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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Sport
Barry Glendenning

Manchester United, crowd-pleasing nostalgia and failing to learn lessons of Seinfeld

Sir Alex Ferguson and Michael Carrick, 20 years ago.
Sir Alex Ferguson and Michael Carrick, 20 years ago. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

TAKING THE MICHAEL

In the Seinfeld episode The Opposite, serial loser George Costanza realises his life is a monument to bad choices, his every impulse is wrong and his gut instinct is not to be trusted. Instead, he decides to do the “opposite” of whatever the little George inside him suggests and within days has landed himself a stunning girlfriend, been offered the job of his dreams and moved out of his parents’ house. While the makers of Seinfeld have always insisted that there are no lessons to be learned from their sitcom, George’s decision to override his brain suggests that if your current instincts and habits aren’t getting you the results you want, doing the opposite might well be the only logical path to success. While Football Daily has no wish to go all High Performance on our readers’ collective @ss, this episode of Seinfeld kept springing to mind as we have tried to make sense of Manchester United’s managerial succession plan (or apparent lack thereof) following the dismissal of Ruben Amorim.

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