A Manchester United pre-mortem

The ‘pre-mortem’, developed by the behavioral psychologist Gary Klein, is a tool used by business executives to spot flaws in their own planning due to the natural innability in human beings to do this well (a problem known known as the planning fallacy). It involves imagining a scenario a year from now where your business has gone bust or your project has failed and pre-emptively identifying the possible reasons why this might happen. In this post I will use a pre-mortem examination to try to pinpoint where Manchester United might go wrong again this season.

So, imagine that it is now May, 2015 and Manchester United haven’t qualified for Europe again suffering devastating losses to Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal in the process. What went wrong?

1    They made too many changes over the summer.

Seventeen players left the club and six came in over the summer. Having a high turnover of players makes success on the pitch difficult (e.g. QPR in 2012/13 and Spurs in 2013/14).

2    There are too many ‘stars’

Not everyone got game every week and this caused unhappiness and resentment among the star names. Players they got rid of in the summer such as Hernandez, Welbeck, Anderson, Nani and Cleverley were not stars but were happy to play in different positions and do a job for the team when required. Every big club needs players like that.

3    Louis van Gaal’s personality

Not a likeable man at all. He’s arrogant and abrasive and became a hate-figure among opposition fans and the press. Modern managers need to be media-savvy, slick and eloquent in order to successfully represent the club brand (Mourinho and Wenger are absolutely excellent at this, for example). Even Ferguson, in his later years, mellowed considerably and learned to play the media well. Van Gaal’s negative behavior put unnecessary pressure on the players. 

4    Crap fans

As happened last season Manchester United fans got frustrated far too quickly with the team when they weren’t playing well. This made the players feel nervous and caused them to play even worse. Fans need to support the team, even when they’re playing badly. If they don’t they’re not doing their job properly in my opinion.

5     A sense of panic

In 2013/14, under Moyes, Manchester United were gripped with an almost paralyzing sense of panic when things started to go wrong which then only served to exacerbate their problems. Unfortunately this sense of panic continued into this season. The huge amount of money spent on player recruitment created an almost intolerable pressure on Van Gaal to succeed. Profits are down and they haven’t qualified for the Champions League for two years in a row. They know that if they carry on like this they will start losing money putting into jeopardy the long term future of the club.