Vim

🚨 Roy Keane on Manchester United standing by Michael Carrick after sacking Ruben Amorim: “I’m listening to this explanation about Carrick and I don’t know whether to laugh or get angry. Apparently the players have decided they can’t keep hiding behind managers. Brilliant. That’s what they should’ve decided three managers ago. Imagine being Ruben Amorim watching this. He comes from Sporting, where he’d built a proper side, with an identity, standards, a way of playing. He arrives at United and says, ‘I need intensity. I need players who can do what I’m asking.’ The club says, ‘Of course, Ruben. That’s why we hired you.’ Then he starts asking difficult questions. ‘Are these the players we’re building around? Are you going to back the changes? Because I can’t promise results while pretending everything is fine.’ Suddenly it’s, ‘Ruben, you need to be more careful with what you say publicly.’ And when things go wrong, he’s gone. Now Carrick’s results are poor and we’re hearing, ‘The players feel responsible. We believe in Michael. We haven’t spoken to anyone behind his back.’ Well, where was all this patience for Amorim? I can picture that boardroom conversation. One director says, ‘The supporters are furious. Should we make a change?’ Another says, ‘Michael hasn’t criticised the club. He’s handled himself very well.’ ‘But what about the football?’ ‘He’s been very professional in his interviews.’ I’m sorry, are we running Manchester United or an interview competition? And listen, this isn’t me attacking Carrick. But let’s not pretend his managerial CV is stronger than Amorim’s. Ruben won titles at Sporting. He didn’t arrive from nowhere. I remember when managers at United demanded things, nobody treated the demand itself as a scandal. You’d hear, ‘We need better players. We need higher standards.’ And the conversation would be about how to meet those standards. Now it seems the safer conversation is the one that keeps everyone comfortable. A reporter asks Carrick, ‘Do you feel the club has given you everything you need?’ He says, ‘Everyone’s working hard behind the scenes. We’re all together.’ Fine. That’s his approach. But imagine Amorim saying, ‘No, I need more. This squad isn’t where it needs to be.’ Suddenly people say, ‘He’s creating problems. He’s putting pressure on the board.’ That’s the manager’s job! To put pressure on people when standards aren’t being met. Someone will tell me, ‘Roy, Amorim had bad results too.’ I know he did. I’m not saying he was perfect or every decision was right. I’m asking why the rules change depending on who’s sitting in the chair. If the directors believed results meant Amorim had to go, then explain why poor results now mean everyone must stick together. And don’t give me, ‘The players have finally taken responsibility.’ What does that even mean? Did someone walk into Carrington and say, ‘Lads, we can’t get another manager sacked. We’re running out of people to blame’? And another player replied, ‘Right, so we’ll start doing the jobs we’re paid to do’? Wonderful. Why did it take another defeat and another manager for that revelation? My fear is United have become a club where a manager can survive upsetting the supporters, but not upsetting the people above him. If that’s not true, prove it. And explain why Amorim wasn’t afforded the same conviction. Because if the difference between keeping your job and losing it is whether you tell the board what it wants to hear, then Manchester United aren’t choosing managers to fix the football. They’re choosing managers who won’t make the board uncomfortable.”

🚨 Sir Alex Ferguson on Manchester City being found guilty of breaching the Premier League’s financial rules: “I read the news and the first person I thought about was Carlos Tevez. Funny, isn’t it? After all these years. We wanted Carlos to stay. David Gill spoke to his representatives, we made our offer, they said we’d left it too late and eventually he went across Manchester. Then City put up that bloody ‘Welcome to Manchester’ poster. I remember looking at it and thinking, ‘They haven’t just signed one of our players. They want us to know they can.’ That was when I called them a small club with a small mentality. But there was something else happening around that period that people forget. Suddenly City could walk into conversations for players that previously would have been choosing between United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Madrid, Barcelona. I remember one summer hearing that Adebayor had agreed to join City, then apparently his people were still contacting us and Chelsea. I thought, ‘What a strange situation. Players who would rather be somewhere else are signing for City anyway.’ At the time, you simply accepted that they had enormous financial power. You competed with it. That’s football. But if you then discover years later that rules were being broken during the period in which you’re trying to compete with that financial power, you’re entitled to look back differently. Because people will say, ‘Ferguson was just angry because City became successful.’ No. I was angry before they were successful. I was standing there in 2009 watching them take Tevez, chase players everywhere and put his face on a building to celebrate taking him from us. Imagine telling me then, ‘Alex, one day the Premier League will investigate how all of this was being financed.’ I’d probably have pointed at the poster and said, ‘You might want to start there.’ And that’s the part people miss when discussing what happened afterwards. Once you change the financial strength of one club, you don’t only change that club. You change where players go. You change what everybody else has to pay. You change which manager gets which footballer. You change title races before the first ball is kicked. People can spend the next twenty years asking whether this player would’ve joined United, whether that player would’ve joined Chelsea, whether somebody else would’ve gone to Arsenal. Nobody can prove those alternate histories. But I know this much. When I was fighting them, I thought I was fighting Manchester City. Apparently I should’ve brought an accountant.”