There has clearly been a culture problem at United for quite some time. Part of it is the evolution of money in the game that makes promising young players multi-millionaires before they’ve even achieved anything of note. Twenty five years ago, at his peak, there was talk of Roy Keane leaving United because of his new contract wage demands. In the end he agreed a club record deal to stay at 55k a week. It was seen as a massive contract but for one of the best and most influential midfielders in world football, for by far the biggest club in England.
Fifteen, or so, years later Adnan Januzaj was getting 50k a week for being a promising young player. Recently you’ve got Garnacho, who can best be described as raw, getting 60k a week - plus bonuses - before he’s even accomplished anything. From a manager’s perspective it is almost impossible to manage players with that kind of wealth, who have been molly coddled, and are surrounded by toxic entourages, into having any sense of real work ethic or patience.
The only way - and I mean the only - you can effectively manage and develop such young talent is to have an incredibly robust and positive culture. One that neutralises the money and places all sense of value on how they progress within the group and what they achieve in a sporting context. It requires a collective buy in, and one underpinned by success. If players see that buying in to the culture will lead to success, it makes achieving that buy in, all the more achievable.
United haven’t had that culture for a long time. I see that Amorim, Wilcox, Berrada and co are genuinely trying to build it, but it will take time. These players are mostly young, perhaps not the brightest, and drowning in cash. The downing of tools comes with little or no consequence to their quality of life, and it’s not like they risk missing out on a United trophy haul because that’s rarely been a possibility for nearly a decade.
Right now United should be starting with three, very talented, homegrown players up front in Garnacho, Rashford and Greenwood. We’d be about the only major club in Europe to boast that. And there can be no question that all three were certainly good enough to be top class players and lead this club to glory. You’d think that they’d love and bleed United, having come through the ranks. Now none of them is at the club, and in every case it is for mental - rather than talent - issues.
Garnacho became too big for his boots and started throwing his toys out of the pram when he actually had to fight for his place. Rashford became lazy, stopped working, focused more on his image and PR than football, and Greenwood just turned out to be a really shit human being. You can’t have that much go wrong with three huge academy talents, in such a short space of time and tell me that there isn’t a massive cultural problem at the club. Martial and Sancho followed similar trajectories having joined as young players.
How long this will take to fix is beyond me, but it needs fixing. My suspicion is that drawing a very hard line now is the only way this can be eradicated and a new culture formed, and it does appear at least that this is what the club is doing. But after you let a toxic culture spread for more than ten years, it doesn’t get eradicated overnight. The mass firings, moving on of key personnel, and the ostracism of certain players, all feels to me like life saving surgery.
As for Garnacho, he could be a very good player, if he works his arse off to improve his weaknesses. Nothing about his attitude and personal environment suggests that’s a possibility, so I suspect he won’t amount to much in the end. Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young. By the time these players realise the value of sporting immortality, they’ll be too old to do anything about it. It used to be the case that to make life changing money you’d have to work really hard and achieve a certain standing and value within the game. That itself was an additional motivator. Now you just need to have the early potential to maybe, possibly, one day be a top player. Sancho has had 18 months of good football in his entire career, and he’s long had enough money to last a life time in extreme opulence.
