Lisandro Martínez is right, and the people squirming about it know he's right. After Manchester United's 2-0 defeat at Atletico Madrid, he stood in front of a camera and said the thing the club has spent years paying managers to absorb for them: "I expect more [investment]. 100 per cent. I expect more from our technical director [Jason Wilcox]." Then he went further. "You can't keep changing, changing, changing the manager. What about other areas? I can't say more."
He didn't need to say more, he'd already named Wilcox. A current player put a technical director on blast on live television. That doesn't happen, and it landed because nobody could call it a lie.
Look at who has walked through the manager's office. Ralf Rangnick came in as interim, begged the owners to back a rebuild, and was ignored. Erik ten Hag won a couple of domestic trophies, got his contract extended after an end-of-season review, and was sacked within months of that same review deciding to keep him. Rúben Amorim arrived to fanfare, reached a Europa League final, lost it 1-0 to Spurs, and the club publicly swore he was a long-term project, before sacking him anyway. Now Michael Carrick is the permanent man, and he's the one Martínez is defending.
Four coaches in roughly five years. The dugout is the one chair United can't stop reupholstering. Everything underneath it stays the same. The recruitment stays scattershot. The squad keeps arriving at nights like Madrid, as Martínez put it, not "ready for this kind of night." If you change the driver four times and the car still won't start, you stop blaming the driver.
Some of these players have endured plenty of flat performances themselves, so watching them point at the boardroom can look convenient. Martínez said as much himself: "as players we have to do more." Both things are true: the players have underperformed, and the people assembling them have failed for years. The difference is that when a player has a bad run, he gets dropped or sold. When Wilcox and the people above him fail, they get to fire the manager and start the cycle again with their own jobs intact. That's the scam Martínez just described.
Wayne Rooney, on the same broadcast, reckoned Martínez had "gone a bit too far" and that it "should have stayed internal." That's the instinct the club relies on: keep it in the building, let the manager eat it in the press conference. Carrick, for his part, said he hadn't even heard the comments and couldn't judge them. Of course he wants to stay out of it. He's next on the conveyor belt.
The context makes Martínez's anger easy to understand. As of the Atletico defeat, United sat 13th in the Premier League, were already out of the Carabao Cup at the first hurdle, had won two of their first nine games of the season, and were on their worst start to a top-flight campaign in four decades. It's a recruitment failure. You don't coach your way out of a squad that wasn't built to compete, assembled by people who keep getting to grade their own homework.
Martínez committed the only sin that actually gets punished at this club. He said it with his name on it. Back him, or admit the decline is exactly what the hierarchy wants.
