Manchester United being bad is now its own self-sustaining media industry

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?”

Yes, I would. I would probably do that. It becomes easier to say this with certainty, to agree with Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence – which might previously have seemed a little lateral, lacking in, say, the directness that makes the Premier League so special – having watched Sky Sports coverage of Sunday’s Manchester derby; and having seen Dave Jones turn to Roy Keane at the final whistle, with a sense even here of basic existence-fatigue and ask: “Roy. How would you sum up that half?”

As the caption Roy Keane: unbeaten in all 14 derbies with Manchester City scrolled beneath his beard-line, Keane paused. Can I say that he looked tired? That behind his eyes, the great anti-bluffer knew that he too was in danger of lapsing into muscle memory and learned response.

Roy didn’t fake it. He didn’t confect imaginary adrenaline. He said that United’s players basically gave up, and not much more. And by the end it felt like a moment to ask: are the great days of people saying Manchester United are bad already gone? People saying that Manchester United are bad was a glorious thing. We will always have those sunlit memories, back when people saying Manchester United are bad was fresh and new. But you have to say, we expect a bare minimum of effort, of