Manchester United will never build a winner if they remain scared of missing the Champions League
If Manchester United want to build a team capable of sustaining a title challenge year after year, they're going to have to get comfortable with losing a bit first
(Authors note: I started writing a version of this article back in September 2022 about if we should be worried about how United were building their squad but then work, life, and some other things got in the way and it’s been sitting in the Kwestthoughts drafts folder ever since. I’ve had to make some revisions as the original question has - essentially - already been answered, but the overall premise remains the same).
Other than money there’s no greater advantage a Premier League club can have besides a long term plan. Merely having a long term plan gives you a leg up on so many other clubs for the simple reason that an astonishing number of clubs just don’t have one at all.
Don’t get me wrong most clubs want to have a long term plan. Nevertheless given the financial risk of relegation as soon as any mild hardships befall the club, the priority of the club switches entirely to ‘do whatever it takes to stay up this year.’ It doesn’t matter what you did last year or how many good seasons you’ve had; one poor start to the campaign can immediately plunge you into this zone. It’s that easy.
“The Sunderland Vortex” is a term coined by Mike Goodman and Michael Caley of the Double Pivot podcast. I’ll let Grace Robertson explain what it is as she did back in February.
The “Sunderland Vortex” gets its name, obviously, from Sunderland AFC and their… “eventful” decade in the 2010s. After a strong previous season, Steve Bruce’s Black Cats found themselves in a relegation fight in 2011/12. The board didn’t hesitate and sacked Bruce a month before Christmas, hiring Martin O’Neill in his place. O’Neill more than did his job, getting Sunderland to a solid 13th-placed finish, before it inevitably fell apart the following year. This time, Sunderland parachuted in Paolo Di Canio with seven games of the season remaining, and he just about did enough to keep the team up before, yep, things got rocky the next season and he was replaced by Gus Poyet. Inevitably, Poyet kept Sunderland up before getting into trouble the next year, when Dick Advocaat came in to save the club and should have left in the summer, but stuck it out until October before the Black Cats swapped him for Sam Allardyce. “Big Sam” stayed clear of relegation until the England job came calling (whoops), and Sunderland were forced to replace him with David Moyes. That year, the team completely fell apart and finished 20th.
Each one of those managers wanted to instill their own brand of football and in order to do that they wanted to bring in “their” players. Therefore every summer Sunderland binned off long term strategy in favor of signing short term “win-now” players for their new manager. Every time the manager got sacked, those players stuck around to become deadweight under the new guy.
There wasn’t any logic behind it. The only thought was, ‘we need to ensure we stay up again this season.’ Once we establish ourselves as a stable Premier League side then we can go back to focusing on the long term. Except that never happens. Leicester City and Southampton were the model clubs at punching (well) above their weight class, with each having a decent run finishing in the European places, but just a few bad decisions over one or two seasons has put both of them back in the Championship this year. It happens that quickly. You can never get comfortable.
Once you end up in the Sunderland Vortex the only outcome is eventual relegation. Every short term signing you make is eating into your wage bill, hampering what you can do in future transfer windows. Players who have past their expiration date are still under contract at the club. It may not happen immediately but eventually it’s going to blow up in your face and you’re going to go down.
There are 13 teams that in any given year can find themselves caught in the Sunderland Vortex. Then there’s the “top six” plus newly rich Newcastle. Those clubs are rich enough that they could spend their way out of any potential disaster. They also have enough talent that even if everything goes wrong in a given season, they’ll still finish comfortably mid table.
They aren’t completely immune as there exists a second Sunderland Vortex. This one is higher up the table. We’ll call it the Manchester United Vortex.
The principal is exactly the same only instead of relegation we’re talking about missing out on the Champions League. And while anyone can fall into the Sunderland Vortex, only Manchester United seem to be stuck in the Manchester United Vortex.
We all know the pattern Manchester United are in. They hire a new manager and spend a boatload on player transfers his first season, helping him qualify for the Champions League in his second season. Then they spend a little less, until eventually United miss out of the Champions League and the manager gets sacked. A new guy is hired and the cycle repeats.
United are terrified of missing out on the Champions League and the money that comes with it. In 2015 United began a 10 year shirt sponsorship with Adidas that pays them £75 million a year - however a clause in that contract states that should United fail to reach the Champions League in two consecutive seasons that amount is reduced by 30 percent. Recently United signed a new 10 year deal with Adidas that will pay them £90 million per year and it’s hard to imagine that Adidas would agree to let that clause be taken out.
United may have brought in record revenues while not being in the Champions League in 2022-23, but a lot of things needed to break their way for that to happen1. Despite those revenues, they still made a loss last season. That Champions League money goes a long way in helping them stay in the black.
United operating as if they are deathly afraid of missing out on Europe’s top competition for an extended period of time gives off the impression that they believe if they were to miss the competition for a few years in a row, they’d never get back.
That notion has been proven to be untrue several times in the Premier League itself but that’s never changed United’s thinking. As a result they’ve thrown themselves firmly into this Champions League level Sunderland Vortex.
