Manager has been hurt by experiences at elite clubs but several players at Old Trafford could fit his playing style
Welcome, Mauricio, to the meat grinder. Or rather, welcome back. We’ve been expecting you. There is nothing surprising in the news Manchester United may be on the verge of appointing Mauricio Pochettino. United are always on the verge of appointing Pochettino.
This is a club that has spent 13 years hiring and firing the same structurally doomed manager – same shell-shocked eyes, same irresolvable macro-problems – and the last eight years almost but not quite doing this to Pochettino.
Well, maybe we’re finally here. Maybe he just needed to be broken enough to make it fit. And who knows, perhaps there is even a kind of accidental synergy here.
By now Pochettino has been thoroughly processed through the soul-extraction machinery of elite club football. He arrives at Old Trafford pre-minced, pre‑haunted, a 54-year-old already bruised by his experiences at Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea and Levy‑era Spurs.
This is a head coach so steeped in the blood of dysfunctional super-clubs that turning back is pretty much the same thing as heading on into its ultimate form in the west end of Manchester.
The problems at Old Trafford are of course unrelated to the appointment of the latest managerial avatar. The constant hiring and firing is a symptom not a cause. This is essentially a distraction, a false flag drawing attention from the avarice and incompetence of the executive tiers.
Still, though, it is necessary on these occasions to set out the reasons why the latest appointment probably won’t work. First up is the obvious sense of diminishing returns.
How do you solve a club that has won two major trophies in 10 years of steady downward progress? Easy. You hire a coach who has also won two major trophies in 13 years of steady downward progress. How do we get back to the dimly remembered recent past? We hire the dimly remembered recent past.
Does this feel like a magic bullet? At this stage hiring Pochettino is like booking the bloke who did Gangnam Style to play the Super Bowl. Yeah, huge fan. Remind me. Weren’t you quite big in 2013?
So much for all that then. It is more interesting to linger on the fact that, as ever with this great belching toxic volcano of a football club, there is always hope, and some kind of logic that says maybe this is the one. We see it every time. Ageing aura-master? Yep, do it. Hot young systems zealot? Get him in.
Random ex-player, who will be transformed almost instantly into a damp, doomed figure crumpled on the touchline like a divorced dad at the school railings? We have a vacancy.
This time there are two things in Pochettino’s favour. First, the memory of his best days at Spurs: the charisma, the barking laugh, the way of striding around looking like the world’s most handsome oil rigger. Plus of course the visceral, hard-running style of that early Spurs team, football as life, pain, exhaustion, delirium. There will be moments. Just give us some of these.
In the end everyone here just wants to feel something.
Second, and more seductive, is the sense of some kind of shared redemption arc, a union of lost souls. Broken club, meet broken manager. You two are going to get along. This happens in movies, the Leaving Las Vegas dynamic: rock bottom, healing, redemption. Is this convincing? Do we have, of all things, not hope – obviously not that – but doomed hope?
Pochettino does have an incompleteness to his career. This is a manager who never manifested the full promise of those early years, headhunted by Southampton, then poached again by Spurs, where he offered a compelling injection of energy. That Pochettino was a hugely moreish figure.
You wanted to hear him speak, clap his dimpled cheeks, to breathe in his Eau de Gaucho scent as he whispered gruff words in your ear about struggle and suffering, and maybe invited you to a barbecue later.
A decade on, Pochettino still has the air of someone looking for a home and a final form. It is an interesting exercise just trying to decide what really broke him. Maybe it was PSG, January 2021 to July 2022, still the source of his only major trophies.
In Paris Pochettino seemed to arrive pre-burnt out, required to make sense from a standing start of a bunch of supernova galácticos. This was High Decadence-era PSG, source of the original despot‑general Kylian Mbappé meme, and a time when Neymar seemed to be more or less continually
