Self flagellation.
An insane act of purposefully inflicting pain upon oneself in the belief it will serve the greater good. That there is a reward in yearning for pain.
It is, clearly, nonsense. Whichever religion does it, they have a queue of people ready to try it. A way to show loyalty to a cause, often publicly.
Of course, you won’t get football fans flogging themselves outside Old Trafford but there’s a similar theme ongoing. If you’re true to Manchester United, if you’re one of the real ones, then desiring disaster is apparently somehow fulfilling and a route to better things.
The prospect of a relegation battle is grasped, because what could be more fulfilling?! If only United hit that low, and it’s a new low grasped every few weeks, then surely things can only get better from there.
But then relegation wasn’t, and isn’t, the reality, although “the low”, the “bottom” continues to become deeper, worse, darker.
Freedom from expectations can be invigorating, yet that is not is what Manchester United is living through now. There has been freedom from expectation for anything other than individual player performance, so the weight lifted is just placed elsewhere and often with glee.
The club isn’t so long ago from fighting for second place in the Premier League and perhaps the tantrum thrown at not achieving better has set them much further back.
Manchester United either has to be everything or something else similarly dramatic. It cannot simply be just another club doing pretty well.
David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjær and Erik ten Hag have been eaten by this. The latter and his perceived influence on transfers is perhaps the reverse, where the predator club was gobbled up by a manager and his advisors, to their great financial profit.
Sure, we can believe Ten Hag had nothing to do with the agency he worked for providing a series of disastrous deals, but then if you were the Manchester United manager is his place, at his time, and working for the best of your club, you’d like to think you’d do differently.
That Tan-Hagover has crippled much of the future. There are many people writing justified and excellent articles on the Glazers and their own destruction attempts, but when we keep it to football business there are huge failures also.
Ineos and their plans for best-in-class appear to have been nothing more than words so far. Disastrous attempts at a much-needed Director of Football appointment continue to bite, and we’re yet to see what Jason Wilcox is really meant to be best-in-class at.
He’s changed roles multiple times, and yet his outward pride over sending Charly Alcaraz on loan from Southampton to Juventus, with a purchase option which was never going to be used, is perhaps the most public decision we know from him. A disaster of naivety which made the Italian media almost laugh at the financial absurdity of the Premier League.
Into all of this walks Ruben Amorim. Fresh from dragging Sporting from a depth which had seen the club’s ultras attack their own players at the training ground.
Bruno de Carvalho, the prior Sporting president, may have amused well-read football fans when he labelled West Ham owners as the “Dildo brothers” when describing negotiations with the English club, but he was an absolute disaster.
Amorim was able to flourish due to Federico Varandes, a doctor and former military captain, taking the presidency.
Ruben thrived on that stability.
Now, he has none.
And he’s not doing himself any favours. The few of us who had heard of him before he was linked with a move to England will be aware his charisma and gravitas helped drag Sporting back to success.
He ain’t doing that now for Manchester United. His stubbornness which once appeared a strength is holding him back and he appears to be even less flexible than at Sporting, almost through a desire to be the strong man and resist criticism.
It is key that he doesn’t have Varandas alongside him, or even football director Hugo Viana, who is set to join Manchester City. The trio made each other more successful and there’s a justifiable question about whether they were the team and therefore more than their individual inputs.
Embracing each new low may bring breathing space for Amorim but it is doubtful whether it will help him long term. He hasn’t yet managed to get his ideas across, so we believe, and even if he does there’s no guarantee such rigid tactics won’t be found out immediately.
Primeira Liga is a great training ground for coaches and Amorim in a lot of senses coached them all with his Sporting team, but more flexibility is surely needed in the big bad Premier League.
Ruben could get the team he wants, playing the way he wants, and then someone like Thomas Frank could rock up and think his way around it, helping everyone else along the way.
Then what? Pep Guardiola adapts, Alex Ferguson adapted, the best coaches do so. Manchester United is not a Ruben Amorim art project.
He appears the man, though. A club so lacking charisma through their Ten-Hagover needed the Ruben kick, but that same man needs to produce and isn’t helped by a poverty of expectations from supporters.
This is not his first go at a project, there are costs to be paid when each new low is reached and those costs are not just financial.
Would Real Madrid abide by this, would Bayern Munich, would even sanction-relegated Juventus have rocked with relegation teams on their return to Serie A post their demotion? No.
Self-harm as a term is quite explicit in its description, and Manchester United fans wishing for such in the hope it will be rewarded are likely mistaken.
Manchester United’s next successful chapter will not be built on the foundations of a poverty of expectation.
Ruben Amorim needs to adapt like every great manager before him, and fans need to stop embracing each new low as somehow part of a desired player-punishment process.
