Nowhere Left to Hide: Louis van Gaal Has Failed at Manchester United
By Sam Pilger, Featured Columnist May 16, 2016
Manchester United’s painful and grossly disappointing season.
But, of course, it isn’t over just yet.
Manchester United still have to play a meaningless game against
Bournemouth at Old Trafford
this week after Sunday’s game was abandoned following a security scare.
There will be nothing at stake, nothing to play for in this fixture, just more anti-climax and disappointment.
The last remaining UEFA Champions League place has disappeared over the hill in the possession of a spluttering
Manchester City side.
United will go through the motions in their rearranged fixture against Bournemouth knowing they are destined to slum it in the UEFA Europa League as a season-long punishment.
Should United win this final game it will mean they have missed out on the Champions League by goal difference, an apt symbol for where they have so obviously failed this season: scoring goals.
The statistics are damning of manager Louis van Gaal and his stale approach.
In Sir Alex Ferguson’s final season at Old Trafford, United scored 86 goals in winning the Premier League title, but this slipped to just 64 under David Moyes, and 62 in Van Gaal’s first campaign.
Dave Thompson/Getty Images
This season Manchester United have scored a barely believable 46 goals in 37 games under Van Gaal, two less than
Sunderland, who narrowly avoided relegation, and just two more than Newcastle, who were sucked into the Championship.
This will be United’s lowest goals total since the 1989/90 season when they finished 13th and flirted with relegation by finishing only five points clear of the bottom three in the table.
There is a rich seam of statistics to cast Van Gaal in an unfavourable light—it all feels far too easy—but where the Dutchman has so resoundingly failed is more in how he has made United fans feel about themselves and their club.
Strangely, but almost understandably, there was a large contingent of United fans who have greeted the failure to reach the Champions League with some degree of relief because it should spell the end of Van Gaal’s tenure at Old Trafford.
There was a fear that by sneaking into the top four Van Gaal could save himself and remain at United for another season.
Julian Finney/Getty Images
Imagine that, United fans actually pleased not to reach the Champions League, but this is the Van Gaal effect.
Many United fans can barely remember feeling so detached from the club, so ground down have they been by the uninspiring football they have had to endure this season.
Even wiser and older fans who expected a period of adjustment, and some lean years post-Ferguson, were not prepared for such a slump and such a departure from the club’s attacking traditions.
The season finished for many United fans as early as last December when United were on a winless run of eight games, which included four consecutive defeats, their worse run for more than a quarter of a century since that dreaded 1989/90 season.
Even though United’s season remained alive throughout most of 2016, and they were still able to win the title, a Champions League place, the Europa League and the FA Cup, United fans had already given up on Van Gaal and wanted the season to end.
All hope had been extinguished. The narrative was Van Gaal had failed, and he has not been able to alter that.
United did not appoint him and invest £250 million in new players to finish fourth, and either fifth or sixth.
Van Gaal’s public utterances—and his attempts to justify these failures—have also become increasingly desperate and only served to open him up to further ridicule.
Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
Two weeks ago, on the same night Leicester City were confirmed as champions after Tottenham Hotspur’s draw at
Chelsea, Van Gaal
declared he was still one of the world’s best coaches.
Leicester had embarrassed him, proved this patently not to be the case, and yet he could still not grasp the reality of his monumental failure.
Moyes paid for his own failure to reach the Champions League with his job, and it remains highly likely that the same fate will befall Van Gaalin the week after the FA Cup final.
If United were to lift the FA Cup at Wembley, it would make for an awkward departure, but it is one that cannot be avoided.
In 1990, an FA Cup victory was enough to save Ferguson, but these are different times; United have since won 13 Premier League titles and have vastly different expectations.
When he was appointed, there was a creeping fear among United fans that Van Gaal was yesterday’s man, a relic of the 1990s, long past his coaching prime.
An impressive run to the World Cup semi-finals in Brazil with the Netherlands temporarily assuaged these fears and saw him arrive at Old Trafford with a revived reputation.
But the last two years have seen those initial fears painfully realised: Van Gaal is yesterday’s man and now deserves to be consigned to yesterday by Manchester United.