Long term planning is often thrown out the window. They have to get into the Champions League now.
When Erik Ten Hag was hired to be United’s latest manager who would come in and build something, he talked about this being a long term project. Hell, it’s something he’s still talking about in November 2023.
Ten Hag could have came in and set expectations about the type of rebuild he was going to undertake. Certain players would have to go, new young ones would come in as United develop a team that looks to improve every year. Instead, Ten Hag’s became the latest United manager to eschew long term thinking in favor of the here and now.
To rebuild his midfield, Ten Hag brought in 30 year old Christian Eriksen and then spent £60 million to bring in another 30 year old in Casemiro. The latter is the quintessential Sunderland Vortex signing.
Casemiro was on his last legs and looking for one last payday. Could he help you qualify for the Champions League this season2? Absolutely. Could he do the same next year? Maybe, but less likely. Will he be useful for the entire duration of his four year contract? Almost certainly not.
Yet rather than consider all those factors, they threw big money down and made the Brazilian their second highest paid player3 based on the fact that in the immediate term he could get them back into Europe.
In all likelihood, United will have to replace both Eriksen and Casemiro from their starting XI within two years (update: looks like they need to do it even sooner than that), which will cost far more than £60 million. I don’t think I need to tell you that when you’re throwing down that kind of money, you’d like some kind of longevity. Spending £60 million plus god knows how much in wages only to have to spend more than that two years later is not a sustainable business model.
That money doesn’t just get written off. You don’t just spend £60 million and forget about it the next year. Transfer fees are amortized over the length of the contract - in Casemiro’s case it’s about £15m per year. So when United are factoring in their transfer budget for the next season, £15 million is already burned4.
After the fees there’s the wages. With the soft salary caps the Premier League and UEFA essentially have, every single pound counts. You’ll need some superstars if you want to win, and that’s not only going to cost superstar wages, but there’s only so many superstar wages you can afford. If you’re spending ~£350k/wk on someone sitting on your bench, that’s going to impact how much you can spend on the guys who are actually on the pitch.
In less than a year and a half Manchester United have already had more than a few bad losses under Erik Ten Hag. With each bad loss come the excuses, let’s say reminders, that not only did Jurgen Klopp and Mikel Arteta also have very bad losses when they first took over their current clubs, but they didn’t even finish in Europe their first season! With Ten Hag finishing third his first year he’s clearly better.
Unfortunately for United, that’s comparing apples to oranges. You can’t compare where Erik Ten Hag is in his “cycle” to where Mikel Arteta was in his. They’re completely different scenarios5.
The sporting landscape has changed drastically in the 21st century. In the United States, nearly every professional sports team has realized the last thing you want to be is mediocre6. Thanks to the draft format, If you’re not among the elite, you don’t want to be the next level down, you want to be all the way down at the bottom.
Teams have realized that superstars in their prime rarely become available, and when they do, you often have to overpay to land them, leading to several years on the back end of their contracts where their production isn’t close to what you’re paying for. If you want to build a title contender, you need a few players on team friendly deals that grow to become superstars.
The way to get those players is to be bad for a few years so you pick at the top of the draft where the best young players are. As you stockpile that young talent they’ll grow and improve together every year. When it works, you suddenly find yourself with some of the best players in the game all entering their prime and playing for you.
This strategy has created a “tanking” culture in American sports that is in no way good for the sport - or the fans - but the problem is, it works!
There is no draft in European football so there’s no reason to be deliberately losing games. But that doesn’t mean that all the other principals don’t carry over. Namely that the best way to build a contender is to harvest young talent and give them a few years to let them grow together as a team.
As Arsenal, Liverpool and even Manchester City have figured out, you don’t become a title contender by gradually getting better step by step. You do it by making a few gradual steps, then a giant leap.
Liverpool didn’t go from 8th to 4th (76 points) to 83 points to 90 points to 97 points. They went from 60 points to 76 and 75 points in consecutive seasons then jumped straight to 97 points - earning over 90 points in three of the next four seasons. Manchester City didn’t win 100 points after finishing with 94 points the previous year, they jumped up from a team had 78 points, and averaged 74 over the previous three seasons, to a team that got 100 and 98 in consecutive years. City did this in the pre-Pep days too. The year before they won their first Premier League title they finished the season with 71 points. A year later they won 89, an 18 point jump.
And of course there’s Arsenal. The Gunners finished 8th in consecutive seasons after Mikel Arteta took over. In year three they went from 61 points to 69 - merely an eight point increase. In year four, instead of taking another step forward they leapt, increasing their points haul by 15 points to finish with 84 and be right in a title race the whole season.
For years now analysts have been saying Liverpool are the blueprint for how to build a team to compete with Manchester City when you don’t have oil money backing you. Arsenal are simply the latest iteration of that process.
Despite spending years watching Manchester United show them what not to do when their legendary coach retired, Arsenal were still a mess in the post Wenger years. But rather than spending a decade in purgatory, they quickly changed course and backed Arteta to go about things the right way when he was hired.
