There is something of the last days of Rome about Old Trafford at the moment. A Mourinho shaped mushroom cloud, grey with acrimony, clings to the empire's walls, like the vaporous murk of fog on a windless day. An internecine rivalry, which pits Paul Pogba's uppity Spartacus head to head with Mourinho's scowling Caesar, threatens to descend into a full blown civil war. Expectation levels are historically low; victories against provincial canon fodder Watford, Bradford, and Young Boys are heralded as a renaissance. Amidst all this, Dave continues to save, but even he can't hold back the relentless march of decline for long.
The disarray at Old Trafford can be traced back to the close of the title winning 2012-13 season, when rumours began to circulate that the unthinkable was happening; Alex Ferguson was to retire. With no discernible plan of succession in place and gripped by panic the Old Trafford hierarchy erroneously attributed Ferguson's success to his Scottishness. The result was that the 2000 Division 2 winner and resolute Scot David Moyes was named as the manager of the "Biggest Club in the World" (official trademark of Manchester United, all rights reserved). Moyes, a man with a Calvinistic devotion to footballing asceticism and who likely performed penitential acts of self flagellation at the mere notion of heretical tiki taka, found himself at the helm of English football's great entertainers. His influence was dramatic. Soon, Champions League winners were prostrating themselves before icons of Phil Jagielka and a manual on how to get the best out of Marouane Fellaini was required reading. This was never going to end well. But let's pause history there and try to imagine what could have been if the bolder decision to appoint Ryan Giggs had been taken.
Now, Giggs' tenure as Wales manager offers much too limited a sample size from which to derive any definitive insights into his managerial approach, but it does offer some hints as to how it may evolve. Firstly, he has clearly inherited a commitment to promoting youth. In his first competitive game as Wales manager, against Ireland, Giggs set out his stall by handing competitive debuts to Chris Mepham, Connor Roberts, Tyler Roberts, Matty Smith, Ethan Ampadu and David Brooks. While they were admittedly playing against glorified training cones, Giggs' youthful formula was the catalyst for an impressive 4-1 victory. Tellingly, for the much more daunting proposition of an away fixture against Denmark, Giggs stuck to his guns. Although Denmark prevailed comfortably in the end, Giggs was sanguine in defeat, noting that the match represented a "learning curve" for his inexperienced side. Whether such excuses would cut the mustard at Old Trafford is open to debate, but his realistic assessment would likely curry favour with Man U traditionalists.
In tactical terms Giggs more closely resembles a diligent disciple of modern footballing orthodoxy than a subversive prophet ripping up the rule book. In possession Wales are forward thinking, prioritising incisiveness ahead of a tiki taka style fetish for possession. Building from the back up, the goalkeeper, even if it's Wayne Hennessey, is expected to be creative with the ball, the central defenders split allowing a ball playing midfielder to drop back and offer a more penetrative passing outlet from deep. The full backs, as is now customary, act as auxiliary wingers. Up front, Gareth Bale has been afforded the liberty of a free role. His pace stretches the game affording the Welsh a long ball option to counter high pressing systems as well as potency on the counterattack.
So how would this translate to the United job? While, Giggs, it seems likely, would have persevered with the core principles of Ferguson's attack minded footballing philosophy he would probably have refined the approach to assimilate modern trends. It should not be forgotten that by the end of Ferguson's tenure, United's football, dulled by years of chronic under investment in personnel, had become increasingly stale and that victories were ground out in a plodding agricultural fashion; more granny's knickers than silk panties. By then United seemed to win as if from muscle memory, like some form of physiological entitlement made it be so. Mostly, they won because Ferguson wouldn't accept defeat. Like he was squeezing an atom to produce nuclear fission, Ferguson had an innate, almost supernatural, ability to extract more from ordinary players than the laws of physics would seem to permit. Giggs, whose public persona is that of a charisma free automaton, would struggle to rework Newton's laws in a similar manner.
Without recourse to Ferguson's unique man management skills, Giggs, in order to remain competitive, would have had to embark on an extensive overhaul of the 2012-13 title winning squad. Here, admittedly, we are entering the twilight zone of conjecture. Would Giggs have turned to academy products such as Adnan Januzaj, Michael Keane, or James Wilson to freshen things up? Ferguson's latter years marked a distinct departure from his celebrated commitment to long term continuity and had shifted inexorably toward short term expediency. The academy was no longer the supply line of old and the talent emerging seems not to have borne comparison with Giggs' own fabled generation. The counter argument of course is that denied an opportunity to develop, these players simply rotted away in the reserves, their talent wilting like the autumn leaves. During his stint as interim United manager Giggs did give debuts to Wilson and Tom Lawrence albeit in an effective dead rubber against Hull City. That's not enough evidence on which to draw any firm conclusions but it does suggest that he would have valued the academy as an important resource. His own indebtedness to the youth system probably underwriting such a perspective.
So if the academy was unable to address the flaws in the first team squad, what about the transfer market? What about Marouane Fellaini? For a man, like Giggs, so well versed in the traditions of Manchester United, the Belgian does not appear to be a natural fit. A more composed talent, such as Thiago, would have better suited Giggs' ideology, and would likely have joined an energetic box-to-box type midfielder in addressing United's problem area in the centre of the pitch. Having said that there were problems everywhere. The wings, once so liberally sprinkled with stardust by the likes of Kanchelskis, Ronaldo, and Giggs himself, were now the preserve of the rather more earth-bound talents of Ashley Young, Antonio Valencia and a diminished Nani. A defense boasting the likes of Ferdinand, Vidic, and Evra, looked strong on paper but in reality was ageing and in need of freshening up. If all that wasn't enough there was also the Wayne Rooney question. The teenage dynamo who burst on the scene so explosively 10 years earlier had by this stage matured into a chain-smoking, beer-swilling, granny admirer who seemed to be chasing former glories as much as another dodgy first touch. Judging from comments made later it seems probable that Giggs would have persevered with Rooney but in a potentially diminished role. In this case, Rooney, chasing one last bumper contract may have jumped ship before he suffered the wage deflating ignominy of being pushed. All this considered Ferguson left behind a mess.
It should be remembered that while Feguson did indeed anchor the club to success, he also anchored United to the 1990s. He treated Manchester United as his personal fiefdom, resembling a latter day Romonov in the autocratic zeal with which he dominated every aspect of the club. It might be hyperbolic to do so but the discord of today could be described as United's Russian Civil War, the internal power struggle a pretense for shaping the club's renewal in a changed landscape. Would Giggs have introduced the reforms necessary to avoid this divisive situation? That's the stuff of speculation, all we do know, thanks to an anonymous director, is that the Manchester United app enjoys a rating of 4.9 in the Apple Store, and knowing that that fact is relevant to the Old Trafford hierarchy tells us all we need to know about the demise of this great club.
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