Manchester United is getting better, yet going nowhere

If we assume that all sport is directed, at a high level, by a capricious trickster god, then Manchester United’s strange season starts to make a lot more sense. This is not just a series of games of football; this is an investigation into whether United’s more ideologically-inclined fans have been telling the truth over the last two seasons. Whether they really meant it when they said, as was a commonplace under Louis van Gaal: “It’s not that we’re rubbish that I mind; it’s that we’re so boring. Why don’t we just have a go?”

This was very amusing to any non-United supporters. Still, the underlying belief that being a football (or indeed any sports) fan is not just about wanting your colour shirt to win, but more about wanting to be entertained and thrilled and moved in some mysterious way, stretches well beyond Old Trafford. At heart, so the theory goes, this whole business is more about uplifting intangibles than it is uplifted trophies.

So, is that right? Or is it simply a self-serving, self-applied veneer, a handy fiction for fans who secretly want to win, but suspect that saying so might make them look greedy, or childish, or even vulgar? That’s what this edition of Jose Mourinho has been sent down (or probably, given the eye-poking, up) to investigate.

It’s not been every game, and it’s not been consistent, but Manchester United have been, intangibly, better since Mourinho took over. They’ve been more adventurous, they’ve been more fun, they’ve been more proactive; they’ve been fundamentally more stimulating to look at. Admittedly, they’ve yet to achieve thrilling, and sometimes they’ve even been actively dull, by accident or design. Sometimes they’ve just been a mess. But on the whole, the trend is an upwards one. They have had a go. And a couple of times, they’ve almost looked like their old, brutal selves again ...

... except when it comes to the result. The most important tangibles are starkly absent: United aren’t scoring enough goals, keeping enough clean sheets, or picking up enough points. At one end, chances go begging; at the other, they’re tucked past a baffled-looking David de Gea. They thumped Stoke, and drew 1-1. They outplayed Arsenal, and drew 1-1. They did enough to beat Everton, and drew 1-1. And that’s why they sit sixth in the league table, 13 points from the top and six from fourth. That’s is why Mourinho is fluttering his eyelashes at the Europa League, and the Champions League place it brings.

The external comparisons are plentiful and schadenfreudetastic: fewer wins than Van Gaal! Fewer goals scored than Tony Pulis’ West Brom! Fewer points than David Moyes in his first 14 games! And there’s the awkward parallel with Antonio Conte, who has done brilliantly to reach the top of the Premier League with a Chelsea squad that, under Mourinho, finished tenth last season.

But it’s the internal contradiction that is the most striking. Mourinho teams, historically and theoretically, are ruthless in the preservation of their own net and the plundering of their opponent’s. Mourinho’s United, for all that they can look quite good at all points in between, are far too squishy. Seven points dropped in the closing stages of games tells its own story. So, too, does the fact that United’s one victory over theoretically top-class opposition this season came against a heavily rotated Manchester City. Mourinho used to be a big-game hunter.

Back to the intangibles. If United’s results aren’t not good enough, then are there signs that they’ll get better? It’s easy to make a case that they will: unusually poor finishing tends to improve over the long run, after all, otherwise it wouldn’t be unusual. Some of the squad have stepped up this season, with Antonio Valencia, Juan Mata and Ander Herrera all having improved. Of the new arrivals, Henrikh Mkhitaryan appears to have finally been welcomed in from the cold, Eric Bailly started well, and while anything less than a hat-trick every game will lead to criticism, Paul Pogba’s been steadily getting better since his late, preseason-less arrival.

Yet the problem with intangibles is there are always questions, and this season United have provoked some sharp but fair ones. Why was Mkhitaryan out for so long? Where is Anthony Martial’s head at? Why is Mourinho attempting to humiliate Luke Shaw? Isolate Bastian Schweinsteiger? Kill Chris Smalling? Why do United shrink back late in games? Why does Mourinho make such appallingly bad substitutions? Related: why Marouane Fellaini? Supplemental: seriously, though, why Marouane Fellaini? And why does Mourinho look so miserable all the time, almost pained, as though there were something dead and rotting in the air?

Maybe there is something dead and rotting in the air. The post-Alex Ferguson Manchester United, perhaps, or the post-Chelsea Jose Mourinho. It’s plausible that the a squad trained according to the visions of four wildly different managers, constructed under the dead hand of Glazernomics, and overseen by a broken shell of a once-Special manager will never achieve the kind of consistency that wins and wows. No use having a go if it doesn’t end up anywhere.

But on the other hand, where football managers used to be given time as a matter of course, now they have to earn it. Winning is the easiest way, but when that won’t come, a certain amount of wow-ing will have to suffice. And with United this season, the improved sense of adventure — spotty though it has been — has probably been enough to forestall any talk of a premature end to Project Mourinho. Enough of a go is being had. Just about.

They could really do with sticking the Europa League, though.