Ryan O’HanlonOct 10, 2025, 04:14 AM ETCloseRyan O’Hanlon is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He’s also the author of “Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution.”Follow on X
play2:11Why Antony felt disrespected at Manchester UnitedReal Betis winger Antony reflects on the end of his tough time at Manchester United.
Hutchison questions Ratcliffe’s commitment to sticking with Amorim (1:36)Don Hutchison reacts to Jim Ratcliffe’s claim that Ruben Amorim will be given time to turn Manchester United around. (1:36)
Why Antony felt disrespected at Manchester UnitedReal Betis winger Antony reflects on the end of his tough time at Manchester United.
Craig Burley reacts to Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s statement backing Man United manager Ruben Amorim for the next ‘3 years’
play1:28Burley: Ratcliffe backing Amorim will come back to bite himCraig Burley reacts to Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s statement backing Man United manager Ruben Amorim for the next ‘3 years’
“We have to be together. Now is not the time to blame anyone. Now is not the time to look for guilty people,” he said. “Now is the time to stick together — with the manager, with his staff, the players and with the people on the board of the club.
“We need to carry on, to stay with the manager. We need to believe in him, because as players we know we have to improve. It’s not just the manager, it’s not just the tactics. It’s all of us. It’s not the time to blame one person. We are all together in this.”
It has, literally, happened every time. First it was Moyes, then Louis van Gaal, then Jose Mourinho, then Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, then Erik ten Hag, and at some point in the future, history says it’s going to happen to Ruben Amorim.
It’s almost not even worth paying attention to United’s results or watching the players kick the ball — every positive or negative development on a given weekend is a distraction from the fact that United have been stuck in the same, downward cycle for the past 10 years. United even have pretty good underlying numbers this season — fourth-best expected-goal differential in the league! — but I’m not letting myself buy into those, and neither should you.
Unless something massive changes, we’re going to keep writing these same columns, keep having these same arguments, keep hearing a new set of players and managers say the same things, until the sun eventually burns out. And a big part of the reason that’s true is that no one at Manchester United really needs it to change. After purchasing the club, the Glazer family oversaw a massive decline in results, coupled with a multibillion-dollar rise in the club’s valuation.
But let’s say that the people who matter at United really did want to build a competitive soccer team again — one that could compete with Liverpool, Arsenal, and Manchester City at the top of the Premier League. How might they do it?
When Fenway Sports Group (FSG) took over at Liverpool, they were just coming off a seventh-place finish, and they’d follow that up with a succession of sixth-, eighth-, and seventh-place finishes. Then United’s biggest rivals nearly won the league in 2013-14 — oh wow, Liverpool are back! — only to drop back down to sixth, and then eighth, in the following two seasons. Same old Liverpool.
For the 2010-11 season, Liverpool recorded the ninth-highest revenue in world soccer. In other words: way above where they finished in the Premier League. But those numbers were similar to Schalke in Germany. They would’ve been the third-richest team in Italy or Spain. Both big Spanish clubs were raking in revenues twice as high as Liverpool’s. United were in a similar stratosphere, while Chelsea and Arsenal were well ahead of them, too.
In order to compete with all of those teams, Liverpool had to find a way to be more efficient with their spending, and they did that in the same way that everyone else had already been doing it in all of the American sports: by using data. But it wasn’t just that Liverpool used data: it was that they had a decision-making structure in place to ensure that the data would actually have an effect on how the club was run.
“We had owners that were deeply invested in a data-driven approach, which isn’t the case at other teams,” Ian Graham, Liverpool’s former head of research, told me. “And I learned from experience: You need that investment from the top, otherwise it’s just not going to work.
“I also had the privilege working for a sporting director who is also heavily invested in data. So even if the owners are invested, that doesn’t mean that people actually making the sporting decisions are invested.”
Edwards, then-manager Jurgen Klopp, and FSG’s on-the-ground representative Mike Gordon would have the final say on what offers got made and what players the club tried to sign. Edwards has said that the most successful signings were the one that checked all the boxes: approved by the scouting/data side, the coaching side, and the financial side.
