Anybody seen Dave Brailsford around the place since Wednesday night? You know the guy – small, hairless, always wears those designer specs that seem to have lost the hook around the ear, probably to marginal gains. Looks a bit like a Bond villain who’s been sat on by a bigger Bond villain. Any sign of him at all?
It’s never been entirely clear what Brailsford’s job is at Manchester United. Officially, he is head of sport at Ineos, the company owned by Jim Ratcliffe, who owns 25 per cent of United and who is never knowingly less than The Big Big Boss. So Brailsford is ... what? Not the pheasant plucker but the pheasant plucker’s son? Who’s only plucking pheasants till the pheasant plucker comes?
Tell you what he isn’t. He’s not the face of the calamitous end to United’s 2024/25 season. Say what you like about Sir Big Sir Jim but he was, at least, the one standing on the podium in Bilbao on Wednesday night, looking for all the world like a lanky henchman tasked with keeping the riff-raff away from Spurs chairman Daniel Levy, who was standing to his left.
But Brailsford came there none. And not for the first time either. The big sports brain who arrived at United 18 months ago and was apparently going to streamline everything to make it fitter and leaner and better run, seems to have started with himself. Certainly, when the shit hit the fan, nobody ran better than Brailsford.
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There are plenty of photos on the newswires of him in the stadium before the Europa League final, not a single one of him afterwards. Not a peep out of him since, either – nor indeed any of the multifarious performance directors, executive vice-presidents and other big swinging mickeys who go to make up United’s seemingly endless club hierarchy. Maybe keeping the head down is the new marginal gain.
(On which note, a quick digression. In conversation with former Waterford hurling manager Derek McGrath one time, the subject of marginal gains came up. Specifically, the notion that Brailsford getting the cyclists on Team Sky to bring their own pillows on overnight trips being hailed as some unheard-of stroke of genius. “Sure we were doing that with the Harty Cup team in school in 2007…”)
Anyway, Brailsford is just another in United’s bulging coterie of failure-is-an-orphan Teflon executives. Yet another season comes and goes with it being everybody’s fault and nobody’s fault. The Glazers, Ratcliffe, Brailsford, Omar Berrada (the actual United chief executive, for those trying to keep up), Jason Wilcox (technical director, ditto) – all somehow in charge yet all somehow insulated from any consequences. In Ireland, we wouldn’t waste those lads on a football team. We’d give them a children’s hospital to build.
Little wonder that the working scrubs whose job it is to actually deliver results on the pitch have been one-upping each other since Wednesday night to make it clear to the outside world that their DMs are open. It started with Ruben Amorim using his post-match press conference to declare that he’ll walk away without compensation, if that’s what United want. Whether that kind of bravado survived Amorim’s next chat with his agent remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Bruno Fernandes reckons he could see his way clear to helping the club if they wanted to sell him. There’s apparently a £100 million offer on the table from Saudi so you’d imagine everyone will see the way being very clear indeed. Alejandro Garnacho has started grouching and chuntering and wondering about the future. The Sun says the whole squad is on the transfer list. Presumably Harry Maguire and Mason Mount will survive.
All in all, it’s just such a jolly good time for those of us who have somehow managed to hitch our football supporting wagon to the most venal, most disorganised, most hubris-laden sporting organisation on the planet. It’s almost enjoyable at this stage, a kind of arms-length foray into what the world of BDSM must be like. How much pain and ridicule can we take? Does anyone remember the safe word?
Only at Man United could you have a scenario where the players are offering to pay for club staff to go to a European final. Only at Man United is it possible for a chief executive to be saying in public that winning said European final is imperative to stave off another round of redundancies. Imagine how badly you need to have managed your business for either of those scenarios to be real.
Now consider the first story out of the gate the day after said defeat in said final. “Ruben Amorim has a summer transfer budget of a little less than £100 million ...” So wrote the Guardian at Thursday lunchtime.
So which is it? Is the club in dire financial doo-doo or does it have 100 mill to throw around? And if it’s the latter, why the hell are they telling people? For the first time in nearly 40 years, United can feasibly try to play the poor mouth in transfer negotiations now. They have always had to pay a United tax. Now they seem to be wilfully setting their own.
Seriously, what a shower. No wonder Brailsford is keeping a low profile. It might be the most sensible thing he’s done since he joined.
