After Manchester United’s FA Cup exit to Fulham, Gary Lineker questioned the inheritance Sir Alex Ferguson left for his successors at Manchester United, as he claimed Jürgen Klopp left Liverpool in a better state on his departure last year.
Did he have a point? Telegraph Sport’s football experts have their say...
Lineker’s hot take is ridiculous
Of all the hot takes on Manchester United’s decline blaming Sir Alex Ferguson for the start of it is almost thermonuclear.
There is no doubt a large part of the intellectual capital left the club when Ferguson – and, crucially, chief executive David Gill –retired in 2013. Yet the collapse since then owes more to the underperformance and complacency of those who took over than those who departed.
They should not only have been willing but ready and able. Succession planning is not just about having the right manager in the dug-out but the right people running the club. Where was the strategy? Where was the vision?
The argument may be that Ferguson rinsed every last drop out of United and that an inevitable fall-off was coming. That is also an abdication of responsibility, starting with the owners, the Glazers, but also including executives such as Ed Woodward and Richard Arnold. They were not up to it. They failed. Fingers should be pointed at them.
Yes, there would be problems ahead. That was inevitable. It happens at the end of any dynasty. But it is 12 years now and United are worse, not better. Not just worse but far worse. It is a different era. No-one can justifiably blame the previous management.
Ferguson’s dominance of the Premier League – 13 titles in 26 years – placed United in a unique position which they have tossed away through arrogance and lazy spending.
The reckoning – on and off the pitch – that is happening now is a product of the past decade, not the previous one.
To effectively allege that Ferguson was negligent and left them in a poorer state than Klopp did Liverpool, as Gary Lineker appears to be claiming, is simply wrong and revisionist.
This Liverpool team will deservedly go on and win the Premier League. Not that Lineker thought that at the start of the season when he predicted that Manchester City would win it again with Arsenal second. So, Liverpool were left in such good shape by Klopp that they were going to again finish third, according to Lineker, which is exactly where they ended in the German’s last season in charge?
It is often claimed that the team Ferguson won the title with in his final season – with four games to spare and an 11-point advantage – was over-the-hill. Many of the players – such as Rio Ferdinand, Ryan Giggs and Patrice Evra – were.
But it was a squad that included a 27-year-old Wayne Rooney and Ferguson had invested in younger players, too. If Rooney, who had fallen out with Ferguson, was on the decline then that was down to him.
Ferguson had conducted a huge upheaval in 2011, just two years before he retired, reducing the average age of the squad to 24. His final signings were Wilfried Zaha (21) and Shinji Kagawa (23). They looked like good ones.
Some of those players proved to be not up to it but it was not Ferguson who forced out products of the academy – that Lineker also criticised as not good enough – such as Danny Welbeck and Jonny Evans. That is on the club and the managers who followed Ferguson.
And that 2012-13 triumph was no Robin van Persie inspired fluke. Ferguson won the league in five of his last seven seasons.
He even talked about the “balance of ages” in the squad being right when he left that “bodes well for continued success at the highest level”. Time has proven that overly optimistic and it is true that the United team that won the league were far from the best Ferguson had created.
But to portray the legacy he left as the root of the club’s problems is ridiculous. There were undoubted problems, infrastructure issues as well which were partly a product of one manager being at the helm for so long and the sport evolving. United were, though, still in a position where they were able to dominate if the right decisions were made. Failing to do that is where it went wrong. They had the resources; they just did not have good enough leadership. Trying to blame it on Ferguson is nonsense.
Lineker has (half) a point: Ferguson’s iron fist ruled as others started to innovate
On the surface it seemed that Gary Lineker’s blaming of Sir Alex Ferguson for Manchester United’s current woes was a bit like an historian blaming Sir Winston Churchill for post-war austerity. United are only the world-renowned club they are because of what Ferguson delivered. More to the point, the 13 titles, five FA Cups and two Champions Leagues he achieved should have been an inspiration to those that followed him, not a kickstart to decline.
Yet in one respect Lineker has a point, though not the one he outlined. As the current United side slithered to yet another disappointment, this time in the FA Cup, a competition even Erik ten Hag managed to win, the BBC presenter suggested it was Ferguson who precipitated the slump. Unlike the team Klopp passed on to his successor at Anfield, Lineker said the squad Ferguson left behind when he retired in 2013 was not one for the future. Sure, it won the league in his final year, but that was the last hurrah of a cohort that was ageing rapidly. Robin van Persie had been assembled for the immediate, not for what lay ahead. Ferguson has long argued against such an assertion, insisting that in youngsters like Chris Smalling, Phil Jones and Danny Welbeck, he was bequeathing some legacy.
But whether or not Jones, Smalling and the others turned out to be an even remotely adequate bequest, that is not the point. It was a dozen years ago. With the resources available, one of the many managers who have attempted to follow in his footsteps should have been capable of building their own championship-winning side since. Or they would have done had United been an even remotely logical operation. The real issue of what Fergie left behind was the system in place. Or more to the point, the fact there wasn’t one.
Ferguson ran United like a medieval court: he was in charge of everything. Every decision went through him. The Glazer ownership (somewhat terrified of him personally) left him to it. He knew what he was doing, he could serve up the dividends as they took a back seat. In the attempt to catch up with United, the rest of football modernised. Clubs like Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea and the rest looked towards the European model, bringing in directors of football, heads of recruitment and specialist data analysts. At United it remained all about Fergie. He decided things, from who to sign and who to sell, to the club’s communications policy (he decided he did not want an official United Twitter account). The fact was Ferguson led United as a one-man band in an increasingly complicated footballing world.
So when he left there was nothing in place. And the Glazer-recruited executives brought in to run the commercial side of the operation were completely unschooled about what upgrades were needed. They reckoned it was more important to deliver an official Far Eastern Pot Noodle Partner and open a Twitter account than it was to modernise the player recruitment side. Or the data analysis. Or to make the training ground fit for purpose in the 21st century. When Fergie’s successors like Jose Mourinho or Ralf Rangnick spoke of dire behind-the-scenes issues they were not talking about the fact Ferguson had passed on a team with an arthritic Rio Ferdinand at its heart. They were talking about the wretchedly inadequate systems that had never come close to replacing the grand old man in charge. The truth is Ruben Amorim is facing the consequence not of Ferguson’s last team, but of the laughably inept corporate governance that utterly failed to step up into the post-Fergie world.
