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Former Manchester United coach Mike Phelan has shone a light on the chaos of the Glazer era when he returned to the club in 2018.
The 62 year old played for the club between 1989 and 1994 and then joined the coaching staff for the first time under Sir Alex Ferguson in 2001 and stayed on until the Scot retired in 2013.
He would later return to Old Trafford in 2018 as part of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s coaching team and left for a final time in 2022 once Erik ten Hag became coach.
In a recent interview with The Athletic, Phelan has commented on how differently the club was being run behind the scenes when he returned in 2018 versus when he was originally working for the Old Trafford side.
He claimed one of the biggest differences he found from 2013 to 2018 was that “the club had gone from this small group of people — chief executive, manager, owner, coach — to departmentalisation”.
This resulted in too much discussion in his view and lacked the ruthless decison-making quality that was present in the Ferguson era, rendering the place a “completely different environment.”
He commented that this lack of leadership resulted in muddled aims and frustration would leak out on all sides, including his own.
“We all get a bit chirpier. The first time round, my opinion was valued, but the second time round, I was really upfront. And I’m not sure that was altogether what the environment wanted. It was really frustrating, because when you’ve got a guy who makes decisions, right or wrong, you go with it and you adapt. When you don’t make decisions, you don’t know what the ultimate aim is.”
Phelan also commented on the fact he found the drop in standards at the club hard to accept as the mentality of winning the League or Champions League had been dropped to finishing in the top four.
The former Hull City manager also lambasted the club’s decision to appoint Ralf Rangnick as an interim coach in December 2021 after sacking Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
“It never felt right. There is nothing interim about being Man United manager — you are the man. It was another change in that world of madness at times.”
Phelan also critised Rangnick’s over-analysis of the game and also his reliance on his close associate Lars Kornetka, who had stayed on at Russian club Lokomotiv Moscow but would watch United’s matches from abroad.
“It’s difficult to understand when the game is going on and you’re there, but the input is coming from somebody on the end of a phone in another part of the world. It was weird. I just thought, ‘Why? The game is there, watch it.’ I don’t need somebody in wherever to tell me his thoughts when he isn’t even relevant to the club right now.”
He also commented that the German coach perhaps over-complicated the sport claiming that he never understood the need to analyse the match with so many laptops and when they were losing with little time left to play, they would waste half the remaining time discussing their next move instead of making an instant decision.
Clearly Phelan’s attitude to coaching is from another era but he does raise some excellent points about the muddled, confused structure of the football club under the Glazers. Fans will hope this has been banished for good with Ineos’ total restructuring of the football department.
