When United dropped to the second division
Fifty years ago, Manchester United were relegated from the top flight. Seems an unthinkable sentence, doesn’t it? But that’s precisely what happened on 27 April 1974, when Birmingham City’s victory over Norwich City condemned Tommy Docherty’s side to demotion.
The big question always asked is: how could such a thing happen? How could United, one of the world’s biggest and grandest football clubs, go from winning the European Cup in 1968 to relegation in the space of six years?
Here’s how...
Pledge of Allegiance
There were many elements of United’s success that caused Sir Matt Busby to beam with pride. Perhaps the most significant of those was the utter devotion to the club displayed by its players. Busby had grown up without a father and had experienced the life of a footballer miles away from his home.
He had vowed that when his opportunity in management came, he would create an environment where young men could feel part of a brotherhood, and feel the pride one might feel when representing a public school. “A kind of family,” Busby once said of his club. And they were.
It was that camaraderie which made the Busby Babes so beloved all over the country, and that character which made the mourning so profound after Munich. It was that sense of duty which inspired young players, led by Jimmy Murphy, to continue in the stead of their friends, giving the club a future.
It was drive inspired by the purpose, the cause of those lost, which underpinned the dramatic success at Wembley in 1968, when Bobby Charlton, George Best and Brian Kidd scored to bring the club their first European Cup.
It was a sense of loyalty and tremendous affection to those players that prohibited Busby from being as ruthless as he had been in the days before the disaster. And, to be frank, these were different times. Football was not as cutthroat as it sometimes feels today; although it was becoming to be that way.
But how could Busby call time on the careers of the players who had brought him his most prized achievement in football? The simple answer is that he couldn’t; and it’s quite possible that this factored in his decision to announce his retirement less than a year after winning the European Cup.
That was when the problems started. Wilf McGuinness, a man who loved Manchester United with an unequalled passion, was chosen as Busby’s successor. Three domestic Cup semi-finals suggested a promising start; but within 18 months, McGuinness was demoted to his old position of reserve team manager and Busby stepped back into the breach as a caretaker for six months.
The reason for this decision? It seemed a simple and straightforward one - McGuinness was a coach of such great potential that he was on Sir Alf Ramsey’s bench in the 1966 World Cup, but having been forced to retire as a young player, he didn’t achieve what the likes of Charlton and Best did, and personality clashes as he attempted to assert discipline undermined his control of the squad. Alex Stepney and George Best both admitted going above McGuinness’ head to Busby when they disagreed with decisions taken by the manager.
The decision was taken to hire an outsider - Frank O’Farrell, the Leicester City manager, who perhaps most notably though came from the school of coaches developing at West Ham. The start was quite exceptional; new life was breathed into Best, who scored some of his most memorable goals at the start of the 71/72 campaign. His hat-trick at the Dell on 27 November helped United cement their position at the top of the league, and O’Farrell was declared the best coach in Britain by the tabloid newspapers.
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Eight weeks later, the season seemed to be in tatters; O’Farrell’s cautious approach to give the players a chance to prove themselves had been commendable and had bore fruit, but the fact is that the team were missing the experience of the recently retired Bill Foulkes and Paddy Crerand, while Denis Law continued to suffer with knee injuries, as did John Fitzpatrick. Bobby Charlton was now 34 and was occasionally dropped by O’Farrell, and though this was such a deeply unpopular decision that even Busby intervened and asked him to reconsider, Charlton himself admitted he could have been left out of the team even earlier than that.
It caused strain on George Best, who, at 25, should have been approaching his peak - but teams began to double up on him and it began to frustrate the Northern Irishman who was desperate for some creative assistance. It frustrated him so much he missed training - O’Farrell dropped him from the game against Wolves, but United lost 3-1. He could not afford to be without Best, regardless of the discipline issues.
It was clear that the team needed reinforcements - O’Farrell’s gamble to give the existing squad a chance had been a positive thing but it had only masked the very real flaws, so, when they appeared, they derailed the form extremely quickly.
