Manchester United is not any good. There's no reason to think they will or even theoretically could turn things around before the season is out. It will probably take yet another major offseason overhaul for United to even start to address its problems. None of this is breaking news, but what is legitimately stunning is how the Red Devils keep contriving to make a bad situation—one entirely of the club's own making—even worse.
On Sunday, Manchester United traveled to North London to face Tottenham, another so-called Big Six team that is in moderate-to-severe crisis. Aside from their positions on the table—much lower than either expected—there are not many similarities between Tottenham and United. The former is an injury-ridden mess that beats itself more often than not, while the latter is by almost every metric a middling team that plays even worse than that due to something unquantifiable: a rancid air of stagnation that has seeped into every pore of the once-vaunted club.
There was a match on Sunday, I promise, even if it was essentially over 13 minutes in, when James Maddison capitalized on a poor André Onana save to put Tottenham up early and for good.
Tottenham craves possession even more than United does—57 to 54 percent per match, on average, respectively—and the hosts basically hit their numbers while playing a spicy bit of front-foot attacking soccer. This is what Spurs do under Ange Postecoglou, and it has been a key factor in the club's ability to both beat anyone on any given Saturday and to lose to anyone on any given Saturday. Manchester United wasn't anyone in either direction on Sunday; though the visiting Red Devils kept up almost shot-for-shot with Tottenham (22-16 edge towards the North London side), few of those shots came as real opportunities, and here is where United's seasonal issues begin.
Simply put, the attacking cohort present in Manchester is inefficient at best and actively wasteful at its 15th-place worst. For the season, United averages roughly 1.5 expected goals per match, ranking 11th in the league. What's worse, the team's attackers have failed to even match those subpar expectations: While xG would predict United would've scored 38 goals for the season, in reality the team has only tallied 28.
It starts up top with Rasmus Hojlund, the young striker in whom United invested some €74 million in 2023. The Dane has just two goals in 20 Premier League appearances this season, and he often disappears from matches, given that he provides nothing except in-the-box goalscoring (in theory, if not practice). The stats back this up: Hojlund ranks towards the bottom of United's roster in almost every attacking metric, with only "passes received in the box" hitting anywhere near elite levels. Having a passive striker who rarely touches the ball except to shoot on goal can work—see Hojlund's fellow Scandinavian Erling Haaland for an example—but Hojlund simply does not give enough attacking impetus with his touches to make his inclusion worth it.
But Hojlund isn't the only flaw in the Red Devil attack. Fellow expensive young striker Joshua Zirkzee is basically the photo-negative version of Hojlund—a player who looks very nifty when participating in play outside of the box but doesn't actually score much. Zirkzee was solid on Sunday, where he was the only attacker who ever looked close to getting an equalizer, but a team so desperate for goals needs more than pretty layoffs from its starting center forward. Winger Amad Diallo had been the team's breakout star, probably the one undeniable bright spot to the whole campaign, but he is now out for the season with an ankle injury. Even the mid-season exits along the attacking line have been painful. The once-beloved Marcus Rashford was shipped off to Aston Villa on loan in acrimonious fashion, and maybe the strongest testament to United's dysfunction is that Antony, the €100 million man who has looked astoundingly awful during the length of his time in England, went on loan to Real Betis last month and immediately transformed into a world-beater.
That's a long way to say that there is no real answer to the team's attacking quandary, at least no answer beyond "pray Hojlund eventually becomes good." For those reasons, it's hard to blame new manager Ruben Amorim, who might have been hyperbolic in calling this the worst Manchester United team ever, but who was pulled into a morass from which there might not be a realistic escape. No matter what his tactics have been (his career success bears out the value of his preferred 3-4-3 formation, though his dogged commitment to it isn't doing his players any favors), or how his side have translated training into performances (hint: not well), Amorim inherited a shockingly average roster, and no one could have come into this particular United side and gotten them to play to their net worth's potential.
Perhaps the worst of the avoidable mistakes made by United in recent times was the choice to keep Erik ten Hag over the summer. The former manager was on hell's own hot seat last season, and the club's decision to let United's victory in the FA Cup final last spring save the Dutchman's job just delayed the inevitable and compounded the damage. The only thing crazier than keeping Ten Hag was handing him a blank check to bring in reinforcements over the summer, where he promptly filled the squad with more expensive and under-talented players who already look like massive liabilities. I can't claim to understand the rationale behind any of this, but I do know that it doomed this season for United, no matter who Ten Hag's eventual successor would've been.
So yes, Amorim isn't getting the best out of this squad, but he didn't pick the squad and the squad isn't very good anyway. Even still, Amorim doesn't have United playing so badly that you'd say they deserve to be a mere three places from the relegation zone. Thanks to MarkStats, we can see that United is roughly middle-of-the-pack at a variety of advanced statistics, with only some minimal outliers in either direction hinting at what truly ails the club.
There's no statistical indication for why United is much worse this year than last year, when it finished eighth. But, while intangible, what have managed to get notably worse this season are the vibes. The squad has been knocked around by the brain trust's strange managerial decisions, the already bad results just continue to get worse, and it's entirely unclear how to right the ship and who should be trusted to attempt that righting, both on the field and on the sideline. It's gotten so bad that Amorim, who probably accepted the job with the understanding that he wouldn't face much by way of expectations or pressure during his truncated debut season, is himself now at risk of losing his job before he's even gotten an honest shot at fixing things.
In a league that has lapped the rest of Europe so thoroughly—one in which the average mid-table team would compete for the Champions League spots in basically any other league on the continent—there's no margin for error for a side like United, or Spurs for that matter. What might've seemed like easy wins in the past turn into Manchester United 0, Crystal Palace 2, as an example. With such a tight window to crawl back into relevance, is it any surprise that a team that's been slowly imploding for over a year, one that can't score and can only just keep out opposing chances at league-average level, finds itself closer to the relegation zone than the European spots? In other seasons, a narrow loss against Tottenham would've been a mere disappointment, but this time around, it's the latest bit of evidence to support what we all already know: Manchester United is an unmitigated disaster.
