Forget blaming JJ Gabriel – it is Man United’s fault the 15-year-old wants to leave, writes OLIVER HOLT. Why would his family entrust the future of English football’s hottest youth property to the greedy Glazers and Sir Jim Ratcliffe?
When a young player wants to leave a football club, it is a default mechanism in the culture of English football to blame the kid for being a prima donna with ideas above his station or, more often, point the finger at a pushy parent or an unscrupulous agent for putting dollar signs ahead of development. And so it has been with JJ Gabriel.
When the news broke on Tuesday afternoon that Gabriel, who is 15 years old and perhaps the most feted young player at Manchester United since Ryan Giggs, had asked to leave the club ahead of his 16th birthday next month, it was greeted with a mixture of dismay and horror at Old Trafford.
But instead of blaming the kid or his parents or an intermediary, or all three, the breakdown in relations between Gabriel and the club feels more like yet the latest symbol of the decline of a club that is learning the hard way that more than a decade of mismanagement at the top of the organisation comes with consequences.
At one level, that means that United can no longer attract the best players in the transfer market. This summer, Elliot Anderson, Mateus Fernandes, Sandro Tonali, Bruno Guimaraes and Adam Wharton were said to be United’s top targets in their attempts to strengthen their midfield. None of them came.
Fernandes and Tonali went to Spurs, Guimaraes went to Arsenal, Anderson went to Manchester City, Wharton stayed at Crystal Palace. United had to settle for Carlos Baleba, Andrey Santos and Youri Tielemans, all good players but not good enough to close the gap to the teams already ahead of United.
That is the reality for United now. They are not the preferred destination for the best players in the world. Even on the back of a positive season last season when Michael Carrick and Steve Holland took the team back into the top four, United’s recruitment let them down in the summer and they have started this season poorly.
Manchester United’s teenage prodigy JJ Gabriel, 15, announced on Tuesday that he wants out
The breakdown in relations between Gabriel and the club feels more like yet the latest symbol of the decline of Manchester United
Who can blame him for wanting to leave the club with the way Sir Jim Ratcliffe is running it
The club is still a mess of dysfunction. The idea that they will fix the team department by department, moving on to replace a creaking defence in the next summer window, is deeply flawed. The dynamics of football teams do not work like that. It feels, once more, as if United are going backwards.
And then there is the farrago involving the club declaring war on a section of its own fans. They are trying to root out ticket touts, the club says, but the removal of hundreds of supporters’ season tickets has created a poisonous atmosphere at Old Trafford at a time when Carrick least needs it.
Think about that and it feels rather amusing that some are accusing those around Gabriel of greed. Greed? United and their current clutch of misbegotten owners wrote the book on it. If there is any moral high ground in an episode like this, United will find it very hard to scramble up to it.
Switch the question around. Why would the hottest youth property in English football want to stay with the modern Manchester United? Why would JJ Gabriel’s parents entrust their son to club owners like the Glazers and Sir Jim Ratcliffe? It is not surprising that the lad is looking for a way out. It would be more surprising if he wasn’t.
I saw Gabriel play for United in the FA Youth Cup against Oxford United at the Kassam Stadium last February and it was obvious that all the hype about him was true. He was a special talent. It was not just that he was electric with the ball at his feet, he had an instinctive awareness of space and how to find it and vision that went beyond his years.
It is said that Carrick was planning to include him in the United squad for the Carabao Cup tie against Brighton on Wednesday evening but it may be that the club has missed a trick by not making him part of the first team at an earlier opportunity. It may be that, even at 15, Gabriel felt he was being held back.
It was expected that Gabriel was to be a part of Michael Carrick’s (left) squad to face Brighton
Arsenal, for instance, handed debuts to their own prodigies, Max Dowman and Ethan Nwaneri, as 15-year-olds. Dowman, who has already announced himself as a spectacularly precocious talent, scored in the Premier League last season and was used in the title run-in by Mikel Arteta.
It is said that United are still hopeful they can repair the situation and retain Gabriel’s services but it already feels as if it will be hard to come back from a fracture of such a public nature.
The older fans amongst us may still associate United with the Busby Babes and the Class of 92 and all the glories and the romance that came with those groups of home-grown players. But those days are long gone and the club that produced them disappeared long, long ago.