It's a very troubling time at Old Trafford. It's been a very troubling time since Sir Alex Ferguson retired back in 2013 yet there has never been as troubling a time as this.
Even the former boss looked fed up with what he's seeing on the pitch.
Going out at the first hurdle in the FA Cup yesterday to a Brighton side with several of their first team players missing was another indication of how far we've fallen as a club and how low the standards truly are.
The frustration amongst supporters is at it's peak as everyone is at each other for everything to a point where the end goal seems to be wanting to be right regardless of the situation.
Darren Fletcher has failed to win either of his games in charge losing his second which was his home debut and resulting in our early exit from a competition that many saw as a route to some form of success should we win it, similar to the 23/24 campaign when lifting the FA Cup salvaged what we all thought was a poor season.
What we would give to finish 8th and win a trophy now...
And therein lies the problem.
I don't want to be finishing 8th and winning just the FA Cup yet we have such a low standard for this club that that has become acceptable because we've somehow stooped even lower!
I want to be winning the league and Champions League.
No, I haven't been smoking some good shit although with the current state of the club, that thought has crossed my mind, but we have to be aiming higher, we have to be aiming toward a standard that is fit for Manchester United Football Club.
Who has the power to change everything?
The owners.
Whether you back the manager or not, these sackings and lack of quality football while not being successful keeps happening for a reason.
And it's not entirely those managers' fault.
United fans aren't divided by opinions, we're divided by symptons.
What I mean is that, one week, we complain that it's the manager's fault, the next, it's the players, then we have an issue with the system, or the tactics are crap. This causes us to end up being at each other.
As I said in my review last night, I don't even blame the players anymore because we know they aren't good enough, we know they can down tools and not show up. We know that they've sacked several managers over the years.
Like fuck me, how is Diogo Dalot still at this club?!
That performance against Brighton was one of his worst I've ever seen which is saying something because he's had quite a few of those where we even question how he is a footballer at all.
But while I and many fans do get upset when managers/head coaches play certain players, I argue that they shouldn't need to make that call in the first place.
If the club was run correctly, such players would've been removed a long time ago. Dalot for example, has been at United since 2018, 8 bloody years!
Any other club would've gotten rid of him by now and Fletcher, Ruben Amorim, Erik ten Hag and anyone in the future wouldn't need to worry about having to play Dalot at right-back.
However, when the same problems occur over and over again under different managers, that's not a coincidence, that's a structural issue.
The owners are the ones who set the standards, which under the Glazers and now INEOS, there are no standards. They are the ones who hire certain people but then don't give them the backing they need nor the time required to be successful.
INEOS in particular also appear to want young and unproven people working at the club be it on the pitch or off it.
I've said this many times and can't stress it enough: Omar Berrada was NEVER a CEO yet was hired as one at the biggest, most scrutinized club in football. The pressure that comes with being the CEO at United is a pressure like no other. It is not something that most other clubs face.
Jason Wilcox was only ever a Director of Football for one season which was at Southampton in a campaign that saw them relegated. He is now the DOF of Manchester United.
With recent reports after Amorim's sacking and a quote that has come to light from him in the past ("I'm a coach at heart. Normally in a different job now, but I'm a coach inside..That's a strength in my role now. But also causes me a bit of a problem, because I always want to interfere with what the managers are doing."), it appears that Wilcox maybe part coach at Old Trafford as well.
INEOS also have this model that wants to sign young players that will take time, have ups and downs and need the perfect environment to develop, something that we do not offer at United. No young player can thrive here and in fact, any player who has some quality eventually looks quite shite upon joining the Red Devils.
As we are impatient not just in the fan base but as a club in terms of wanting that success, we can't afford to bring in players who will take time such as these developmental ones.
They didn't even have the patience with Amorim so as to see out his project or the three years in which Sir Jim Ratcliffe said would be the only time where the Portuguese can truly be judged. Amorim himself was a risk as he is a young up-and-coming manager.
What is this obsession with going young? We need experience at all levels yet that is not the policy.
I can go on and on about how INEOS have messed up big time. But we all know the problems with them, we all know how ridiculously awful they've been as co-owners and the heads of the football side of things at United.
They run the football side of the club, but look like they don't know how to run the football side of the club.
One 'positive' if you want to call it that, is that even though it isn't a great feeling to be watching our team lose on the regular, what it has done is that it has brought more focus on the club, perhaps more focus than ever before, and specifically onto INEOS.
Never have I seen so many people talk so openly about how badly run the club is and how they want INEOS gone. We've even gotten ex-players saying it and now even mainstream journalists as well.
This post from The Guardian is absolutely superb not just because of what was said (we as fans have been saying a lot of these same things), but the fact that it came from a large, well-known newspaper.
We just don't get enough of this in regards to United which made it so refreshing to see.
All of us already know the problem/s at United. That is a positive in itself. But for some reason, we don't really focus on that and rather try to one-up each other about being right or wrong on certain things that aren't as important as what truly matters.
We don't channel our anger, frustration, disappointment and all the other emotions towards the owners.
I don't even blame the fan base for being as fractured as it is or for being as at odds with each other as we are even if I do get frustrated with this flip-flop nature and wanting to be right. This is just the result of the club's standards dropping so low that we don't even know what we want.
We just look for any semblance of positivity at a club where there is very little to be positive about.
That is not our fault.
What we can do however, is more in terms of focusing on the real issue instead of fighting one another on certain opinions, and be more United when it comes to trying to demand better from the club.
That is something we can be better at.
Look, I’m not saying fans shouldn’t have opinions about what happens on the pitch, that’s part of supporting a club like United and watching football.
But when the club feels broken, winning an argument becomes a substitute for influence.
People just want to be proven right without properly taking into account the situation we find ourselves in as a club and it shifts the focus away from the real problem.
And that’s how we end up at each other instead of looking up.
Avram Glazer and Sir Jim Ratcliffe | Creator: Michael Steele | Credit: Getty Images Copyright: 2025 Getty Images via Goal