End of an era

Of course the structures of Manchester United will not fold over night. The training methods, the coaches, the scouting networks, academy, and sheer pull factor will serve the next manager.

And so the day has arrived. It was announced earlier this week that Sir Alexander Chapman Ferguson will finally clamber onto his particularly high horse and ride off into the setting sun at the end of the current season.

His job is done, his enemies vanquished, and his fears all left behind. What remains unaccomplished will now be the responsibility of another man.

And that man must realize it will be into some very big shoes he will be stepping, because regardless of his reputation or track record, Ferguson has left behind a weighty burden of expectation borne of all the achievements he amassed over a very lengthy period of time. Time therefore will be the biggest challenge of his successor.

Time is an issue for anyone coming after Ferguson because it takes time to accumulate all that he has won. It is therefore already unfair to expect anyone to match him yet they will not have the single most important ingredient of his successes-time!

Ferguson was lucky to have worked in a time when patience was a virtue and when football clubs were not value generating assets of impatient absentee owners, but extensions of the societies in which they existed. The next manager however walks into a listed company and one that will be controlled as thus.

Listed companies live by predictability alone because volatility hurts share prices. They are by their very nature impatient and it can be said here and now that Ferguson successor will not have 27 years, certainly not the time to accumulate 38 trophies.

And yet it is on such standards as set by Ferguson that he will be judged. So he is already doomed to fail. I dare say Ferguson actually did Manchester United a big disservice by staying on too long! It’s easy to read off a long list of achievements- the various all-conquering teams and the collection of trophies, but hanging around for 27 years produces a personality cult which means the centre rarely holds beyond the cult-figures’ departure.

In fact Manchester United’s history carries one such example in Sir Matt Busby a man with as big a personality presence as Ferguson and successes to match. In summary the period between the two men is a blotch on united illustrious history and I am inclined to believe that which follows Ferguson will suffer a similar fate simply because both men stayed on long enough to generate an unmatchable clout-quota.

Of course the structures of Manchester United will not fold over night. The training methods, the coaches, the scouting networks, academy, and sheer pull factor will serve the next manager.

But all those things we came to know as bouncebackability like never knowing when to lose will go with the man, Ferguson. They came to represent Manchester United but were borrowed from the man and just might follow him into retirement. To that extent Manchester United must prepare for a new dawn in which success isn’t a guarantee
In a way the times dictate that Ferguson has left behind a poisoned chalice of a job.

Manchester United has changed far more than it’s manager; it has changed ownership and therefore its ways and character. Fergusons’ departure represents an end of an era.

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