Man Utd’s dressing room cracks are showing again

The Dutchman arrived at the club on a mission to put an end to player power, but one man alone can’t fix a culture that has been brewing for a decade

It began with Alejandro Garnacho turning up late for breakfast during Erik ten Hag’s first pre-season tour as Manchester United manager. Then Cristiano Ronaldo started leaving matches early, even when he was supposed to come on as a substitute. The Portuguese later gave an unauthorised and explosive interview to Piers Morgan, firing shots in all directions, including at his manager. Then Marcus Rashford was late for a team meeting and dropped from the starting line-up.

A blissfully quiet few months with little to report on in the form of dressing room politics then passed, only to be followed by one negative story after another to greet the new season. First Jadon Sancho didn’t train hard enough and when he was bluntly told so, fired back in an angry social media post. Days later, Antony was accused of violence against women and took a leave of absence to deal with the allegations – which he denies.

Anthony Martial turned up at training at the wrong time before Rashford visited a nightclub after the humiliating defeat in the derby by Manchester City in October. Three months later, Rashford missed training after a wild drunken night out in Belfast and lied to the club about his whereabouts. Then, on the lower end of the scale, last Saturday, Garnacho liked a tweet criticising Ten Hag after the 2-2 draw with Bournemouth.

Exhausted just reading the long list of misdemeanours committed by United players in the last two years? Then imagine how Ten Hag must feel having to deal with them…

When Sir Alex Ferguson was in charge of United, dressing room leaks to the media were extremely rare, and any dissent was quickly and brutally stamped out. Ruud van Nistelrooy was forced out after disagreeing with being benched for the League Cup final; Roy Keane was hounded out for a critical piece of analysis on MUTV; David Beckham was sold to Real Madrid once Ferguson had concluded he had lost his focus due to his celebrity lifestyle.

No player, no matter how talented or influential, was above the manager or the club, and the team continued to be successful after each high-profile departure. The show went on, with Ferguson the only star who could not be disposed of. To the ruthless Glaswegian, making sure he, and not the players, ruled the club was a non-negotiable.

“If the day came that the manager of Manchester United was controlled by the players – in other words, if the players decided how the training should be, what days they should have off, what the discipline should be, and what the tactics should be – then Manchester United would not be the Manchester United we know,” he told the Harvard Business Review. “It creates power for the players – that is very dangerous. If the coach has no control, he will not last.”

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When Ferguson retired in 2013, United not only lost the mind that had won them 13 Premier League titles and two Champions Leagues, they lost that sense of control. His first successor David Moyes, for example, got on the wrong side of players just weeks into the job. According to Rio Ferdinand, it all stemmed from him banning them from eating chips the night before games. Ferdinand said Moyes’ reactive tactics had also rubbed the players up the wrong way.

Moyes had never taken on a club of United’s size and was ill-equipped to cope with big-name players and the constant scrutiny he was under. His successors, Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho, should have been much better prepared given the enormous institutions they had worked, at including Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Inter and Chelsea.

However, both the Dutchman and the Portuguese struggled to impose their authority on United. Van Gaal’s rigorous training regime meant he got off on the wrong foot with many players and his larger-than-life personality, coupled with his habit of saying exactly what he thought and never biting his tongue, alienated them too.

Mourinho’s old-school methods and dictatorial personality won over some players such as Ander Herrera, but severely annoyed others, none more than Paul Pogba. The Portuguese would also call out players who he felt had underperformed, especially Luke Shaw and Martial.

When Mourinho was eventually sacked and replaced by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, there was a notable difference in the vibe around the training ground. The toxic atmosphere Mourinho had forged had vanished, and the positive vibes between manager and squad led to a massive upswing in results in the Norwegian’s first few months in charge.

But Solskjaer eventually fell victim to United’s lawless dressing room, and when the positive early results began to dry up, it dawned on him that there was a dearth of big characters who could help galvanise the other players.

He has revealed that several players refused to be captain in certain games and did not even have the courage to inform the manager themselves, getting their message across through intermediaries instead. The Norwegian also complained of the group splintering off.

“When you have a group you need everyone to pull in the same direction. When things didn’t go right, you could see certain players and egos came out,” Solskjaer told The Athletic last year.

“Some players felt they should’ve played more and weren’t constructive to the environment. That’s a huge sin for me. When I didn’t start games, I wanted to prove to the manager he’d made the wrong decision. Now, a lot of players aren’t like that. Agents and family members get into their heads and tell them they’re better than they are because they have a vested interest. It’s a disease of modern football.”

Solskjaer has also spoken of the difficulties of dealing with ‘Gen Z’ players and called some of the younger players “snowflakes”, but generational differences are a factor for every manager and every club. Player power is not a disease of modern football, but rather a disease of Manchester United. Title-challengers Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester City have no such problems. Every United manager since Moyes has identified the problem, but none of them have been able to properly root it out.

Interim boss Ralf Ragnick summed up United’s problems better than any manager before him or after when he said the club needed “an operation of the open heart”. But he also recognised that it was not down to one person to sort it out, stressing the need to create a proper culture running through the club.

“If this happens and everyone has realised that this has to happen and if people want to work together then it makes sense and I believe it doesn’t take two or three years to change those things. This can happen within one year,” Rangnick explained in April 2022.

“For sure [strong leadership is needed]. This is something that not just one single person as a manager can do. With all respect to Jurgen [Klopp] and Pep [Guardiola], I’m sure that they didn’t do all the things themselves [at Liverpool and Manchester City]. There were also other people involved in those two clubs, people in certain positions, no matter what area it was, in order to rebuild and build something we want to build here. In all areas you have to have top people and they have to work together in a very close, reliable way.”

Rangnick’s diagnosis is one way to explain why Ten Hag’s attempts to instill discipline have not had a real impact on the squad and why ripples of discontent keep appearing which threaten to undermine him, as happened with Garnacho last week. The Dutchman was given a mandate to overhaul standards when he succeeded Rangnick in the summer of 2022, which led to him taking such a hard line against Sancho.

“Strict lines is what the club asked me because there was no good culture before last season, so to set good standards, that is what I did and it is my job to control the standards,” he explained in September.

Ten Hag has been a lone soldier in this battle until recently, although help has arrived in the form of the partial takeover by INEOS. Minority shareholder Sir Jim Ratcliffe and director of sport Sir Dave Brailsford have been radically overhauling the club in the four months since getting the key’s to the club’s sporting operation, hiring Omar Berrada as CEO and taking steps to bring in Dan Ashworth as sporting director and Jason Wilcox as technical director, while parting ways with John Murtough.

But none of the new hires have begun work yet, meaning the raising of standards that is needed across the board is still yet to begin. The fact that Ten Hag has not been given a public vote of confidence by Ratcliffe or Brailsford does not help matters, either. The manager’s position is far from secure amid what threatens to be United’s worst season of the post-Ferguson era.

When results are bad, discontent grows across the squad and around the club, and results have been bad all season. So more murmurings of anger from the squad can be expected until the end of the campaign. But if Brailsford and Ratcliffe can realise their goal of implementing ‘best in class’ standards across the club, the doomsday scenario that Ferguson correctly envisaged should eventually fade away.