As Arteta only came in midway through an ongoing season, there was only so much he could do that first year. But this was a man with a plan and he immediately got to work on phasing people out and building to the future. Arteta came in and immediately made 17 year old Bakayo Saka a first team mainstay7. 20 year old Eddie Nketiah also started getting looks as the season wore on. In Arteta’s first year the average age of the team fell by 1.4 years compared to the previous season.
The following season 20 and 21 year olds Emile Smith-Rowe and Gabriel Martinelli had the eighth and ninth most minutes among outfield players. Arsenal fans may have been up in arms due to the club’s mere £54.1m net spend but there was a plan here. Ahead of the 2021-22 season, Arsenal added five more players with an average age of 22. Suddenly Granit Xhaka and Tomas Partey were old men in Arsenal’s XI at just 28 years old.
With the foundation in place, Arsenal were now ready to spend more money on players already in their peak years or add cheaper veteran depth pieces like Jorginho and Leandro Trossard.
The key to making this all happen was giving Arteta the time and patience to see out a long term plan. The key to giving him time was Arsenal weren’t afraid to miss out on Europe. They knew the results those years didn’t matter8, if they stuck with the plan they’d not only get back there, they’d thrive.
That doesn’t mean mistakes weren’t made along the way - notably giving Pierre Emerick Aubameyang a horrendous contract extension. But when you have a plan the mistakes become fewer and farther between, and the fewer mistakes there are, the easier it is to move past each one.
Erik Ten Hag has gone about things in the complete opposite way. Ten Hag took over a team that had an average age of 27 the previous season. In his first season United had a net spend of £183.5m on players with an average age of 25.69 . The average age of United’s XI dropped from 27 to just 26.6 and that’s factoring in that 37 year old Cristiano Ronaldo played 1931 fewer minutes10 than the previous year. In other words, they really didn’t get any younger.
That’s a big deal. The last six Premier League winners had an average age of 26.47 with all six coming between 26 and 27. The average age of all the winners of Europe’s top five leagues in the last six seasons is 26.43. In other words, once the average age of your squad hits 26.5 that is essentially the peak of what that squad is going to achieve. Once you hit that age, if you want to stay at the same age let alone get better, you better make sure you get that average age going in the other direction.11
In Erik Ten Hag’s first year he put together a squad that was already at their peak age. In his second season he hasn’t done much to change that. So far this season United have an average age of 26.3 - the sixth oldest in the league.
When Arteta and Klopp took over Arsenal and Liverpool, they build their squads around young players who were still developing and getting better every year. These players would build the core of the team and once they they started entering their primes together that’s when they’d start supplementing them by signing players who were also just entering their prime.
Had no one been allowed to make any signings this summer you would still expect Arsenal to improve given that their key players such as Saka, Gabriel Martinelli, and Martin Odegaard were all under the age of 24 last season. Natural progression would see all of them get a little bit better this year.
You can’t say the same thing about United. Had United not signed anyone last summer you wouldn’t have expected a repeat performance of last year, and if they don’t sign anyone next summer you wouldn’t expect them to be even as good(?) as they are this year. The squad is just too old. There’s too many players past their prime. Natural progression is going the wrong way.
That’s the problem United find themselves in. This happens every few years as instead of really taking the time to reset the squad12 they spend money on short term solutions with the sole focus of getting back into the Champions League.
United can continue doing this for a long time but their ceiling will never get any higher. Every so often they’ll stumble into some draw luck and be able to win a trophy. They’ll make the Champions League three out of every five years, usually progress from their group and occasionally win a knockout tie but that’s it.
If United want to actually get back to being a title contender a lot of work needs to be done. They need to gut a large chunk of the squad. They need to bring in young players like Rasmus Hojlund, who may not be the best right now but have the potential to become that good. Let them play together, develop together, and improve together year over year before you start signing the big superstars. The blueprint is there, you just have to follow it.
But before you can do any of that, you have to get over your fear of missing the Champions League in consecutive seasons. Until you do that, you’ll remain in the Manchester United Vortex - an essential purgatory with no chance of getting out.
Such as getting home draws in every domestic cup round boosting match day attendance.
As in the 2022-23 season
With David de Gea leaving he’s now their highest paid player
Along with the amortizations from every other recent signing
We’re not even going to go into the fact that Arteta managed to get Arsenal playing his “style” of play right away. The players just weren’t suited to it and it resulted in insanely drab football. It was BAD. But this isn’t about that.
Some teams used to make a name for themselves based on having 20 year streaks of making the playoffs without ever coming close to a title. Those days are long gone.
Initially as a left back, then towards the end of the season higher up the pitch
They also knew that being a top six team the worst they could do was finish around mid table
That’s 2.6 years older than the average age of Pep’s first signing class at City in 2016
About 21 and a half games less
City won the treble last season with an average age of 26.7. Their average age this year is nearly a full year younger (25.8)
They started down this path in 2019-20 and then two years later couldn’t get out of their own way as they signed a 28 year old and 36 year old
facts
Great historical and analytical piece Paul!!!