Disunited - Dundee United fall apart

Chokers.

Don’t deny you’ve not thought it about Dundee United. We all have. They’ve done it in big league games. They’ve done it in a cup final. If you can think of a situation where they could lose their nerve, they’ve probably lost their nerve in it.

But choking normally lasts a couple of minutes - a mad moment, a failure to shut a game out. Yet this propensity to smack the self destruct button just when you look like making progress is in the middle of its most prolonged spell yet in a crisis of form and of trust that is starting to envelop the entire club.

The Arabs uninspiring form has gone a little under the radar for two reasons - firstly, they could call upon the excuse of the never ending series of games against Celtic. No one could reasonably expect them to get much out of that, but one draw out of four games that became ever easier for Celtic as they went on was disheartening. Secondly, unlike Hamilton, Dundee United waited until they had got to a stage of the season and points total where their top six place was certain before losing their form. But one point out of their last 18 possible shows the form for what it is - wretched. Furthermore, half these games were against bottom six sides - two of those at Tannadice. Excluding Celtic, it would be hard to dress their run of games since the League Cup Semi as difficult.

It is this that has meant what has been simmering under the surface - dissatisfaction with the club’s inability to build a solid first team or maintain a title tilt as Aberdeen have - has burst out into the foreground. Celtic would always be challenged not by them falling back to the pack but rather a team grasping the initiative and separating themselves from the rest. In January, Dundee United were three points off the top spot. That is now twenty three. Instead of becoming the side to establish themselves as Scotland’s second club, they have, instead, solidified themselves as also rans.

The short term cause of this was the sale of Stuart Armstrong and Gary Mackay-Steven to Celtic, a transfer many quipped was the club selling the League Cup Final away. What they didn’t think was that they were selling their entire season away. The speed at which Dundee United’s season has gone to hell and that fan satisfaction with the club has gone to hell with it, if not at an even faster pace is frightening. A club who just a couple of months ago were held up as the standard of a well-run club - debt free, built around youth, increasing attendances - are now being shown up as, perhaps, what they always were: a fairly cynical operation run similarly to Newcastle in that they scout talent, develop players and sell on without ever really building much of anything. The small nature of Scotland allows them to do this and still capture the odd trophy but, in the main, they exist to live off their transfer surplus and have few ambitions beside that. Well run as a business, perhaps. Well run as a club for the fans, most certainly not.

It’s this latter part that is the cause of much consternation now. Perhaps the best description of United’s business model comes from their accounts when they describe a key strategy as identifying and developing talent for the club and the football sector in general. Crucially, it’s clear that developing and selling is all that keeps the club ticking. A cursory look at their accounts shows that their general operations run at a loss with a profit achieved this year thanks to a one off gain of £1.3m due to becoming debt free, which happened because of player sales. Wages are still going up and a wage-turnover ratio of 63% is certainly higher than the club would want. Admin expenses jumping by 18% since last year is also sub-optimal.

But what really stirred the pot was a fans group, the Arab Trust, posting a claim the the board were not communicating and also, more seriously, that transfer money has gone AWOL. Firstly, the board claimed costs were being managed downwards, something which has not proven to be the case. As for the transfer money, the club acted embarrassingly by initially denying it and then, 24 hours later, admitting it to be the case as follows:

The contractual and renumenatory status of Jackie McNamara is a fairly complex (albeit, not that abnormal) one. He is paid a comparatively low basic salary, compared to the rest of the league and to his predecessors, but should he do a good job and produce players who can be sold on for a profit, he gets a slice of that pie. Certain parts of the media claimed that it was disgusting that the board were forced to divulge contractual details which conveniently ignore the fact that this situation wasn’t really much of a secret, that many fans already knew and that the media certainly will have been well aware of. McNamara gets somewhere in the region of 5% of the transfer profit so, for instance, he will have picked up a six figure sum from the sale of Stuart Armstrong and Gary Mackay-Steven.

This half-logical, half-madness policy has understandably got people’s backs up. It’s logical in that if Dundee United can’t afford a big basic salary, it is a carrot that can be dangled that incentivises making players better and, as a result, the team - they promote youth, get a good year or two of the players and then the club get a good profit.

It’s madness in that the manager is incentivised not to win stuff but to cash in and it promotes an inherently unstable system - Dundee United could have gone much further had they kept GMS and Armstrong but, knowing their value would only fall, McNamara acquiesced to a sale which was about as far from the club’s best interests as you could get and, instead in the interests of their bank manager alone. It debatably cost them the League Cup Final. It has probably cost them European competition. It nearly cost them their top six spot. It has unquestionably cost the club a feel good factor, a bucketload of point and their credibility.

Deftly, however, Stephen Thompson has diverted the attention away from how he runs the club onto the morality and justness of McNamara getting a sweet kickback for selling players when it has started a run of form that has left it looking less like a congratulatory slap on the back for development and more like an insulting kick in the balls as a bonus for losing. This leaves an unfortunate truth where the managers position is close to untenable not because of performance alone, but because he personally benefitted from having his team sold from under him with the collapse in form providing a handy excuse.

But, if anything, there is a far far more dangerous reason why McNamara’s position is untenable - because it is now in McNamara’s interest to depart. Dundee United still have talented young players - John Souttar, Aiden Connolly, Charlie Telfer - but they are a couple of seasons away from being ready. Once Nadir Ciftci is sold, the club have no saleable talents. One could even argue that even Ciftci isn’t worth that much. If we are entering a scenario where the manager’s basic pay is low and made acceptable only by getting a slice of transfer money, then once it doesn’t look like there will be much transfer money for a while, there is no incentive to stay at the club. McNamara is under scrutiny for performances on the pitch, is under scrutiny because of his contract off the pitch and is now seeing the prospect of the bonuses that make his contract acceptable in the first place drying up completely. Why on earth would he stay on? Should performances not pick up or even if they do, it is hard to see it not being beneficial for both club and manager to part ways at the end of the season - the club bury the contractual scandal and hire a new manager on different terms and McNamara cuts himself free from a situation where he is both under the microscope and failing to benefit from it any more.

There is little way to dress that up as anything other than a football club being run badly - it is a model which relies on there always being talents to sell and that, when talents are sold, performance always remains good. It leaves a nice bank balance but with a sour taste in the mouth. And it requires a two pronged approach to sort out - firstly, pay the manager normally. Once one adds Gauld, Robertson, Armstrong and GMS together, McNamara has likely personally benefitted to the tune of over £250k this season and, with his basic pay added, is either the best paid manager in the Premiership or not far from it and under no metric could he be argued to have really delivered this season aside from on the balance sheet. Keep the bonus but slash it and increase basic pay and one would see the club save money because no manager going into negotiations with the club would expect a basic salary the equivalent of over £6k per week, which McNamara has made this year once his commission is added in. Secondly, sort costs out once and for all - with a £2m loan still outstanding, transfer money and revenue in general is just going into a black hole and the more fans see that, the less they turn out. Bringing the wage-turnover ratio back under 60% is a good place to start as the only way to win back trust from the fans is to make the club sustainable without being reliant on transfer incomes - that is the base of starting to build a real team that can challenge for second and do well consistently.

As it stands, though, Dundee United’s painful spring looks like it will continue at least until the end of the season. Finishing sixth is likely as no other side in the top six will fear them and their form is such that it is hard to imagine them posing much threat. Once this damaging spring is over, they have a chance to rip up the current system and start again. Pressing the reset button is badly needed at this point.

Failure to do that and much worse next season may follow.