The day Manchester United 2024-25 were confirmed as the club’s worst team of the Premier League era

There is never a good time to play the modern iteration of Newcastle United at St James’ Park. The past three years have seen Eddie Howe and his staff transform them into one of the more pugnacious and potent threats in the Premier League.

Call them “Atletico Tyneside”, make wolf whistles at their combative midfield trio and the in-form Alexander Isak, or wheel out metrics assessing the intensity of their defending. Newcastle play good football when they have the ball, but their greatest assets emerge when they are without it. They hunt and harry in packs, seizing upon any passing errors before counter-attacking at speed and with purpose.

There is never a good time to play this new version of Newcastle, but a trip to St James’ Park, three days after a European away match? That certainly might be considered a bad time. If one can describe Manchester United as between a rock and a hard place, then this Newcastle game was the boulder maintaining pressure ahead of a crucial Europa League quarter-final second leg against Lyon on Thursday.

Ruben Amorim made five changes to the starting XI that drew the first leg against Lyon last week. Some swaps — such as Joshua Zirkzee for Rasmus Hojlund — felt performance-based. Others, such as Christian Eriksen’s inclusion over Casemiro, Victor Lindelof for Harry Maguire, and Harry Amass over Patrick Dorgu, suggested the head coach wanted to preserve the legs of his more important players. Andre Onana did not travel with the squad, with Altay Bayindir replacing him in goal.

Some things change with Amorim’s United. Many do not. Their 4-1 defeat on Sunday was born from playing a team better equipped for the physical challenges the Premier League demands of its best sides. The loss was their 14th of the league campaign and confirms the club will finish with their lowest points total of the Premier League era.

(If Man United were to win all six of their remaining league fixtures in 2024-25, they would end up with 56 points)

“We need to accept that and move forward and try to do things so much better in the future,” said Amorim at full time. “So we don’t have this kind of season (again). And then you can see some goals. They (Newcastle) were doing high pressure and we lose possession in some moments — some spaces  — that we cannot lose possession.”

Gary Neville told NBC that the current squad are in a “desperate situation”. Roy Keane said on Sky Sports that United are “physically and mentally a weak team”, before calling out Bruno Fernandes and deriding the team as “bluffers”. Big defeats have a habit of transforming Manchester United from a football club into a soap opera; multiple characters bickering over what went wrong.

So why did Manchester United 2024-25 become the club’s worst Premier League vintage? And should Sunday’s result be the reason for widespread meltdown?

The tactical answers verge on the mundane. Amorim’s men lost on Sunday for the same reason they have lost several Premier League games this season. They struggled to deal with the swarming hornet’s-nest defence that Howe and others have forged in the north east of England. Newcastle relish the physical battles that have been essential to modern Premier League matches. Amorim’s personnel changes unbalanced an already fragile team. A trio of second-half substitutions made clear the head coach’s priorities. He would rather protect his best assets for Thursday’s game — where Man United have a physical edge — than exhaust everything in an arm-wrestle with a much bigger Premier League foe.

“If you have one more second to think with the ball, it’s a different game,” said Amorim on Wednesday evening when asked about the difference between European football and that of the Premier League. Loose balls, second balls, aerial duels, the majority of these were won by a Newcastle team hungry to deny Man United that extra second to think.

Illness prevented Howe from being in the dugout, but his team carried on with its finely tuned pressing and relentless counter-pressing in his absence. Newcastle are a well-coached team with the discipline and collective intelligence to deal with the majority of threats thrown at them. Manchester United are in the early stages of learning Amorim’s Plan A and lack the confidence and creativity to think their way out of a situation when things break down.

A finely worked team goal, started by Kieran Trippier and completed by Sandro Tonali in the 24th minute, began a wobble. An equaliser scored by Alejandro Garnacho in the 37th minute restored some balance, before Harvey Barnes removed what little momentum Man United had shortly after half-time.

This match was played with an interesting ebb and flow. Manchester United are best when running into space and Newcastle wished to turn such space into a black-and-white-themed traffic jam. The sight of Zirkzee running into the final third with the ball, only to succumb to a hamstring injury, made for uncomfortable viewing. This team find it hard to settle into a groove and in the short moments they do, misery and misfortunate arise to spoil things.

When faced with one of the better midfield trios in the land, Manchester United retreated into strange spurts of self-preservation. Players dawdled on the ball in key moments, hesitant to make mistakes. Newcastle responded to such uncertainty by snatching possession and taking the initiative. Barnes’ second of the game saw Noussair Mazraoui shrugged aside before the forward ran through the heart of the Man United defence and provided a third for Newcastle. A fourth was delivered when Bayindir’s long pass out the back was blocked by a leaping Joelinton, sending the ball into the path of Bruno Guimaraes, who finished calmly.

Amorim spent his two hours in the away dugout cutting a frustrated figure, alternating between shaking his head, throwing his arms aloft and walking away in disappointment. Personnel changes pushed an already uncertain team to its limit on Sunday. Bayindir tried his best on what was his Premier League debut but provided little evidence he could be Amorim’s starting goalkeeper next season. Newcastle fans would spend the game’s final minutes goading his every touch of the ball, hoping he might make another mistake.

Such was Newcastle’s belief in their out-of-possession strategy that they were content to let Amorim’s men pass the ball out from the back, safe in the knowledge that neither Lindelof nor Manuel Ugarte had the requisite quality to progress the ball properly, and if they did, they could win it back easily. When Amorim decided to remove Fernandes for Kobbie Mainoo in the 82nd minute, it felt like a concession.

His side will need a much-improved performance against Lyon at Old Trafford, but Thursday’s game — and their season as a whole — sits in a precarious place. Collect the number of things that need to go right for Amorim’s men to win a game and then contrast it with the number of things that can go awry and cost them a result. Many teams leave St James’ Park licking their wounds after a bruising defeat, but this result once again raises a powerful question: where does a football team go when their best efforts very often aren’t good enough?

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