Two signings were made - Martin Buchan and Ian Storey-Moore arrived. Buchan was a fantastic leader and became an instant hit. Storey-Moore was also a sound investment, and a worthy foil for Best, but some unfortunate injury issues stunted his game time and left Best in the same position as he had been.
At the end of the season, Best shockingly announced he was going to retire in Marbella, only to change his mind within weeks. This sort of stressful situation caused a complete personality transformation in O’Farrell; he gave up his weekly newspaper column to concentrate on his job, and, as results got worse, he was seen on the training pitch of the Cliff less and less.
Though Best was back for pre-season, new blood was needed up front. O’Farrell made two forward signings - Wyn Davies and Ted MacDougall. They were strikers capable of playing top-flight football but were being given the impossible job of trying to replace Law and Charlton, who were still around.
The 72/73 season started disastrously, with no win in the first nine games. A renewed attempt to drop Charlton backfired spectacularly and culminated in O’Farrell’s wife, Ann, confronting Busby at a club function.
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Call The Doc
A 4-1 home defeat to Spurs put O’Farrell on the brink, and when United lost 5-0 at Crystal Palace just before Christmas, it was the final straw.
“He came as stranger,” Paddy Crerand said of O’Farrell, “and he left as a stranger.”
Tommy Docherty was in the right place at the right time. He was also the right man, though it didn’t immediately seem so. Docherty was the Scotland manager, and he was in the director’s box at Selhurst Park sitting alongside Busby and United chairman Louis Edwards.
At half-time, the three had a conversation.
“How do you fancy becoming United manager?” Docherty claims Edwards asked him, to which he replied, “But you’ve got a manager. And he’s godfather to my son!”
“Well, we won’t have on Tuesday,” he was told.
And that was that. Busby had done his due diligence, asking the Scottish contingent at the club like Law, Crerand (now a coach) and Willie Morgan, who all vouched for Docherty’s man-management skills.
Docherty’s first act was to bring in even more of the Tartan Army, signing Lou Macari and Jim Holton among others, thereby immediately creating a nucleus of players who he knew would fight for him.
The exit of the Trinity
The club’s form stabilised and enabled the new manager to make incredibly unpopular decisions. He was thankful that Charlton took one of them out of his hand - the United legend approached the boss and said he planned to retire at the end of the season.
He would also have been relieved at George Best having ‘resigned’ on the same day as O’Farrell’s firing; the winger having grown disenfranchised with events at the club and also his own conduct.
The future of Denis Law was not quite so clear. His knee injuries had impacted his ability to train and Docherty wasn’t keen on rewarding a player who couldn’t train with game time - but what happened next was regrettable. Docherty promised Law he would be able to see out his career at United, but when Law returned home for the post-season, he switched on the television and saw the news - that he had in fact been given a free transfer.
A devastated Law still intended to see out one more year in order to try and be part of the Scotland squad in the 1974 World Cup. He didn’t want to move - so re-signed for former team Manchester City.
Docherty, meanwhile, had not seen the last of Best, either. Best suffered from thrombosis on his latest sabbatical in Spain so was rushed back to hospital in Manchester - he was visited by Busby. “Isn’t it time you were back playing, son?”
Best agreed, accepting publicly he was in last chance saloon. But he was overweight and rushed back into the team - and now, without his legendary partners there to get some of the spotlight, the personal attention he received prior to his two breaks was even more brutal. Defenders were delighted to kick lumps out of a player whose sparkle and burst of pace had gone; Best almost cut the figure of a pariah, surrounded as he was by young hopeful players breaking through such as Sammy McIlroy, who’d grown up a strong arm’s stone’s throw on the same streets of Belfast, where Best was revered as a god.
That was the same on these streets of Salford, too, but now Best was a fallen god, and Docherty did not seem too enamoured with him. Before the New Year’s Day game at QPR, Rangers owner Jim Gregory made Docherty an offer of around £10,000 to sign Best, with the thinking that the spectacle would encourage bigger crowds at Loftus Road.
