When Was the Last Time Manchester United Got Relegated?
There’s no other way to put it: Manchester United are hitting rock bottom. Last season, they finished eighth under Erik ten Hag, their worst-ever Premier League finish. Ten Hag managed to keep hold of his job thanks to his FA Cup Final victory against Manchester City, only to be sacked on October 28 after accumulating 11 points from nine matches. Ruud van Nistelrooy was given the interim post with the club sitting in 14th place, before making way for Rúben Amorim.
Having ended a 19-year title drought at Sporting, expectations were high for the Portuguese manager upon his arrival, but so far, he’s been unable to deliver. United have taken just 26 points from 22 matches and have a -5 goal difference, and they sit 13th in the table, just 10 points above the relegation zone. To put that in perspective, United haven’t finished outside the top eight since 1989/90, when they placed 13th under Sir Alex Ferguson.
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From the playing squad, which now looks like a depression quilt of players signed by different managers, each in various states of being broken by this club that seems to ruin players, to the ground which is in dire need of repair. This wouldn’t look so bad if the funds were there for a rebuild of the squad to go with the new manager, but from an Financial Fair Play point of view, the January transfer window will resemble a Russian dinner on a stormy night in the 80s, somewhere in Siberia.
Amorim is apparently considering extending Harry Maguire’s contract as the club “starving for leaders on the pitch”. As for the facilities, which haven’t seen anything meaningful in terms of modernisation since the Fergie era, let’s just say that a club that has been posting losses season after season, can’t really dream of a new stadium.
The prospect of a club like Manchester United getting relegated seems beyond the realms of possibilities, but a decade of mismanagement has now made this nightmare quite real. Amorim has been quoted as saying that the prospect of relegation is the ‘shock’ Manchester United need, but I will go a step further and say that relegation might actually be the biggest footballing shock of all time.
If we take away the massive loss of revenue and the exodus of stars, which has already started if we take into account Rashford’s situation and the club’s apparent eagerness to sell its most prized youngsters, relegation might sound like a clean slate for such a toxic club. So if we are to prepare for such an eventuality, let’s cast our gaze back into the past to when Manchester United last got relegated and see what might happen if the second tier of English football will be graced by arguably England’s biggest club once again.
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Manchester United are no strangers to relegation, since the early days of the club were marked by mediocrity and stints in the lower leagues. A reversal of fortunes and a change of name from Newton Heath to their current name saw them crowned champions in 1908 and 1911, but the interwar years brought further relegations and a very close call with third-tier football, when United saved themselves by beating Millwall on the final day of the season.
Having gained promotion just before the outbreak of World War Two and suffering extensive damage to their stadium through German bombing raids, the club appointed Matt Busby as manager in 1945. Busby was only 36 at the time of appointment, was a former Liverpool and Manchester City player and demanded unprecedented levels of control from the club when he was appointed
Such was the desperation to regain their status as one of England’s premier football teams that the club accepted. Busby overhauled the squad promoting several youth players from the Manchester United Junior Athletic Club which had been founded in 1938 with just that goal in mind and got rid of many of the older figures.
The result was a team with an average age of 22 that lifted the FA Cup already in 1948 before being crowned champions in 1952. The 1956 and 1957 seasons were the high water mark of the team dubbed the “Busby Babes” as they won back-to-back league titles and reached the semi-final of the newly established European Cup.
In that season of Europe’s premier competition, the top two goal scorers were Dennis Viollet and Tommy Taylor with 9 and 8 goals respectively, from just 4 games. The world’s press were in love with the young English team and many were tipping United to push perennial winners and favourites Real Madrid all the way in the 1958 season. In the league, United were third, just six points behind league leaders Wolves and were looking to defeat Red Star Belgrade in the European Cup quarterfinals.
Having overcome the Serbian side, the plane carrying the United players and staff from Belgrade back home stopped to refuel in Munchen. After three unsuccessful take-off attempts and with snow building on the runway, the plane skidded of the tarmac and crashed into a house, killing nearly half of the passengers on board, including many of United’s brightest talents.
Busby himself was severely injured but made a miraculous recovery and when he returned to his team started the arduous task of rebuilding a squad that had lost some of its best talents. Having lost Duncan Edwards, considered a future footballing superstar, Busby could still rely on Bobby Charlton and with the addition of Denis Law in 1962 a new golden generation was starting to form.
The club abandoned the “Busby Babes” moniker and around the same time, the “Red Devils” identity began to form. Despite finishing 19th in the league in 1963 they managed to win the FA Cup, before coming second the next year. Their immediate reversal of fortune was helped by the addition of the last member of the so-called “holy trinity”, George Best.
The most successful period in the club’s history so far would follow between 1965 and 1968, winning two more league titles and the 1968 European Cup at the Wembley Stadium. However, in 1969, Matt Busby announced plans to retire, joining the backroom staff of United and naming Wilf McGuinness, the reserve team coach as his successor.
