Well, I don't know what would have happened to my Arsenal fandom if Arteta hadn't come in to revive my club. All I know is that a lot of my milestones in life have come at a time when they won the league, and I'm always hoping that they'll do it again, and we'll see what kind of milestone I'll hit in life next.

Newcastle vs Liverpool

Last weekend I took the long trip (isn't that long these days but back then it was really long) trip to the old army camp where I lived in for 1-2 months in 1996. They were probably the longest part of my national service. That place was one of the most bleak and barren places in Singapore (although it was not as bleak and barren as Snowy Hill). 

At that time, there was this great football match: Newcastle vs Liverpool. It finished 4-3. It was, back then, billed as the greatest match that we’ve seen since the EPL started. Back then, the EPL wasn’t a great product. It was still coming out of its doldrums, and it would not be taken seriously: the various failures in Europe made it seem that the EPL was left far behind. 

After the ban on the English football ended, it experienced a rebirth. Alex Ferguson’s Man U had won a European trophy in the cup winner’s cup. But sustained success in Europe was a long time coming. European competitions were dominated by the Germans, the Spanish and the Italians in the 1990s. Even when Man U was dominating the domestic league, it wasn’t until 1999’s treble that they won the European cup, and the sheer romance of that occasion highlighted that they won it as underdogs, rather than as one of the favourites who were expected to win it. 

In this backdrop was the Liverpool Newcastle match. 

There was a fork in the road regarding the premier league. It hadn’t been a league that was as dominated by juggernauts the way it eventually became, after Man U won the league title against Newcastle. For a time, people were wondering whether Man U’s dominance was going to last, particularly as back then there wasn’t anything inevitable about Man U’s ascendence to the top of the pile. The other great sports dynasty of the 1990s was Chicago Bull’s dominance of the NBA, and for some reason it didn’t outlast Michael Jordan being part of that team. 

Various clubs challenged for the top of the premier league. There was a power vacuum because at that time, Liverpool were on the wane. Anybody could be the next powerhouse in football. At various times, it could have been Leeds, who won a title. Or Aston Villa. Or Sheffield Wednesday, who won a few cups and reached a few finals. Or Norwich or Nottingham Forest, who reached Europe. It could have been Blackburn, who actually did win one premier league title with the great 1995 team. Or it could have been Newcastle. 

Newcastle and Liverpool had a lot in common. They had a passionate support. They were northern teams. Newcastle had former Liverpool great players managing them, in Kevin Keegan and Kenny Dalglish. Newcastle was supposed to be the next Blackburn Rovers, who had a generous benefactor bankrolling them. 

Manchester United were there for the taking, it seemed. The season started with an infamous defeat against Aston Villa, where the former Liverpool player turned pundit Alan Hansen said, “you’ll never win anything with kids”. But those kids were not just… it usually is the case that you have one or two great academy products coming through a season. But United had a great bumper crop, in Beckham, the Nevilles, Scholes, Giggs and Butt. And there were the ones who didn’t make it, but had respectable careers with mid-table sides, like Robbie Savage and Keith Gillespie. 

They had a youth team with a miraculous crop of youngsters. Only to be rivalled with the Barcelona youngsters who formed the core of Barcelona when Barcelona and Spain ruled the world. Or the Chelsea of recent times. 

The match was played under very tense circumstances, with Alex Ferguson turning the heat up on Kevin Keegan, the way that he threatened to hound Blackburn off the title race. In fact, there were a lot of tense title races with Man U during that time. There was 91/92, which he lost to Leeds. 92/93 when he had to rough it out against Aston Villa. 93/94, he won at a canter. 94/95, he lost it to Blackburn. 95/96, he had to fight against Newcastle. 

Newcastle were letting the title slip away. Around that time, both Man U and Newcastle were playing Leeds United around the same time, and Alex Ferguson made a mischievous remark about which of them Leeds was going to fight harder against, and Kevin Keegan had an outburst which made it plain that the heat was getting to him. 

It was a big, pulsating match, full of twists, turns, excitement, and one to remember for the ages. This may be me looking at it through the lens of myself also being a teenager, but the EPL seemed to be going through some adolescence during that period of time. The football wasn’t yet world class, but the players were very good, it had the potential to be extremely exciting and entertaining. The players were all free to display their authentic parts of their personality. Eventually this would change: first in the 00s, the players were all media trained to give very prosaic answers that reduced the jeopardy on themselves. And then later, after the rise of social media, then they would be trained to become circus clowns designed to “drive engagement” and be an upstanding citizen of the clownshow which is social media. 

Tactically, it was a freer and more open environment. This would not be Brazil 1982, when everything revolved around individuals. But both teams combined attacking flair and skill at the expense of defensive solidity. In contrast, the league cup finals of 2025 would show two teams which were so defensively well drilled, they defended from the front. (This is now known as “pressing”.) 

In the 1996 match, Newcastle were a new pretender to the throne, and Liverpool were the old guard who had lost their throne and were looking to retake it. (It would have been very demoralizing for them to know that they had to wait until 2020 to see Liverpool win the next league title.)

The fact that Newcastle won this match does suggest that this time, Newcastle actually wins something. They had a rough time after topping the table 12 points ahead at Christmas 1995. They came in second twice. Then they fell apart when Ruud Gullit tried to implement “sexy football”. Bobby Robson restored some pride with a champions league finish, but that was as good as it got. Following their tradition for having former Liverpool greats, they got Graeme Souness, and turned into a grim mid table side. 

Then the Mike Ashley period began, and it was a thinly disguised asset stripping exercise. That only ended when the Saudis bought it over, installed Eddie Howe, and produced a lean and mean side capable of challenging for champions league places. 

It’s possible that the era of oligopolies is finally over. This may not be the post-Alex Ferguson, pre-Guardiola period where the league title pinged back and forth between an unsteady Man City, Chelsea and of all clubs, Leicester, when Tottenham were threatening to win a title. But we now have an elite that not only contains the usual suspects (Man City, Arsenal, Liverpool), but a few genuine UCL places contenders (Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa, Bournemouth) and a few lost sheep who are hankering for former glories (Man U, Tottenham, Chelsea).