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Rio Ferdinand

So Long Slabhead?

Life comes at you fast.

Four years ago this summer, Manchester United paid £80 million to secure the services of Harry Maguire, a record transfer fee for a defender that still stands.

Sure, it was a lot of money, but at the time, it seemed like he was worth every cent. The club desperately needed a good center half and back line leader and Maguire had long been considered one of the best in the league. Pep Guardiola had tried to get him to replace Vincent Kompany while Jose Mourinho was so upset that United didn’t sign him in 2018 that he was still complaining about it a year later.

During Maguire’s first season at United, he made that fee look like a bargain, playing every minute of every match in the league and bringing a level of authority, skill and stability not seen since the heyday of Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic. When he was given the captain’s armband after only a few months at the club, it seemed like a no-brainer.

This weekend, when Maguire announced that he had been stripped of the captaincy, it seemed like another no-brainer for United. Maguire has been a liability for several seasons now and had lost his place under Erik ten Hag. He’s been so bad that even politicians outside the UK are taking shots at him. A departure seems inevitable— the only question is whether it will be a permanent or loan move.

So what happened?

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What A Difference One Week Makes…

Going into the FA Cup Final, things seemed to be looking up for David de Gea. Despite an uneven season, the longtime Manchester United #1 won his second Premier League Golden Glove award and looked set to sign a new contract— albeit for less money.

He wasn’t guaranteed to be the starter going into next season, but by accepting a hefty pay cut, he was set to stay at United and either compete for the top job or transition into a role as a backup and locker room leader.

But the seven day period between the FA Cup Final and the Champions League Final might have changed everything.

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Return of the King

A lot can change in 24 hours. Just ask Jack Bauer.

Or Cristiano Ronaldo. On Thursday, it looked like he was ready to break the hearts of the faithful United fans who still sing his name and join Pep Guardiola at Manchester City. In doing so, he would be the eighth player to suit up for both United and City — and the third player from that vaunted 2007-2008 Champions League winning team to do so.

But then the United Network kicked in. Sir Alex Ferguson spoke to the player he’s long had a fatherly affection for and tried to get him to come home, something he thought he had accomplished in 2013 as his last act before retirement. Former teammates weighed in, with Rio Ferdinand calling to try and talk him out of joining City, Patrice Evra keeping tabs via WhatsApp and Wayne Rooney sending a message through the media. Even Bruno Fernandes reached out to his fellow Portuguese international and Sporting Lisbon alum to try and change his mind and sell him on an unlikely homecoming.

It worked.

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“A Season in the Red”: How David Moyes Beat Himself Before Chelsea, Everton, Man City, Liverpool (and a Ton of Other Teams) Did

“He is a modest man who has a lot to be modest about,” Winston Churchill reportedly said about political rival Clement Attlee. Of course, Attlee got the last laugh, defeating Churchill in the 1945 parliamentary elections, but the (possibly apocryphal) put-down lives on in political lore.

Churchill’s quip was on my mind as I read A Season in the Red, by the Guardian’s Jamie Jackson. The book, which was released this month in the United States, chronicles all of the various missteps and mishaps from David Moyes’s disastrous 10-month stint at Old Trafford. The book, which covers both Moyes’s ill-fated tenure, as well as the first year of Louis van Gaal’s reign, is written primarily from the perspective of the press corp covering the team during that tumultuous two-year period following Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement.

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Super Dave

“Is that skinny kid with the bad alpaca-like facial hair the guy we just bought from Atlético for £18 million?”

I got to see one of David de Gea’s first starts for Manchester United. I went to watch United play Barcelona in Washington, D.C. during United’s pre-season tour of the United States in 2011. The match took place several months after Messi, Villa, Xavi and Iniesta dismantled Sir Alex Ferguson’s last great United team in London during the Champions League Final. The 20 year-old, rail-thin de Gea had just signed for the club to replace United legend Edwin van der Sar, and he looked like an overgrown tuft of grass standing in his green kit on the Fed Ex Field turf.

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Wither the Manchester United Youth Academy?

A lot has been made of Manchester United’s decision to sell home-grown player Danny Welbeck to Arsenal while bringing in Colombian hitman Radamel Falcao from AS Monaco for a (potentially) astronomical fee. Predictably, many United alums are up in arms that the move is a betrayal of the club’s history of putting youth development first and giving prized academy graduates an opportunity to succeed with the first team. Former assistant manager Mike Phelan sounded the warning bell immediately after the transfer window shut, saying that the club was “losing its identity.” Eric Harrison, the famed youth team coach that won the FA Youth Cup in 1992 with the likes of Ryan Giggs, David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt and the Neville Brothers said he was worried the club would “lose its soul” by importing foreign stars and failing to give opportunities to academy graduates.

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