Ronay identified two things in Pochettino’s favour. The first is his best style: an astringent, high-intensity 4-2-3-1 that could purge rather than paper over problems.
United are always on the verge of appointing him, Ronay said. The club has spent 13 years hiring and firing the same kind of structurally doomed manager, facing the same unresolved problems, and has spent the last eight years almost, but not quite, turning to Pochettino.
The latest link would not, in Ronay’s view, amount to a master plan. There is no magic solution in the appointment, he wrote, and it is still necessary to set out why it probably will not work.
Pochettino has already been through the machinery of elite club football, Ronay argued, and is steeped in the problems of dysfunctional super-clubs. Turning back, he wrote, is much the same as heading into that world in its ultimate form at United.
A decade on, Pochettino still looks like a coach searching for a home and a final form, Ronay said. He may also be on the wrong side of his own prime, a walking image of better times and diminished powers.
Those who know him have reported disillusionment with superstar ego, the swagger of unproven young players, and training sessions that became a losing battle for intensity, Ronay wrote.
In Paris, Ronay said, Pochettino seemed to arrive already burnt out, asked from a standing start to make sense of a group of star players. A case can even be made that Tottenham broke him, even though five seasons there were the peak of his club career.
United’s squad, Ronay wrote, is a jumble of mismatched parts. The club itself, he said, can look like a ghost ship stuck in a long calm, an institution that needs to feel good and keep moving as much as it needs a detailed fix.
Football is often emotion as much as detail, he wrote, and that is where United stands now.
The second, and more seductive, is a shared redemption story, a union of lost souls. Pochettino’s career still has an incompleteness to it, Ronay said.
Even so, Ronay concluded, Pochettino’s arrival would at least be a story: a meeting of last chances, not a cure.