The more things change, the more they stay the same. The turn of the new decade in the Premier League was supposed to have been the moment when the peloton bunched up and levelled out, homogenized by a culture of wealth and consumption.
Liverpool and Manchester City may be playing on their own ring-fenced plain of super-evolution. But from the summit downwards, the league’s contours are smoothing over. The pack is jostling, and the heirs are posturing. Gangly young elbows are digging into tweedy distinguished ribs.
Sheffield United and Wolves have thrown off their quaint, parochial Championship traits and have found a taste for the high life. Burnley might not be far behind. Leicester City have one foot in the Champions League already.
Then came the bombshell that seemed to throw the whole thing wide open. Manchester City’s exclusion from European competition for the next two seasons lowered the ladder just another tantalising couple of rungs, so that elevation to the European elite for teams that still have EFL mud between their studs feels just that little bit more possible.
Except a look at the league table this morning gives a rather different picture. Wolves, Sheffield United and Burnley sit beneath Chelsea, Tottenham and Manchester United. Frank Lampard and Jose Mourinho may have given fans an indication of the relative direction of travel of their respective teams during Saturday’s 2-1 win for the Blues against Spurs at Stamford Bridge, but it looks increasingly as though the main beneficiary of Uefa’s ruling against Man City will be Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s Man United.
From leading the sack race to eating up the ground on the top-four (even if the top-four is now actually a top-five), there has been a transformation in the immediate circumstances for Solskjaer and United. It may or may not point towards a solution to the bulk of the club’s deepest and most publicised problems.
The heart of the Old Trafford crisis has been personnel. The people bringing people in haven’t been good enough, and neither have the people that those people have brought in. After so much aching mediocrity, it seems almost whimsical to be able to lavish honest praise on a United new boy, but the impact of Bruno Fernandes on the team since making his debut against Wolves earlier in February has been refreshing.
Finally there is a presence in this team’s midfield with a sense of adventure. The Portugal international was the catalyst for United’s victories against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge and against Watford on Sunday – when he scored his first goal for the club – and if on a sixpence can fortunes turn then Fernandes might prove to be the example-setter that the team’s talented but lethargic squad have been missing.
Credit is only fair too to United’s transfer-wranglers, who fought to wrestle through a deal for Fernandes that more than once looked to be slipping away as Sporting Lisbon played financial hardball. It may be true that in sport and in business failure is the best teacher and people learn through their mistakes, but that school of thought hasn’t worked out too well in the corridors of power at Old Trafford.
Instead, great legacies turn on singular moments. There are those who argue that Mark Robins’ FA Cup third-round replay goal against Nottingham Forest in 1990 was the most important United have ever scored, as it turned the tide of favour towards Alex Ferguson’s reign when the board were running out of patience (United had lost at home to Crystal Palace the previous month, prompting a banner in the Stretford End that accused Ferguson of presiding over "three years of excuses" at Old Trafford). Fernandes has made a promising start - not electrifying but promising, bright enough to suggest it could be a turning point in the club's transfer policy if his influence on the rest of the midfield spreads.
Ed Woodward’s own evaluation of the club’s very recent transfer success suggests he is certainly ready to spin the thing into a watershed moment. The United chief said on Tuesday: "Despite being linked in the media to 111 players in January, our acquisition of just one of them - Bruno Fernandes - is an important step, demonstrating our commitment to adding experienced, world-class recruits to the exciting crop of academy graduates that are at the heart of this developing team. We will take the same planned, disciplined, approach this coming summer.” Not exactly self-effacing. But maybe Woodward has earned his moment of respite after some of the more odious criticism he has received from some quarters.
As for Solskjaer himself, he's still the same manager who oversaw the slow atrophy of the team during the first half of this season and the final weeks of last. Criticism that he is not a mature enough tactician, not a rousing enough man-manager, not a rampaging enough presence around Old Trafford cannot be swept away in the signing of a cheque. If they were true then, they're true now. But what else could have changed?
That Chelsea and Tottenham have fallen victim to untimely injury crises may yet turn out to be the killer factor in Champions League qualification. Mourinho said after Spurs’ toothless 1-0 defeat to RB Leipzig that his team were like “a gun with no bullets” following the news that Son Heung-min will join Harry Kane on the sidelines for most of the rest of the season. He didn’t look far wrong as they lost again to the Blues, who themselves are struggling without Tammy Abraham (who returned briefly as a substitute on Tuesday but limped out of the team’s warm-down) and Christian Pulisic, not to mention N’Golo Kante. Lampard’s team’s meek loss to Bayern Munich on Tuesday was a reminder to the Premier League’s chasing pack that his team are there for the taking in fourth place.
To paraphrase an old saying, ‘football is two teams kicking a ball around for 90 minutes, and at the end Manchester United win’. Those days patently are on hold for now. But that recessive United gene might just give the team what they need to get themselves over the line.
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