Sir Alex Ferguson attends just about every game at Old Trafford. If he really wants to pile the pressure on Chelsea and Manchester United this Sunday, he will invite Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte to join him in the directors’ box.
Chelsea and Manchester United are fighting many of the same battles. Externally, the two sides will clash on Sunday with a place in next season’s Champions League potentially in the balance. Internally, both clubs are wrestling with who they are, whether they should move out of their defining managers’ shadows and, if so, how.
Maurizio Sarri and Ole Gunnar Solksjaer came into their posts under reactionary circumstances. Fans looked to both men to make their club’s football enjoyable again (Manchester United) or for the first time (Chelsea, so they tell us). Sarri and Solksjaer had a mandate to play expansive, attacking football that would bring smiles to players and fans alike. Both coaches were expected to take their clubs beyond the limitations their predecessors had the unfortunately honest disposition to speak about publicly.
Sarri and Solksjaer rode the wave for a while, but eventually the reality of their squads and the Premier League caught up with them. Maurizio Sarri’s base of support forgave him for publicly criticizing his players, notably N’Golo Kante, even though they called for Antonio Conte’s head for suggesting he had done as much as he could with the Blues at his disposal. Solksjaer has not yet come out in agreement with Jose Mourinho’s dour assessments of the Red Devils, but United’s results support the Special One’s conclusions.
Mourinho and Conte are the protean pragmatists of the Premier League. They each have their preferred organization and training methods, but on matchday, they do what it takes to win.
If Antonio Conte plays a 3-5-2 with Eden Hazard as a false-nine and minimal pressing and possession against Manchester City, it’s not because he thinks that is always the best way to play. It’s because he determined that gave Chelsea the best chance of a result on that day against that opponent.
If Jose Mourinho rotates his defenders and midfielders nearly every game for the first half of the season, trying players in new positions and perhaps constraining some players’ creative tendencies to reinforce the back, it’s not because that is his dream dogma come to life. It’s because the three-time Premier League winner and three-time European Cup winner concluded Manchester United did not have a steady best XI to challenge in four competitions, particularly in a Premier League with Liverpool and Manchester City in top form.
Mourinho’s and Conte’s bleak realism fed their pragmatism. But the fans at Chelsea and Manchester United wanted neither realism or pragmatism.
At Chelsea, they wanted entertainment. At Manchester United, they wanted style.
Chelsea fans wanted to move on from their defining coach, Jose Mourinho. They didn’t want someone so much in Mourinho’s mould like Conte. Manchester United fans wanted to return to the days of their defining coach, Sir Alex Ferguson. They wanted to erase the years of David Moyes, Louis van Gaal and Mourinho and go back to the way things were.
Absent from all the rancor was any acknowledgement that Mourinho and Conte just might have the measure of their squads better than the keyboard warriors.
Maurizio Sarri and Ole Gunnar Solksjaer are now in the unfortunate position of having to break the news to their devoted fans that the men they replaced were pretty much right. Solksjaer is not as rigidly dogmatic as Sarri (few people are, thankfully), but he is still very much aware that he is expected to resurrect the style of Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United. He will be in deep trouble if he starts making pragmatic adjustments to the lineup and tactics to grind out results. Solksjaer knows, though, he can only do as much as whatever Ed Woodward, the board and potentially the club’s first technical director provide him.
Sarri is up against the same limits as Antonio Conte. But Sarri reached that limit much sooner, without two trophies and without the experimentation that shows he tried everything and this is the most Chelsea can do.
Sarri is proving his own limitations as much as the squad’s. This isn’t news to some of us. The danger for Chelsea is giving Sarri more rope to hang himself (and the club with) in the form of another year and more transfers bred in Napoli, FIFA permitting. Sarri at least has the cushion of knowing the players will take the fall for his shortcomings, a luxury his more accomplished predecessors were never granted.
Chelsea and Manchester United have an identity inseparable from their success. United did not really know what they wanted out of the post-Ferguson era. After stumbling for a few years, they have realized that change is scary and they want the old days back. Whether that is a worthy goal is up to United fans, and whether it is an attainable goal is currently up to Ole Gunnar Solksjaer and United’s board.
United have an advantage over Chelsea in their battle for an identity and success: they are not ashamed of who they are at their best. Hopefully Chelsea won’t need six years to figure out that Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte were not only right about the club, but right for the club.
But if they do, that will be right around the time Diego Simeone is available!