So it only took more than a year, but it looks like Manchester United is finding its level. The team is undefeated in the league since the restart, and indeed undefeated since 22 January, when they lost 2-0 to Burnley.
The main reason for the uptick in form seems to have been the signing of Bruno Fernandes from Sporting in Portugal, during the January transfer window. This tactical analysis is from before he signed, but casts an eye on how he'd fit into the United team, and it seems to be borne out by the facts since his arrival at Old Trafford.
But beyond the numbers on the pitch, what's interesting is that manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer even made this transfer. It's not excessive to state how precarious his position was by the time the January transfer window rolled around - a couple of pundits on the Guardian Football Weekly had even predicted at the start of this season that he'd be sacked by November, such was the drop in form after his appointment as permanent manager at the end of last season.
He'd seemed to grab the players' attention in his first few games, winning an impressive streak in the league and coming back from an inauspicious first leg in the Champions League to beat Paris St-Germain. He'd even gotten some good form out of Paul Pogba, whose inconsistency under Jose Mourinho must have contributed to his sacking and Solskjaer's appointment.
But then Pogba went AWOL again this season, with a long-term ankle injury, and a 4-0 defeat of Chelsea notwithstanding, United spent the first few months of the campaign looking like they were in crisis again. But for every poor result, they managed to rescue Solskjaer with a win (or at least a creditable performance) right after, and so he hung on, indeed long past when Mauricio Pochettino was sacked by Spurs and replaced by Mourinho.
Manchester United is a bit of a weird club. It's one of the richest, if not the absolutely most profitable, in the world. Yet despite that, the stadium grows increasingly shabby and the football takes a back seat to the sponsorship deals - though these deals, ironically, are probably what left United in such good shape to weather the coronavirus shutdown without putting players or staff on furlough.
In a way, that lack of interest in the footballing side of being a football club may also have saved Solskjaer - he wasn't picking too many fights with the players or overseeing too many embarrassing defeats, so the owners might have been happy to keep him in place until someone better came along. You see this attitude a lot in the Premier League at the moment, where owners like Mike Ashley are happy to let their clubs (in this case Newcastle) rot as long as they stay in the top division.
But I think it's also interesting that Solskjaer had the vision for how he wanted the team to play (a thing that wasn't always clear as they went into their decline after his appointment) and was able to buy the player he wanted to make that vision a reality. There was a sense, reading the football pages in the last months of 2019, of him being a little isolated and not entirely in charge. The idea that Pogba might still be at the club by the end of the season tended to be met with laughter.
Still, it's clear that Solskjaer knew how he wanted the team to play, and found the player who could do that, either on his own or, as the manager must have preferred, in partnership with Pogba. In one stroke, Solskjaer strengthens his team, and also puts his star midfielder on notice that he can get by without him - depending on Pogba's level of professionalism, that either lights a fire under him to work harder, or indicates that he's working with a manager who knows what he's doing.
And in the meantime Fernandes has scored 6 goals in 9 appearances, plus 5 assists to boot, linking up with Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial quite well.
I suspect Pogba is still likely to leave during the next transfer window, though it's notable he hasn't followed the example of Leroy Sané, who jumped ship from Manchester City mid-season to go back to Germany. If Juventus wants Pogba back, or one of the Spanish giants, or even PSG, it's hard to imagine him not making the leap. But Fernandes seems to have filled the gap left by Pogba's season-long injury quite impressively, and he looks like he'll be a good replacement if Pogba leaves.
The other point to think about is the speed with which clubs replace managers. United famously endured a poor start to Alex Ferguson's tenure in 1986, but stuck with him and were rewarded by the most dominant display in English football history (he says with possibly unwarranted confidence). As I mentioned last week, United has won 29 trophies in the past 30 years (not counting Community Shields), and several of those have also come in the years since Ferguson retired, though notably they haven't won the league since then.
One hesitates to say that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is the next manifestation of Sir Alex Ferguson, but you can appreciate his role in how football writers are starting to entertain the prospect of United challenging for the title next season. If that does happen, it'll probably cement the disciples of Ferguson at the club forever, for better or worse; though it feels equally likely that things go desperately wrong for Solskjaer again and that this time he doesn't survive the slump.
It also makes me wonder again about a point from Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, where they argue that the manager is actually not as relevant to the success of a team as we think. They have a new edition out, and I feel like I need to revisit it to see how that suggestion of theirs squares with the experience of managers like Solskjaer, Mourinho or Claudio Ranieri, not to mention super-managers like Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp in the last five years.
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