Best was again kicked out of the game in a 3-0 home win. That night, back in Manchester, he went to his nightclub Slack Alice, and partied for two days - pictures of these escapades were printed in newspapers, and conscientious QPR boss Gordon Jago reneged out of the deal.
The next part of the story has gone down in United urban myth; did George turn up to the FA Cup game with Plymouth drunk and with a woman? Yes, said Docherty, and so he had no choice but to drop him. No, insisted Best and everybody else. Best said if he was not considered good enough to play against Plymouth, he obviously wasn’t good enough to play against anyone - and walked out for good.
The story of the QPR deal was not revealed until both Docherty and Best had passed; finally, a motive for Docherty’s action.
The actions which led to the exits of Law and Best were undignified and something that their immense careers did not deserve; but they were nonetheless necessary in order for the club to move on to the future. Without their stardust, however, Old Trafford seemed a bleak place. The young players who had looked to their legendary players for leadership now suddenly struggled with a case of stage fright now the spotlight was on them, and now they were expected to replicate the level of quality of arguably the three greatest players in the club’s history.
The QPR defeat had been the fifth of twelve in just 21 games, and this form dragged United down into a relegation dogfight. Against fellow strugglers Birmingham on March 16th, an attempted clearance smashed against Joe Gallagher and flew into the United net for the game’s only goal.
It was the sort of bad luck which had plagued Docherty’s side all season. As Alex Stepney says, of the club’s 20 league defeats over the campaign, only four were heavier than a single goal defeat. It was a sign of the low confidence in the team.
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Down…
Docherty had tried to play a cautious 4-3-3 system in order to give his players greater control of the ball - the team were playing well, and creating chances, but suffered from this profound lack of confidence. A conversation with Docherty and Busby, where Busby impressed that if United were to go down, they should go down fighting, proved transformational.
United signed experienced forward Jim McCalliog just before the transfer deadline and moved back to a 4-4-2. It was an inspired transfer - McCalliog inspired wins at Chelsea and Norwich, and then scored in home victories over Newcastle and Everton.
These four wins gave Docherty’s side a fighting chance but the concession of a penalty at the Dell in a 1-1 draw seemed to dent their confidence. At half-time in the next game at Goodison Park, the scores were read out, and they were going against United. Docherty was furious, believing it had impacted his team’s belief - and Everton scored just after the break to win the game.
It left United needing to win against Manchester City and Stoke City in their last two games, and results in other games to go their way, if they were to have any hope of survival. It had been a devastating setback; the endeavour of a young team was now finally looking as though it was showing a positive outcome.
Supporters had grown fond of the efforts of Lou Macari, the skill of Sammy McIlroy, and the commitment of Brian Greenhoff, who was named the fan’s player of the year. This was, after all, a generation who had grown up watching the European Cup win. Boys who had dreamed of being Bobby Charlton now had different heroes in the team as they started going to matches regularly, and the dedication of that support was to prove pivotal.
In the short term, however, everyone was made to suffer through heartbreak in the cruellest way. United huffed and puffed but couldn’t find a breakthrough against City; McIlroy coming closest, but the anxiety of knowing it was out of their hands was beginning to tell on the home performance. With eight minutes left, City broke - a ball across the box fell to Denis Law.
Here’s the thing about Denis Law. He was one of Old Trafford’s true great strikers, a forward capable of scoring all kinds of goals. Matt Busby had been desperate to sign him when he was a kid at Huddersfield. He brought him back from Torino after being enchanted by stories of Law practising overhead kicks; this was a time when such a thing was extremely rare. Law had scored overhead kicks for United. He’d scored hat-trick after hat-trick. He was the player who would do something outrageous in the pursuit of the art of scoring a goal.
