Manchester United

Manchester United are the biggest club in England, and the gap between that status and their actual football has been the defining embarrassment of the Premier League era since Sir Alex Ferguson retired. Twenty league titles, three European Cup/Champions League trophies, and a list of legendary names — Busby, Ferguson, Best, Cantona, Beckham, Ronaldo — that reads like a hall of fame. And yet, for the better part of a decade, Old Trafford has been less the Theatre of Dreams and more the Theatre of the Absurd: a 74,310-capacity monument to institutional decline.

Ruben Amorim’s appointment in November 2024 was the latest attempt to arrest the rot, and there are reasons for cautious optimism. The Portuguese led Sporting CP to the league title with a distinctive 3-4-3 formation and arrived in Manchester with a tactical clarity that has been conspicuously absent from Old Trafford for years. The INEOS group, led by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, have been overhauling the club’s football operations with the unsentimental efficiency of people who run chemicals companies. Whether corporate restructuring can solve what is fundamentally a footballing problem remains the most expensive open question in the sport.

Manchester United’s Australian fanbase is colossal — tours, supporter groups in every city, an emotional investment that borders on the masochistic given recent results. Old Trafford, England’s largest club ground, deserves a team worthy of its history. The question is whether Amorim can provide one.

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United’s 2025-26 season is the most pivotal in the club’s post-Ferguson history, and that is not hyperbole — it is arithmetic. Amorim’s tactical system is being embedded into a squad that has been significantly reshaped, and the early signs suggest a club that is finally moving in a discernible direction rather than lurching from crisis to crisis. Plans for a new or radically redeveloped Old Trafford are being explored, which would create one of the great stadiums of world football and generate the revenue to compete with the state-owned clubs. United’s history, fanbase, and financial power ensure they will always be relevant. Whether they can be good again is the question that 74,310 supporters ask themselves every matchday.

VS — Chief sports columnist, australiafootball.com