Lisandro Martínez has become the latest Manchester United player to publicly criticise the club’s hierarchy, singling out technical director Jason Wilcox over a lack of investment in the squad. His comments came after United’s 2-0 defeat by Atlético Madrid on Tuesday night, and they have provoked a swift backlash from former players. But writing in The Guardian, Jonathan Liew argues that the defender’s intervention, however awkward, goes to the heart of what has gone wrong at Old Trafford.
Liew acknowledges that Martínez is not the ideal messenger. His high-profile defensive errors against Fulham and Tottenham are partly responsible for United’s indifferent start to the season. Former players lined up to condemn him: Wayne Rooney called the comments “disrespectful”; Ashley Young said he does not feel Martínez has the right; Rio Ferdinand said on his podcast, “These things don’t end well.” Liew suggests this reflects English football’s ingrained reluctance to scrutinise the owners and executives who hold more influence over the sport than anybody else, a reluctance also visible in the fallout from the Manchester City legal case.
The substance of Martínez’s complaint, Liew writes, is more complex than it first appears. United’s summer recruitment brought in three midfielders—Andrey Santos, Youri Tielemans and Carlos Baleba—plus reserve goalkeeper Karl Darlow, but no forward and no defender. The club pursued deals for Lewis Hall and Myles Lewis-Skelly, yet could not sign a defender because they were unable to sell one. There was no interest in Diogo Dalot, Noussair Mazraoui, Harry Maguire, Luke Shaw or Martínez, whose contracts are up next summer. This, Liew argues, is the product of recruitment decisions made and deals signed years ago.
Liew then asks why United, one of the world’s most lucrative clubs, need to sell to buy in the first place. He points to a club in austerity measures under part-owner Jim Ratcliffe, who has been cutting costs and raising ticket prices. United baulked at the asking price for Elliot Anderson and instead signed the inconsistent Santos and the adequate but overpromoted Tielemans. Liew frames this as an attempt to curb the years of excess that preceded Ratcliffe, when mediocre players were signed on ridiculous money and failing coaches were paid to leave.
The deeper cause, Liew says, is the Glazers. More than £1bn has been drained out of the club in their 21 years of ownership, not just in dividends but in share sales and interest payments on the debt they undertook to buy the club, while the maintenance of Old Trafford and the training ground at Carrington was neglected. Whether he knows it or not, Liew writes, when Martínez criticises the lack of investment he is in effect holding the Glazers accountable for more than two decades of avarice and mismanagement.
Martínez attempted to clarify his comments in a social media post on Wednesday night, but Liew suggests he may still be dispatched to the bomb squad. Few serving United players have spoken so frankly about the ruins of the Glazer ownership. Ole Gunnar Solskjær made a minor stand in early 2005, before the Glazers arrived at the club. Cristiano Ronaldo threw some hand grenades over his shoulder a few days before he left for the second time in 2022. Countless others waited for the safety of retirement.
Liew also expects Michael Carrick to be gone before long. A few months ago, he wrote hopefully that Carrick might be the ideal man to cut through the noise and nonsense; now he says he was wrong. It is not Carrick’s fault, Liew argues, that United have not signed a new defender in almost two years, that Bruno Fernandes is so clearly playing through discomfort, that Joshua Zirkzee is still hanging around the place, or that the ownership decided to purge season-ticket holders in the summer, generating a huge wave of ill-feeling and apathy that can be felt at Old Trafford on matchdays.
Ultimately, Liew argues, accountability is for the little people. It is far easier to replace a coach on a modest 20-month contract than to oust Ineos or the Glazers, or to replace Wilcox or Omar Berrada, even if we now know they partly built their reputations on the success of a club found to have serially cheated. Bumper returns for the owners, price hikes for the fans, corners cut on the pitch: this is the story of the modern Manchester United, which by no coincidence is also the story of modern football.