In a situation we are surely all very familiar with the proposed successor to a Manchester United manager who had been at the club for 24 years faltered under the pressure of living up to his predecessor. With the old manager looking down from the stands and an aging squad, some of which had known only one manager for most of their careers, the task seemed impossible, much like the one given to David Moyes.
Busby returned on an interim basis to the team, managing to save them from relegation and finishing 8th. A further 8th place finish under Frank O’Farrell followed, with brief glimpses of quality amidst a seemingly sinking ship. Much like when United were courting every manager in Europe before allowing Ten Hag to stay another season, O’Farrell hadn’t even been the club’s first choice, as approaches to European Cup winner Jock Stein of Celtic, Football League mastermind Don Revie of Leeds and Dave Sexton of Chelsea having been made.
The next season would be even worse, seeing United enter a relegation battle, which cost O’Farrell his job. Scotland manager Tommy Docherty was announced as the new United manager. Charlton retired at age 35 and George Best was becoming increasingly erratic as his alcoholism truly began to affect his playing career. He had already announced his retirement in 1972 aged just 26, before immediately backtracking and then retiring again in 1973.
Docherty managed to keep United barely afloat, finishing 18th as he signed a series of new players. Out of the new recruits that came in during these years just two, centre back and captain Martin Buchan and future club legend Lou Macari could be considered successful. George Best once again came out of retirement to play for the club in the 1973-74 season but the most devastating blow came when Denis Law signed for archrivals Manchester City on a free transfer.
United were 13th after the fourth matchweek, but it was all downhill from there and the club were firmly in a relegation battle picking up just 4 wins in the next 20 league games. Best played his last game for the club on New Year’s Day 1974, and with that the last member of the holy trinity had left the club. Manager Tommy Docherty started asking his players to slow things down and play out from the back and a good run of form followed, but it was too little too late.
Over the course of the season, the club managed to win just 10 games from 42, losing 20 and drawing 12. With two games of the season to go, United were 21st, three points off safety. On the 27th of April 1974, United’s first relegation in 36 years was sealed in the cruellest of ways. Nearly 57, 000 spectators gathered at the Old Trafford stadium and watched on as United and City cancelled each other out for over an hour, when City’s Francis Lee broke through the United defence.
He crossed the ball from the edge of the box to Denis Law, who was waiting in the centre and Law backheeled the ball past United goalkeeper Alex Stepney. After the game, Law stated that he hadn’t felt so depressed in his life and even 30 years after scoring that infamous goal he admits he is still haunted by it. Manager Tommy Docherty stayed on for the next season, which would be spent in the second tier and immediately moved on all remaining players from the Busby era except for goalkeeper Alex Stepney.
New signings like Stuart Pearson and young players who had shown promise last season like Sammy McIlroy were going to be the squad’s new core. The similarities to United’s modern-day woes end at the behaviour of their fans, however. Instead of acting like petulant children and either criticizing the club at every step, United’s fans of 1974 rallied around their club and Old Trafford’s attendances actually increased in the second tier.
The atmosphere around the club back then was starkly different from the one nowadays. Most fans loved Tommy Docherty and even the owners, the Edwards family, were viewed favourably. As the next season went underway United won their first four games on the trot and were unbeaten in their first nine.
Despite suffering seven defeats, mostly coming during the middle part of the season, United finished strongly on a run of 11 unbeaten games, and Lou Macari sealed the club’s promotion with his goal against Southampton on April 5th 1975. This form carried over into their first season back into the top flight and many were tipping them to become only the third side to win the league after promotion.
Ultimately, a third-place finish, just four points off champions Liverpool, and an FA Cup Final, losing to Southampton, was the best the team could manage, still incredibly impressive for a newly promoted side. The 1977 season would bring two massive developments to United’s fortune, namely their first trophy in 9 years and the sacking of Tommy Docherty, who had been the architect of United’s revival. His affair with the wife of one of the club’s physios garnered negative attention from the press and the club decided to sack him for his offence.
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The FA Cup win had come after a 2-1 win against Liverpool in the final, thus preventing their most hated rivals from completing a treble that season, but Docherty’s sacking was a huge blow to the club. His replacement, Dave Sexton could only muster a second-place finish behind Liverpool in 1980, who were probably the best team in Europe at the time and a lost FA Cup against Arsenal one year prior.
Ron Atkinson came in at the end of the 1981 season and brought in Bryan Robson from West Bromwich Albion for £1.5 million, a then-British transfer record. His two FA Cup wins, in 1983 against Brighton and in 1985 against last season’s champions Everton were overshadowed by an inability to consistently compete for the title in the league. His sacking in 1986 paved the way for Sir Alex Ferguson to take the club to its greatest ever performances becoming arguably the greatest manager of all time in the process.
By: Eduard Holdis / @He_Ftbl
Featured Image: @GabFoligno / Justin Setterfield / Getty Images