Man United: Pogba and Mourinho’s legacies intertwined and not fond
Mourinho’s third season meltdown is here
The man that signed Pogba is also to blame. Mourinho has bought player after player, but the side has not improved all that much. For every Romelu Lukaku and Nemanja Matic, there have been multiple duds.
Henrikh Mkhitaryan has come and gone, Alexis Sanchez has been dreadful for half a year now, Eric Bailly has been frozen out and Victor Lindelof has looked shaky. Somehow, six seasons after Ferguson’s retirement, Chris Smalling is the best centre-back at United. It is a damning indictment of Mourinho’s signings.
The style of football may be better than the drivel played under Louis van Gaal, but not by much. United have been played off the park by Brighton, Spurs, Wolves, and Derby this season. They do not look like a team that can challenge for the Premier League or the Champions League never mind both.
It was Mourinho’s decision to sign Pogba, but he has yet to get the best out of him. Combine that with the issues with Anthony Martial, and lack of meaningful game time for Marcus Rashford, two of the brightest young talents in the Premier League, and it is understandable that some fans are losing their patience.
It would be different if the board still truly backed Mourinho, but as they showed by not signing a new centre-back over the summer, they do not trust him anymore. Undermined by Pogba, his team playing dire football, and unable to win regularly, Mourinho is floundering.
Legacies of failure
If things continue as they have been, United will struggle to qualify for next year’s Champions League. Cristiano Ronaldo’s return with Juventus in a month will remind fans of happier times, and the legacies of that past.
Mourinho and Pogba, the two main characters of the Manchester United soap opera, are building their own legacy. The legacy of a manager who appears to have seen the game pass him by and of a player who has deluded himself into thinking he can undermine his boss without consequences.
Next. Jose and his men fail again. dark
In all likelihood, neither man will be at United at the start of the 2019/20 season. Then, we can look back at their time at United and see them for what they were: misguided, arrogant, and (to borrow a phrase from Mourinho) specialists in failure.