Top coaches are either psychologists or cult leaders; Ronaldo & company need the latter. (Photo by Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)
Move the fridge outside. That’s what a feng shui consultant would suggest as a way to restore spatial harmony to Old Trafford – the fridge being Harry Maguire.
Easier said than done, though. The Manchester United defender lacks mobility in more than one sense; he is rustily hard to remove from the starting lineup, despite being increasingly and visibly central to the decline of the team. New manager Erik Ten Hag even reaffirmed Maguire’s captaincy when he took over, a decision which shouldn’t be an obstacle to benching him. But it does add a crust of awkwardness to the situation.
Maguire probably isn’t nearly as awful a defender as he has seemed to be during the past two seasons. Put him in a better, happier team with a discernible system (like England, for example) and he becomes a solid, blood-and-thunder centreback in the English tradition – a latter-day Steve Bruce or Tony Adams. Instead, he is the psychological ground zero of this side, a haunted fridge, overstocked with an entire squad’s bad energy.
And, if Ten Hag did take the tough-minded step of dropping Maguire, he would be grossly oversimplifying the problem because he has a flock of scapegoats to choose from. The two best footballers in the side – the eternally sulky Bruno Fernandes and the haughtily work-shy Cristiano Ronaldo – are arguably more disruptive to the team-building project than Maguire is. Everywhere else in his squad, there are square pegs chafing miserably against round holes and vice versa.
A Venn diagram of United’s problems would be an illegible scribble. If you erase one circle from that scribble, it won’t make too much difference. And erasing more circles is not viable. Ten Hag cannot simply sell 10 players and buy 10 better ones – not least because you cannot attract the world’s best footballers to a depressed club, regardless of the wages on offer. Witness the long, and probably doomed, pursuit of Frenkie de Jong this summer.
So, the only way forward for Ten Hag is to treat the depression, to break the current cycle of mutually reinforcing self-doubt. These players don’t all have to like each other – many great football teams have managed constant bad blood in the dressing room. (Teddy Sheringham and Andy Cole famously loathed each other but they were a potent strike duo, regardless.) However, the team members do need to arrive at a renewed professional commitment to each other – a basic platform of collective trust – which would in turn lift the confidence of battling players like Maguire, Jadon Sancho, Marcus Rashford and Fred, who are all better footballers than they currently believe they are.
That shift will demand some expert brainwashing from Ten Hag. He has to function as both a cult leader and a shrink. At FC Utrecht and Ajax Amsterdam, he did pay careful attention to mental conditioning, drawing up personal development plans for each player. He spoke about disrupting what he saw as “neurotic” habits of players – superstitiously hiding under a towel before a game, for example.
But young players in stepping-stone leagues are easier to shape. They have it all in front of them; they aren’t haunted by the idea that it’s all behind them, as Maguire might be.
Anyone who has managed a disillusioned group or organisation will know it requires a huge jolt of leadership energy to break the inertia of the group energy. That’s why so many effective coaches are intense and ego-driven, to the point of mania – witness Monday’s hullabaloo between Thomas Tuchel and Antonio Conte. Even the cerebral Pep Guardiola is a bit of a nutcase. These are the cult leaders of the coaching elite. The sheer force of their own obsessive egos transmits faith and hunger to their charges.
By contrast, the great shrinks of the touchline – subtle and diplomatic star-whisperers like Carlo Ancelotti – generally need to inherit a great squad and maximise it. Ancelotti’s failure at Everton showed he cannot hoodwink limited players into overperforming.
Ten Hag has some serious hoodwinking to do. He might just be too sane for the job.
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