Soccer

Gareth Southgate could be the stern reformer Manchester United badly need

The England manager’s honesty and systems expertise are just what is needed at the haunted house Old Trafford has become

Gareth Southgate: he has the things Manchester United clearly lack: backbone, ruthlessness, the inability to tell a lie. Photograph: Catherine Ivill/Getty Images
Gareth Southgate: he has the things Manchester United clearly lack: backbone, ruthlessness, the inability to tell a lie. Photograph: Catherine Ivill/Getty Images
Barney Ronay
Fri Apr 26 2024 - 19:30

And so we entered the age of the noble, blameless bald men. This is a pretty good moment to be Ineos at Manchester United. Nothing really matters yet. Every problem is someone else’s problem. Every solution is your own.

For now you’re just hope, blue sky. You’re a silent reproach on a gantry. You’re a tieless Tony Blair jamming with Shed Seven in the Downing Street garden. And even the bad things are kind of good, because you’re not the bad things.

This phase will also soon be over. Decisions about hard football things will need to be made. Most obviously, it is very hard right now to see Erik Ten Hag keeping his job at the end of the season.

Champions League qualification has already been set as a retention target. More broadly this is a question of ideology. Lever-pullers need to pull levers. Gain-seekers need to find their gains. And there is no more obvious margin than the man standing on the touchline. It would almost be a betrayal of method not to get the cleaver out.

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At which point it is worth noting that, as of this weekend, Gareth Southgate remains favourite to become the next Manchester United manager. What to make of this, really?

Plenty of things still have to happen before it becomes a possibility. There has to be a vacancy (likely). Southgate has to be available (his England contract ends this year). Both parties have to want this to happen (United are said to be keen). Most importantly the public response needs to fall somewhere below the threshold of masked middle-aged men in tracksuits staging an Ian-Brown-walk invasion of Old Trafford.

And that public reaction remains the most interesting part for now. When the prospect was first floated a couple of months ago I also thought it was just a really terrible idea. It almost felt like a hoax, a banter-thread made flesh. Positions have been taken on Southgate. The moment there’s a stumble or the football is dull, those pre-cooked waves of outrage will unleash themselves. @Dz30304 will go mental. Men on YouTube will rant fluently in office swivel chairs. Why even tangle with this?

The thing is, having thought about it, I have now come full circle. Southgate to Manchester United is in fact a brilliant idea. Maybe it’s the last great idea left, an idea so compelling it is impossible even to consider doing anything else.

Firstly, for reasons specific to the struggles of the Manchester United industrial-complex. This is a club that has basically stopped over the last 10 years. It’s a haunted house, a ghost-ship peopled by zombies, noises through the wall, a place where the past constantly devours the present.

Something profound needs to happen to move this on. Manchester United doesn’t need a brilliant tactician. It needs a systems expert, an industrial de-scaler. Essentially, it needs a shit-flusher. And Southgate is unarguably one of those, is in fact the only person out there with a recent record of doing exactly this, of taking a stalled and sclerotic football institution and turning it into a happier, lighter place.

Southgate did this with England. Yes he did. Really. He just did. Take a trip back to the years 2000-2016, scan the stellar squad lists, click on the actual footage, and accept that he did this, even if he also asked people not to mind players taking the knee or didn’t pick Player X so is therefore a supply teacher fraud or something.

Southgate fits United’s new owners. He knows the Brailsford-Ashworth nexus. He’s good at making young players feel good. He oversaw the DNA stuff with England, the pathway, the sense of organic continuity United so clearly lacks.

Mainly he has the things this institution has clearly missed: backbone, ruthlessness, the inability to tell a lie. Who has actually told the truth inside Old Trafford in the last decade? Ralf Rangnick, who was immediately bundled off in a van. Louis van Gaal, out on the heath yelling into the storm. Southgate will tell the truth, and it will hurt, and this is good.

You can almost see it already. Southgate in a press conference being stubborn and refusing to promise anything. Southgate coming on like a Lutheran minister, astringent, vinegary, disapproving. Southgate as the greatest thing that ever happened to Antony. Southgate losing heroically in the Europa League final and applauding the fans in shirtsleeves and everyone feeling husky and brave.

Because this needs to feel like a purging, like an institutional enema. In fact the public backlash is utterly vital. The YouTubers have to squeal, the bots and plastics and aggregators need to feel the squeeze, with no traction here, nothing to cling to, drowning in their own toxins while Southgate says things like “our best might not be enough”, a Southgate who offers not glory or jam today, but a cure, a cleansing, a rain that that will come some day and wash all this filth from the streets.

And yes, this does in fact sound deluded and hysterical and probably also not what will happen in practice. Here we have another illusion, another case of the great man theory, the idea that one person can cure a sickly institution. And that this miracle worker is in fact a decent, intelligent man who has no real pedigree in club management, but does seems unusually honest.

The fact is I actually want Southgate, or at least my own deluded and desperate vision of Southgate, to have every job. Not just in football. I want him to nationalise the trains. I want him to take over Boots. I want to luxuriate in this, the glow of the imagined Southgate personality. Perhaps this is how dictatorships start, false nostalgia for a nonexistent past protected on to a single stern-faced person in a nicely cut suit. Maybe Southgate is in fact the most dangerous man in Britain.

More likely, this has now become an article about the actual story of Manchester United, the reason why it is such a disproportionate obsession, why it seems necessary to dwell endlessly on the exact reasons why one very rich football club finishes sixth and not second, to imbue this with an epic-scale sense of decay.

It is of course the Manchester United-as-Britain dynamic. Can you feel it? Here is a football club that seems to embody more than any other a parallel sense of falling away: what has been called the “shitification” of modern life, the stretching thin of previously valuable things, hollowing out of institutions, stuff that basically doesn’t work any more, and to a deliberate design.

Can things be fixed? This is the question Manchester United always seems to be asking. If so could this really lie in the hands of Sir Big Sir Jim Sir Ratcliffe and the unlikely figure of Southgate, who is wealthy, 53 years old and may just want to go off and become an artisan beekeeper in any case.

Standing tall, a luminous reformer in the wreckage of Camelot. This actually sounds quite tiring. Not to mention destined, in all likelihood, to end up another strangely seductive piece of mythmaking. – Guardian