Are the class of 2025 really the worst Manchester United team of all time?
Are the class of 2025 really the worst Manchester United team of all time?
Share:
Ruben Amorim thinks so, but other managers have faced similar struggles. Here is a trip down memory lane to some of the worst crises at Old Trafford …. If United’s current state feels like a lost decade, then the 1930s were its progenitor, much of it spent in the second tier, fans yearning for the early 1900s glory years under Ernest Mangnall, one of only three United managers – with Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson – to win the league title. United finished last in the First Division at the end of the 1930-31 season, winning seven games, losing their opening 12, conceding 115 goals, the manager Herbert Bamlett, better known as a referee, sacked with six fixtures to play. The previous owner, John Henry Davies, who had funded the Mangnall years, had died in 1927, stretching finances. According to the author and broadcaster Eamon Dunphy, the final game, against Middlesbrough, drew 3,900 to Old Trafford, marked by an “uncanny atmosphere” with “the shouts of derision echoing through the empty grandstand”. United would spend the next couple of seasons fighting off relegation to the Third Division North.
![[Manchester United 1930-31]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2a8cfa76dcf26ba89779c32a57f4a8f1d5f0f872/0_0_830_569/master/830.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
The years that followed the 1958 Munich Disaster harmed the understudies to the Busby Babes, cutting short the careers of talented youngsters such as Alex Dawson, Ronnie Cope and Mark Pearson by overexposing them. Not that the fateful event was ever mentioned within United. Busby, still mired in grief, visibly affected by the injuries sustained at Munich, was known by his players as “the Old Man”. He was still in his early 50s. His lack of belief in modern tactics meant he continued to demand his team “keep it simple” and “give it to a red shirt”. Noel Cantwell, signed from West Ham’s academy of football thinkers, asked the young professional Dunphy: “How do you find a red shirt if you haven’t worked on it?” These were insurrectional times with Bobby Charlton going through a career dip and the banishing of the maximum wage making United players realise that Busby was not a benevolent man. United finished 15th in 1961-62, a run to the FA Cup semis a fig leaf for a relegation battle. “It’s very good to have you around,” Charlton told the late Denis Law, signed that summer. “It went against the idea the club would never again touch the levels of consistent brilliance,” he wrote later.
![[Manchester United 1962-63]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a911f863d9f7f3dac5b97a2605798c612cfcdb94/0_0_829_568/master/829.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
