Manchester United: Why Europa League success is still vital to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s progress

More than three years have passed since Manchester United won the Europa League in Stockholm and there have been no further additions to the Old Trafford trophy room in the time since. It is the club’s longest barren spell this century. In fact, the last time that United waited this long for silverware, a five-year drought would be eventually ended by Alex Ferguson’s first trophy.

In the diaries which Ferguson kept during his early years at Old Trafford, he described his 1990 FA Cup win as “our saving grace”. This was a rather liberal use of the editorial we, as winning that trophy saved nobody more than Ferguson himself. Despite suffering United’s lowest league finish since relegation in 1974, silverware meant he could present hard evidence of progress to the board.

His job was safe and the rest, as they say, is history.

Football has changed a lot since 1990 and so have the priorities of elite clubs. Back then, one piece of silverware could excuse an otherwise dismal campaign. Now, a single trophy is not enough to guarantee that a manager will still be in work the following season unless they have also secured Champions League qualification. Thankfully, the stakes are not nearly so high for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

The fourth man to try and emulate Ferguson’s 38-trophy haul is yet to get off the mark in that regard, and Solskjaer would have needed to win the Europa League in order to reach next season’s Champions League had United lost to Leicester City on the final day of the Premier League season. Instead, their third-place finish means that he and his players can approach this two-week mini-tournament in Germany with less fear and more freedom.

Does that mean there is not as much pressure on United? Solskjaer insisted not. “I don’t think so because we went into this season knowing the Europa League is a great chance for us one to get a trophy, to get far in a tournament, but also to groom a few of the youngsters. It was perfect for us,” he said on Sunday evening at the Rhein Energie Stadion in Cologne, which will host United’s quarter-final against Copenhagen on Monday night.

Solskjaer is right. There are benefits to competing in European football’s second-tier competition, as United have in three of the seven seasons since Ferguson’s retirement, and one of them was sitting to his left. The young full-back Brandon Williams made his first senior United start in the competition against AZ Alkmaar in October and has since established himself as a fully-fledged first team squad member, signing not one but two new contracts.

“If we had been in the Champions League this season, I wouldn’t have had a chance to play Brandon as much as we have, or Mason [Greenwood], so many of the young kids that have now started what are going to be fantastic careers,” Solskjaer added. “Brandon sits next to me and is going to play a quarter-final in the Europa League, which is a great achievement for him this season.”

Greenwood provides an even better example, having become the club’s youngest-ever goalscorer in European competition on his first United start against Astana last September. The 18-year-old watched the 2017 triumph in this competition at home on the sofa with his parents. Three years later, his five goals in seven Europa League appearances were a major factor in Solskjaer’s decision to promote him to his first-choice starting line-up. Without the opportunities offered by the Europa League, he would still be on the fringes of the squad.

And if the competition has been an important developmental tool for United’s youngsters, it has the potential to do something for the more senior players too. Of the party travelling to Cologne, only seven – David De Gea, Eric Bailly, Paul Pogba, Jesse Lingard, Juan Mata, Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial – have experience of winning silverware as a United player and of those, only De Gea is in danger of needing a new mantelpiece at any point in the near future.

Others have no record of winning trophies anywhere. Last summer’s three major signings – club captain Harry Maguire, Aaron Wan-Bissaka and Daniel James – had only Maguire’s 2016 Championship play-off win with Hull City between them. Jadon Sancho is this summer’s priority target and a Under-17 World Cup winner with England at youth international level, though his outstanding production for Borussia Dortmund over the past two years has not produced meaningful silverware.

There is no direct correlation between past and future honours, of course, and one trophy is not necessarily the sign of more to come. Far from it, in fact. Winning the EFL Cup and Europa League in 2017 was not the turning point that Jose Mourinho hoped for at United. Every now and again though, they carry a transformative quality. They can mark the end of one uncertain, indifferent period and the start of something better, as Ferguson would attest.

Solskjaer’s United are currently in a strange place. It is not entirely clear how good they are – having finished third with the club’s second-lowest points total of the Premier League era – nor how good they can be, as the rebuilding project and ‘cultural reset’ continues apace. Now a Champions League place is secure, they have an opportunity to claim a first trophy while the pressure is off, to an extent. It is one they should not pass up.