And that’s exactly what he did - with his back to goal, he decided to instinctively try a backheeled shot. It fooled former team-mate Alex Stepney and went into the net. Law immediately walked off the pitch as his manager replaced him. It would be his last act in domestic football. Those supporters who had been so dedicated to United’s cause all season were so frustrated they took to the pitch, and the referee blew for time before the 90th minute.
Law went straight down the tunnel - Jim McCalliog recalled seeing his dejected former international team-mate sitting in the home dressing room where he had sat with his team-mates for over a decade. Sharing good times. Great times. And now the worst of times.
Law was given some consolation - but only some - by the fact that Birmingham win against Norwich, meaning United were down even they’d won. But the goal was symbolic for many reasons, most of all because it was Law, Law who had seen his career at the club ended in such brutal fashion.
He was so heartbroken by the profile and perception of his role in United’s relegation that he refused to speak about it for decades.
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Tommy Docherty feared the sack. However, when Busby went to visit him that week, he presented him with a case of champagne. The directors had seen the green shoots in recent weeks to believe that there was something worth sticking with.
And it was. The players have stopped short of saying relegation was a good thing for them, but it did have something of a liberating effect. There was a new pressure - a pressure to be promoted at the first attempt, and to do so in style. It was one the younger players lived up to.
The Second Division campaign started at a quintessential lower-league venue - Orient, at Brisbane Road. Thousands of United supporters travelled south to see their players get off to a good start with a 2-0 win. They continued to follow them all over the country to venues that were not familiar with the prospect of facing United and their travelling fans.
Cardiff, Millwall, Bristol, Hull, York - now managed by Wilf McGuinness! - these towns and more saw the Red Army descend upon them. Clubs were extra-motivated to keep United in the division because they’d never experienced gates and atmospheres like it.
Docherty’s side, now spearheaded by Stuart Pearson up front, were thrilling football fans and reporters alike, so much so that their home game against Sunderland in November was chosen as the featured game on Match of the Day. The Old Trafford atmosphere for that 3-2 win is still cited by some of the players as their most favourite.
Promotion was a cert as early as late winter and the visit of York City was notable, firstly of course for the visit of McGuinness - who found the affection from his former club as strong as ever - and secondly for the birth of a new formation. Docherty decided to play in a 4-2-4 shape, a gung-ho approach which relied on the responsible sensibilities of the brand new signing Steve Coppell on the right and the maverick talent of Willie Morgan on the left.
This formation would become synonymous with ‘Doc’s Devils’, with Gordon Hill later taking that left-side berth, and promotion would be followed by an FA Cup final and 3rd placed finish in the first season back in the top flight, and an FA Cup Final win against Liverpool in 1977.
It was always a risk that McGuinness’s relative inexperience as a top player could lead to him being undermined by high achievers. It was always a risk that coming into Old Trafford without the experience of being from a Manchester United background would prove to be a daunting task as it did for O’Farrell. Both of those managers could point to positive moments and the timing of decisions that just went against them.
And finally, the decision to move on Charlton, Law and Best was always likely to have a short-term negative impact if only because of the loss of that immense experience, even if it was, at that point, necessary for the long-term health of the club.
Because of what it represents, of course, relegation is not a moment to be celebrated, certainly not for a club the size of Manchester United. But it happened, in all its inauspicious controversy, and because it is so seismic, it’s important to reflect on the events that led us there.
It’s also important to look at what came from it, and there were positive outcomes which nobody could deny. The step down enabled a young team to build confidence in a run of convincing results; the positive form strengthened the connection between the players and a new generation of support.
It all came together to form the basis of what would become an era looked upon with tremendous affection by all who were there. And now, for those who weren’t, the milestone is fascinating.
It is straightforward to connect all of those positive outcomes and deduce that they were made possible only by the club’s relegation, as controversial an event as it undoubtedly was.
So, while today is not exactly one of celebration, it is an important milestone in the club’s history that should be commemorated and remembered as being the start of a rebirth of the club.