Lack of leadership from top to bottom is killing Man United

A new dimension to the José Mourinho-Paul Pogba saga has been provided by Dimitar Berbatov, rapidly making a name for himself in a Sybil Fawlty specialist-subject-the bleedin'-obvious kind of way as a spokesman for a gambling company. "Football should be about what happens on the pitch, not who has the biggest dick," the former Manchester United striker said. "I'm fed up of seeing these headlines, you are all grown-ups and this sort of thing really needs to be kept in-house."

As a summary of what Berbatov refers to as “a stupid situation”, that is as neat and precise as one of his cushioned first touches from days gone by. There is room for debate on whether the two main protagonists are fully grown-up in any meaningful sense, though Berbatov is right about the spectacle being unedifying. That last thing anyone wants to see at the toybox end of the newspaper is toys out of the pram.

The Bulgarian is probably struggling to understand why a club such as Manchester United does not come down like a ton of bricks on the superstar squabblers as it would have done in his day. Not that something resembling the present stand-off would ever have happened when Berbatov was at Old Trafford because Alex Ferguson was in charge then, and his preferred method of dealing with gobby challenges to his authority was to move the player out, however important or expensive, rather than conduct a feud via the media.

Ferguson knew perfectly well how to use the media – and opponents, referees and officialdom in general were all accustomed to feeling the heat of his belligerent personality – but he drew the line at public attacks on his own players. He demanded loyalty from those in his charge but the quid pro quo was that he in turn would never be disloyal. One of the reasons he stopped attending post-match press conferences, in fact, was to swerve questions about a player he knew he would not be able to keep defending indefinitely.

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So Mourinho is not Ferguson. This much we know already. But the answer to Berbatov’s implied question, the reason why no one within the club is pointing to the brand and telling the fractious egos to give it a rest, can also be traced back to Ferguson and his previous influence.

If there is a power vacuum at the top of Manchester United at the moment, with absentee owners only interested in profit margins and a weak executive vice-chairman – Ed Woodward – more concerned with adding to an absurdly long list of commercial partners than concentrating on the core activity, it is because no one is actually answerable to anyone else any more.

In the old days everyone was answerable to Fergie – everyone on this side of the Atlantic at least – because he made it his business to poke his nose into every aspect of the club. That was his notion of how to run such a large and complicated business. The first rule of his leadership course would be that you can have only one leader. That does not mean he was unable or unwilling to delegate – later-stage Ferguson was quite adept at sharing out the workload – but everyone knew where the buck stopped when any major decision arose.

Clearly that is an old-fashioned way to run a football club, as United belatedly discovered when Ferguson stepped down. Because he had been at the club so long, and seen his own role expand imperceptibly as United’s empire and influence widened, it was not immediately appreciated that a new manager would find it difficult to understand the scope and scale of the task.

It was also enormously unhelpful that David Gill departed as chief executive at the same time as Ferguson, robbing the club not only of a partnership that worked but also of an extra layer of experience. That mistake, more than any particular managerial appointment, is perhaps key to what is now seen as a bungled succession. With Gill at his side, David Moyes might have stood a chance of lasting longer than one season, if not the six years originally planned.

United did not fancy Mourinho in 2013, but that was before they realised how far things had moved on since 1986, the year Ferguson came down from Scotland. As soon as that adjustment was made, and United worked out they were now in the era and the market for a rentable super-coach, Mourinho swam into their sights once Louis van Gaal had tried and failed to impress.

After the unpalatable stasis of a second managerial disappointment, even the Mourinho doubters were ready to accept a well-qualified candidate who at least was a proven winner and at worst a less unpleasant taste of medicine than his predecessor, though the man apparently keen to follow Ferguson in 2013 was so lukewarm three years later that he declined to move his family to northern England and chose to operate out of a hotel.

Ferguson would never have approved of that and perhaps Woodward ought not to have either. United seem to have turned into a transit camp rather than a destination of choice, so perhaps it is no surprise they have ended up with a dissatisfied manager and a disenchanted record signing.

Woodward is said to be backing Mourinho, although there is no guarantee the Portuguese will stick around any longer than Pogba, in fact it is hard at the moment to predict which of the pair will be first out of Manchester. All that can be safely said is that when figures of authority are taking sides in an internal argument it is a departure from the leadership principles that served United so well in the club’s storied past. This is a club built on unity. The clue may even be in the name. – Guardian service