Whoever wins the Manchester derby, Manchester United will lose

Manchester United can significantly damage Manchester City’s title hopes on Wednesday, but the club have bigger problems.

The most relentless title race in Premier League history has come to this: Manchester United vs. Manchester City at Old Trafford, trophy on the line. Except only City can actually win the trophy, and not at Old Trafford, and United have won twice in eight games, and are coming off a miserable 4-0 defeat to Everton in the aftermath of which their manager threatened to sell all their players, and they might prefer City to win the title anyway, given the alternative. Granted, that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

What are we to make of Wednesday’s Manchester derby, then? On one view, the most dominant side in Premier League history — freshly pissed off following a heartbreaking, VAR-reviewed exit from the Champions League and having won 24 of their 26 matches since the turn of the year — are playing a Europa League team in arguably their worst run of form all season, lacking possibly literally a single player playing even remotely close to his ceiling. There is no technical or tactical or talent-based reason to think City won’t win this match.

On another view, City, who have spent the entire season trading places with Liverpool at the top of the table, finally get to play their game in hand, knowing a win will send them a point clear with three matches remaining. It just so happens that game in hand comes against their oldest and fiercest rivals, a club the weight of whose history and tradition still loom over City like a mountain over a movie theater, and who came from two goals down to prevent them clinching the title exactly a year ago this month.

Which of these two narratives prevails will depend on what happens at Old Trafford on Wednesday. Right now the most unpredictable variable is the level of interest of both United’s players and fans. After Arsenal and Chelsea dropped points this weekend, United still have a realistic chance of finishing in the top four and qualifying for the Champions League, which, particularly in the wake of their humiliation at Goodison, should generate some galvanizing sense of professional pride among their players.

The problem is their players, with one or two exceptions, are much worse that City’s. United’s only meaningful edge, then, seems to be Old Trafford; but even that edge has been significantly dulled by the context in which this match occurs. Not only would a positive result give United’s actual oldest and fiercest rivals, Liverpool, the lead in the title race, but events of the past month have seen the wave of euphoria that washed over the club following Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s arrival almost completely evaporate.

Since Solskjaer was given the manager’s job on a permanent basis, United have lost four of six matches, been knocked out of the Champions League and are now reportedly on the verge of appointing Mike Phelan, he of Being Pals With Sir Alex Ferguson fame, their new technical director, a position that was supposed to mark the club’s long-overdue recognition of the need to modernize and is now set to become the living embodiment of their apparent inability to finally and decisively leave the past in the past.

It takes a remarkable quantity of mismanagement for a club of United’s resources to be this bad for this long. Whatever the outcome, Wednesday’s match will be a fitting culmination to these years of incompetence: Their most important contribution to the Premier League title race will be to determine which of their two biggest rivals gets to win it. Even worse, it seems their only route to victory is for the Theatre of Dreams to live up to its name, for the club’s rich history to produce one more howl of defiance before it drags them back into the swamp of mediocrity.