Manchester United are a pub team, and could Neymar be off to Newcastle? (No)

Manchester United’s demise continues, could Neymar be off to Newcastle (SPOILER: No) and a Sun headline that made us laugh involuntarily…

Down the pub

The race to make the most outlandish newspaper claim about Crisis Club Manchester United continues apace, with the already unthinkable ‘bottom-half team’ now looking like heady days indeed for a club that Andrew Dillon of The Sun has confirmed are now ‘a pub team’.

As with all current Manchester United content, it combines entirely fair and correct concerns about the direction of travel at the club with some astonishing nonsense.

‘The sight of Old Trafford’s new transfer guru sitting in a boozer hosting a strategy meeting with the Red Army confirms what many already suspect.

Manchester United are now a pub team.’

Richard Arnold’s pub trip may have been ill-advised and he should probably have been more alert to the possibility of being filmed, but it was also well-intentioned and a shift from the previous regime’s policy of avoiding actual fans at all costs. It was also, of course, in absolutely no way ‘a strategy meeting’.

‘If Arnold’s contacts in the transfer market were anywhere near as good as his hoolie spotting mates, then things wouldn’t seem so bad.’

Genuinely no idea what this bit means. All football fans are hooligans?

‘When Christian Eriksen, 30, a man who suffered cardiac arrest on a pitch, is torn between signing for a club with a 75,000-seater stadium or tiny Brentford, then something is wrong.’

Let’s just pretend that Tottenham don’t exist or that Eriksen’s feelings for ‘tiny Brentford’ might be slightly influenced by the chance they took on him in January.

‘Incoming manager Erik ten Hag has, so far, shown only limited imagination in how he wants to rebuild