These are trying times for Millennial soccer fans. Signs of the passage of time and the effects of aging are everywhere you look. Our old idols of physical prowess, chiseled beauty, and rakish charm are now middle-aged men whose rounded faces and time-ravaged (or Turkensteined) hairlines are plastered onto our TV screens during interminable pre- and mid- and postgame pundit segments, where they spout the most tired "yer da" drivel about why the players these days just don't do it as well as they did back in the day. The two defining stars of our own generation have entered semi-retirement in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, their total obsolescence perilously near. The sport does still beget exciting new talents (who nevertheless just don't do it as well as they did back in the day!), but the prostrate position is a little more difficult to assume when the one you bow before would regard you not as a peer, not even as a worthy supplicant, but first and foremost as, in the parlance of the times, an "unc."
Yet there is one aspect of the game that has endured from the no-longer-so-recent past to today, something that unites all fans, from the Boomers to the Zoomers and beyond, in a shared sense of joy, good humor, and camaraderie. And that is the fact that, after more than a decade of misery, after hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars spent trying to bring about brighter days, and after countless false dawns, Manchester United still sucks mondo ass, and it's still so much fun watching them eat shit.
The latest example of United's ongoing agony came on Wednesday, when the Red Devils somehow contrived to get beat in the League Cup by League Two outfit Grimsby Town. Some additional context might help that sink in. Taking the English soccer pyramid as a single continuum, there were 61 table spots separating top-division United from fourth-tier Grimsby Town at the conclusion of last season. The two clubs haven't competed in the same league since the 1947-48 season, when Man Utd finished second in the First Division (and won its second-ever FA Cup) while Grimsby came dead last in what was the club's final appearance in England's highest tier. The website Transfermarkt sets the cumulative market value of today's Grimsby's roster at €3.6 million, while United's comes in slightly north of that, at €887.2 million. United's roster boasts 20 full internationals, who've represented some of the sport's most storied national teams like Brazil, England, and Portugal. Grimsby's has two: Northern Ireland's Christy Pym and the Faroe Islands' Geza David Turi, both of whom have been called up to but never yet appeared for their respective countries.
In spite of this chasmic distance between the two clubs and their players, the run of play in Wednesday's match was the exact opposite of what logic would have you expect. Though it took an impressively long penalty shootout to decide the affair, Grimsby had actually been easily the better team during the 90 minutes of open play. The hosting Mariners got out to a wholly deserved 2-0 lead in the first half, and had the ball in the back of the net on two other occasions, though a handball and an offside ruled out those would-be backbreakers. Powered by little more than the inertia of their still considerable collective talent, United did eventually get back on level terms through a Bryan Mbeumo strike in the 75th minute and a Harry Maguire header in the 89th. But the soccer gods did not wish to grant the Red Devils even the meager reprieve of scraping past a fourth-tier team on penalties, and so Grimsby vanquished the visiting giants by converting 12 of 13 spot-kicks to win.
Except for the admittedly large number of people who make up Manchester United's enormous fanbase, everybody delighted in this result. Grimsby's fans stormed the pitch after Mbeumo's contest-ending penalty attempt rattled off the crossbar. The delirious scenes of overjoyed Mariners fans had me channeling my inner Gianni Infantino, thinking to myself, Today, I feel Yellowbelly. Social media was awash with memes and barbs aimed at the lovably hatable Mancs. Manager Ruben Amorim gave a typically blunt postgame interview, where he offered a remix to a previous, ontologically problematic assessment of his team, saying, "I think that—no, I know that the best team won, the only team that was on the pitch." Yes, there were laughs to be had all around, and the best news is that there's no reason to expect the shitshow to end any time soon.
"I think that the team and the players spoke really loud today." Amorim echoed some version of this sentiment in several of his postgame interviews. Contrary to what Amorim kept insisting when he responded to requests to clarify by saying "Guys, I am being very clear," before repeating himself, it's not actually all that easy to understand what he was getting at. I think I have an idea, though. Again, some additional context helps.
Amorim took over a dead and demoralized United team in November of 2024. When he was hired, Amorim was considered one of the hottest up-and-coming managers in the sport—much the same way Erik ten Hag, Amorim's predecessor, was thought of when he came in 2022. Ten Hag had spent the bulk of his tenure bullying the team's biggest names out of the club, no doubt with ownership's full support, while simultaneously splurging on big-money failure after big-money failure in hopes of revitalizing United's threadbare roster. When the club's leadership finally, belatedly got rid of the Dutchman and brought in his Portuguese replacement, the vibes in the locker room were awful, and the players didn't seem to be either physically or mentally prepared to withstand the demands of one of the most high-pressure jobs in sports.
Unsurprisingly, Amorim's presence alone did not magically fix things. United kept losing after the coaching change, and all Amorim could do was repeat the same truth over and over: The team's spirit was shot, the players were ill-prepared and also not good enough, and there was no real way to truly address things until the offseason, when the rot could be cleared and better players could join and the coaching staff could get them in better shape heading into a new campaign. United's leadership clearly wasn't surprised by Amorim's inability to change the team's fortunes in his first half-season in charge, and their faith in their hand-picked golden boy meant they were content to ride out the troubles until everyone involved could start fresh.
