Jock what's happened to Dundee United is it a financial collapse? I'm usually think of them on par with Aberdeen and Hearts as the best of the rest behind the Old Firm in Scotland but I see your on course for relegation .
Well, in my estimation, it's a few things.
We operate at a loss every year, so stay alive through player sales, making us the proverbial "selling club". We had a sticky patch a decade or so ago and cycled through a few managers, before settling on the great Craig Levein (who then left to become Scotland manager) who revamped our youth set up and one facet of that was to pitch the club to young players looking to make it. They could play for us and if they did well it was a shop window to a much bigger move.
After Levein left, his AM (Housty) took over and won us a cup with a good crop of youngsters, but felt he'd taken the club as far as they could go and couldn't rely on the youngsters.
This is where we arrive at Jackie (Sackie) McNamara (Sacknamara).
Took over with a remit to blood the youngsters and keep the club going. But he did several things.
By various accounts there was no real training to speak of. His method was to say "go out and express yourself" to the aforementioned talented youngsters. And initially it worked.
In one of his first games he played a 16 year old center back in a cup semi final, one of the biggest games in years. And the lad strolled it, even famously playing a cheeky backheel between two Celtic forwards.
Knowing he would one day lose the young guys, he started to fill the team with his own players (aka "Jackie's Winners") - players who had a "winning mentality" despite coming from nowhere. These include a couple of guys who didn't start playing professionally until well in to their 20s, a guy who sent us a YouTube audition video, a plumber and various other Billy Big Baws.
It was going OK, the sheer talent of the young lads (Ryan Gauld, Stuart Armstrong, Gary Mackay-Steven) was seeing us win games by 4-3 or 5-2. Granted, he produced a couple of Gems - Nadir Ciftci had his only decent spell with us and Andrew Robertson was nowhere and after us he played for Scotland and in the Premier League.
But then last season it all went to shit. On the LAST DAY of the transfer window, we sold the heart of the team. Gauld had already gone (3 million - oo-er) and Robertson (another 3 mill). Then, with us challenging for the title and with a cup final coming up against Celtic, the chairman sold Armstrong and GMS to Celtic. Leaving us with basically no talent. Jackie's Winners were proving to be pish without the golden boys propping them up; the message that it sent about our acquiescence to the Great Celtic couldn't have been clearer; it came out in the press that 1) despite making 8 mill in under a year, with a total debt of about 6 mil, we were still ~1mill in debt and it wasn't going down any time soon; Sackie had been shaving 5% or so of all the transfer fees for his own pocket (was in his contract) which, one would assume, made him all the more eager to sell.
Negativity and doom basically took over. Sackie's shite tactics and lack of training were exposed; we couldn't win games; the morale plummeted; we couldn't hold a lead; couldn't score, couldn't defend.
Some kind of bust up saw us suspend, then fire our lauded head of youth development. Fans turned on the chairman, who had been largely absent from the club, looking to buy a new club in Australia.
By the time they sacked Sacknamara the rot was already so deep. We had a huge squad of Jackie's Winners or boys with "potential" (gotta get that % of sell on fee...) that had no training or tactics and morale was in the sewers.
In short, selling off all our best assets so quickly (which made the fans turn on the chairman and manager both of who m got $$$) and showing ourselves to be just another also-ran (bearing in mind we should have been trying to challenge in a league without The Rangers) sucked the heart and soul out of the team and turned the place in to a depressing anger-fest.
We basically deserve to be relegated this season for being so many layers of shite worse than everyone else, but it really is a damning indictment given where we were not 2 years ago.
