Nothing better sums up the stasis at Manchester United than the muddle they’ve got themselves in over Mason Greenwood. The British crown prosecution service dropped the case against their prodigious young striker back in February yet here they are, six and a half months later, still casting around for a way to bring resolution to the matter. Irony of ironies, the case was dropped on February 2nd. Groundhog Day.
That United have allowed the whys and wherefores of the Greenwood case to spill over into the new season will come as no surprise to anyone who has watched the club operate over the past decade. The issues change, the names change but the pattern remains the same.
Pick your poison. Maybe it’s the ramshackle state of one of the world’s most famous stadiums. Or the extended farce of keeping Ole Gunnar Solksjær in his job because of a goal he scored two decades ago. Or the interminable sale-not-sale of the club itself. This is modern Manchester United. If you are what you repeatedly do, United are the square root of nothing.
And so of course they’ve backed themselves into a corner over Greenwood. They have made the situation far more complicated than it needs to be. The original incident happened in October 2021. Greenwood was subsequently arrested and later charged with attempted rape, assault causing actual bodily harm, and controlling and coercive behaviour – charges he denied.
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All of which means that United have had almost two full years to allow the legal process to take its course, to gather all the relevant information and to come to a decision they are willing to stand behind. Yet still they stand and gaze up at the weathervane as it spins this way and that.
[ Mason Greenwood: Chief executive to decide player’s future at Manchester UnitedOpens in new window ]
Greenwood has been convicted of no crime. In April 2022, key witnesses in the case withdrew their co-operation with the police inquiry. As a result, and allied to new material that had come to light, the CPS said, “there was no longer a realistic prospect of conviction”. Greenwood is innocent before the eyes of the law and perfectly entitled to continue his football career.
As well as that, Manchester United are perfectly entitled to facilitate him in continuing that career at Old Trafford. Greenwood is 21 and has been part of the club since he joined the academy at the age of seven. If, as United have been briefing, the club feels duty bound to support a player with whom they have a relationship stretching back through three-quarters of his life – and again, one against whom no criminal conviction exists – then they should do so.
On the flipside, if they feel that Greenwood now comes with too much baggage attached, they are just as entitled to begin the process of shipping him out of the club. His current contract has two years left to run on it so he certainly has a legal claim to stay. But every professional footballer knows what reality looks like – if United decide Greenwood isn’t going to be playing for them, then it’s good night and good luck.
Clubs make decisions on players and their futures every day of the week. Footballers have been moved on or not signed to contracts for far more spurious reasons than this. When Roy Keane managed Sunderland, he rang Robbie Savage to try to sign him but changed his mind when the call went to voicemail and Savage’s message shouted ‘WHAASSSSSUUUUPPPP’ in the manner of the old Budweiser ad. “I can’t be f**king signing that,” Keane wrote in his book.
The point is, the lack of a criminal conviction is only as relevant as Greenwood’s employers decide it is. It need not be where United choose to set the bar on his future at the club. They could take the reasonable view that enough people have heard the infamous and brutal audio – which is still available with a simple internet search – that they, as an institution, are choosing to move forward without him playing in their shirt.
One way or the other, there is no good reason that this whole farrago hasn’t been squared away by now. When the charges were dropped in February, United made a big show of launching their own investigation. While it made sense for them to stand back and hold fire while due process played out, an internal investigation is straightforward once you get going. Talk to whoever you need to talk to, get the facts, make a decision, move on.
That they haven’t done so is probably a fair indication that they ultimately favour keeping Greenwood at the club. If they were going to cut ties, they’d presumably have done it by now. Any firestorm that would follow might struggle to last a day before the latest Chelsea signing eats up the news cycle. Who, beyond a rumbling belch of the worst men on the internet, would criticise them for it?
No, the reason it has become such a drawn-out episode is most likely that United, rudderless and cowardly to the last drop, have been frantically scuttling about and trying to find cover for their decision. As revealed in The Athletic this week, they’ve been drawing up lists of pundits and organisations, separating them into categories – Supportive, Open-Minded, Hostile. With eye-rolling inevitability, domestic abuse charities were placed in the hostile pile.
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This is what United are now – a public relations sweatshop masquerading as a football club. Worse – and in keeping with the tepid on-pitch display in their season opener against Wolves on Monday – they’re not even all that good at it.
A probably well-meaning attempt to include the club’s representatives on the England women’s team in the consultation process threw Ella Toone, Mary Earps and club captain Katie Zelem into the maw of the controversy just as they were getting ready for the World Cup semi-final. Whether England win or lose the final on Sunday, they are guaranteed to have to spend at least some part of the aftermath answering questions about Mason Greenwood. Any reply they give will now carry an outsized significance. Their club did that to them, nobody else.
If and when United announce that Greenwood is staying, they will no doubt emphasise their duty of care towards a person they’ve had in their system man and boy. And the responsibility they feel towards him as he rebuilds his career.
But given the leaderless shell of a club United have become over that period of time, given the squalid, grasping nature of everything from the Glazers on down, one question screams immediately to mind.
Who are Manchester United to imagine they can set an example to anyone?