Those decisions—for Amorim to continually trash the team, and for the club to keep Amorim in the job in spite of the lows—were defendable on their face. However, the wisdom of that course of action would depend both on the club being able to bring in the right new talents into the right positions, and on Amorim being able to inspire his charges, new and old alike, to follow his vision. If Wednesday's performance "spoke really loud," I think what it said was that the club has failed on both criteria.
United has spent big this summer, dropping huge fees on a new attacking trio consisting of Mbeumo, Matheus Cunha, and Benjamin Sesko. Though a jolt of talent into underperforming forward line was more than welcome, the strategy of splashing cash on attackers while ignoring the massive holes elsewhere in the roster is indicative of the poor squad planning that, more than anything else, has kept this once mighty club down for so long. We here at Defector may be big fans of Mbeumo and Cunha, and while we can buy the idea that Sesko has a better shot of coming good than the other expensive young striker projects that have flopped there in the recent past, it nevertheless doesn't make much sense to blow your entire wad reinforcing a spot where you already have some solid coverage.
Adding Mbeumo and Cunha to the roster means that Bruno Fernandes, Amad Diallo, Mason Mount, and Alejandro Garnacho—four good-to-great players who would ideally start in either of the No. 10 positions in the 3-4-3 formation Amorim is wedded to—likely will have to ride the bench or play away from their strongest positions in order to compensate. Indeed, for much of this season Fernandes has had to play deeper in a central midfield duo, and Diallo has spent a lot of time at wing back. Both of those positional tweaks limit those two players' ability to get into the most dangerous areas of the final third, where they each do their best work, while also weakening the team defensively. A knock-on effect of this has been to push midfielder Kobbie Mainoo to the bench and maybe even out of the club entirely, if the rumors are true that the club is now willing to sell their 20-year-old academy product because they don't see a place for him in the lineup.
Seeing Mainoo's impressive emergence has been one of the rare, non-schadenfreude-based pleasures of watching the Red Devils over the past couple seasons. It may be a shame as a neutral to see such a cool young player forced out of his boyhood club in order to scare up funds for what will surely be even more mediocre replacements, but it really has to hurt if you're an actual United fan. The academy system itself, and watching the integration and success of homegrown talent who come through it, is one of the most beautiful parts of soccer, and it's one of the few remaining aspects of the globalized, homogenized game that strengthens the bonds between a club and its local community. But in the world of Financial Fair Play and Profit and Sustainability Rules, homegrown talents are increasingly seen salable assets of "pure profit" that clean your books and help fund exciting new signings that managers and sporting directors can claim credit for. Mainoo is one of only two born-and-raised Mancunians on Manchester United's roster, the other being little-used defender Tyler Fredricson. Even if the club sells Mainoo (and the same goes for Garnacho, who is also out of favor and is the cusp of a move to Chelsea) for a lot and uses the money to sign a new midfielder who gives the team what it needs, something important will have been lost.
But nothing wins over fans like winning, and (almost) all could be forgiven if Amorim could sell anyone on the idea that he knows the route to victory. That no longer seems particularly likely, though. It goes back to the game that "spoke really loud." To continue the metaphor, it's hard not to hear in that performance the players screaming, "We're not listening to you, Ruben!"
You earn the respect and faith of players as a coach by proving to them that, if they do what you say, you'll bring them closer to better play, a more harmonious environment, and more wins. It may not really be Amorim's fault that the 2024-25 season was such a disaster, but he nevertheless spent the majority of a season failing to improve the players' performance, improve the vibes within the club, or get the team winning, all while telling everyone who'd listen that his players all suck. Even if you don't apportion him much of the blame for all that, it's very difficult for him to go walk back into that locker room—one that is necessarily filled with mostly the same players—and be like, Hey boys! I'm so excited about our future together, I think you are all great, and I am going to help you all be even better while we return this club to former glory! Who's with me?
There's a facile but prominent view of soccer that evaluates players and managers alike in Manichaean, absolutist terms. A player or manager is either good or bad, and the outcome of any given season, competition, or even match is a referendum on this goodness or badness. In reality, the sport is much more complex and contextual. Plenty of undeniably good players have down seasons. Even the greatest managers have bad spells that ultimately lead to them losing their job. None of that necessarily speaks to some inherent, irreversible state of goodness or badness or past-it-ness. Often an underperforming player or manager was simply a bad fit for a certain place at a certain time, and that's all there is to it.
Amorim may have been the right man to lead United back to greatness, but maybe the sourness of his early tenure means the timing was wrong and success is now precluded from him. And it's certainly still possible that the club makes a key signing or two over the next week, Amorim gets things to click, and, boosted by having no European commitments to distract them, United turns it around and finishes in the Champions League places. The only thing I truly feel confident in saying, off the strength of more than a decade of evidence at this point, is that the people who run Manchester United don't have the slightest clue how to build and maintain a great team, and until that changes, your safest bet is to expect even more chaos and dysfunction. And I, no matter how old I get or how out of touch with the current players' generations I become, will be certain that I can show up to a bar, watch United take a humiliating L, share a knowing glance at whoever's standing next to me, and together laugh and laugh and laugh.