While Liverpool couldn’t compete with the Manchester Uniteds and Real Madrids of the world for the most expensive players, their process unearthed undervalued players, and they could always outbid their competitors for these players. That’s how you sign Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mané, and Mohamed Salah in consecutive summers — before you’ve even come close to winning a major trophy.
United have never had anything close to this kind of decision-making structure. Sir Alex Ferguson was the decision-making structure at United and then the Glazers had no interest in building a modern front-office once he left at the end the 2012-23 season. So, there’s been a power vacuum ever since — filled randomly and haphazardly by different people, season after season.
I don’t know who exactly could be their Andrew Friedman, but it should be the most important hire for Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS. Most managers will only last a couple seasons, and the same goes for players, but you need someone ensuring there’s long-term cohesion within the squad and making decisions over much longer than a one-or-two-year time horizon.
It’s only been one year, but Ratcliffe & Co. have not only dropped the ball here. They then ran the ball over with an 18-wheeler and set it on fire.
Initially, they hired Dan Ashworth away from Newcastle United to fill this role, but then Ashworth left the club last year, it seems, out of a disagreement over the hiring of Amorim. Since then, Ratcliffe’s deputy, Sir Dave Brailsford briefly served as the director of football, before being replaced by Jason Wilcox, who briefly filled a similar role at Southampton and was then serving a lower-level role at United.
The identity of the person is almost a moot point here. The bigger problem: If your head footballing decision-maker is leaving your club because of the coach your club hires, then your decision-making process is utterly broken.
There is one primary reason why Arsenal are currently atop the Premier League — and it is not Mikel Arteta. No, it’s that the club seriously values young players. And I mean this in two ways.
The first: their academy is on an incredible run. Bukayo Saka is genuinely one of the best players in the world. Per Transfermarkt’s estimated values, only Lamine Yamal, Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappé, and Jude Bellingham would demand a higher transfer fee than Saka on the open market.
The consultancy Twenty First Group estimated that Liverpool saved £150 million over nine seasons by bringing Trent Alexander-Arnold up through their academy. In other words, it would’ve cost that much, in transfer fees and salary, to bring in an outside player who was just as good as TAA was for Liverpool.
Saka is giving that much value to Arsenal, if not more. And there’s a very real world where, in a couple seasons, 40% of Arsenal’s outfield starters are academy products, with Myles Lewis-Skelly, Ethan Nwaneri, and Max Dowman all still teenagers, and all already good enough to contribute to the first team.
This is the team-building cheat code. I’d argue that the emergence of Alexander-Arnold and Saka were the single most important player developments in explaining how both of their clubs re-emerged among the best teams in the world. Even Manchester City, who will spend as much as the Premier League allows (and then some), have been aided massively by the emergence of Phil Foden. When Chelsea won the Champions League, multiple academy players (Mason Mount and Reece James) started in the final.
United’s most promising academy player in recent years … now plays for Chelsea (Alejandro Garnacho). And their most promising academy player before him … is currently on loan at Barcelona (Marcus Rashford). Of course, these developments are somewhat random — player development is really hard to predict. But ultimately it’s a numbers game: if you have the right plan and invest enough money into your academy, it’ll eventually bear fruit.
Arsenal have the benefit of existing in London, one of the world’s soccer hotbeds, but if Liverpool can do it, there’s no reason why Manchester United can’t have an academy that’s producing players who are good enough to play for Manchester United. That’s especially true since Man United isn’t anywhere near as good as either of those two clubs.
Jurriën Timber started 27 games at right back and was signed when he was 22. Lewis-Skelly started 15 games, while Nwaneri made 11 — and both are academy products. Jakub Kiwior started 10 matches; he was signed when he was 21.
In fact, among all of the players to make 10 league starts last season, Merino, Leandro Trossard, and Thomas Partey were the only ones to join once they’d already hit their primes. Partey was a holdover from the Raul Sanllehi era, when personal connections seemed to drive player acquisition more than “trying to win soccer games,” and Trossard was signed while Arsenal were in first place, in January of 2023.
The last part is particularly important. Arsenal built themselves back up into a title contender by making bets on young talent, hitting most of those bets, and then having all of those players get better at the exact same time. They’ve only started signing older players when they’ve been in range of winning a title. And that still carries with it some risks — even when you’re one of the five best teams in the world.