Hull City Drags Red Devils Right Back To Hell

As a soccer fan, one of the best things you can do for your physical and mental well-being is to studiously avoid overreacting to results early in the season. Especially for the big teams, and especially coming off a summer international tournament, the first few weeks of the league are essentially an extension of the preseason, and therefore should be considered little more than glorified training sessions aimed primarily at working players back into shape after their abbreviated, inebriated vacations. A Week 1 upset hardly condemns the loser to a season of disappointment, nor does it catapult the winner into the fight for the European places.

That said, if any presumably good Premier League team could least afford to come stumbling out of the blocks, it’s Manchester United, which opened its promise-laden new campaign with a humiliating loss to what is likely the worst team in the division.

Just to be nice, let’s start with the positives the Red Devils can take from Saturday’s 2-0 away loss to Hull City. Again, it’s only Week 1. Factoring in likely new signings, the return to fitness of a couple guys, and the further development of some young players, it wouldn’t be surprising if the ideal starting XI United settles into this season features all of six new faces not found on the team that took the field over the weekend. What’s more, United completely overhauled its midfield this summer, adding to what had been a threadbare rotation the likes of Andrey Santos, Youri Tielemans, and (the soon-to-be-official) Carlos Baleba. That is a huge influx of talent at a crucial area of the pitch, and it’s understandable if it takes a bit of time for those brand-new teammates to build the kind of chemistry and synergies that great midfield play requires. By results United was the best team in the league during the 2026 part of last season. One crummy outing, against a team that beat them on a pair of set-piece goals, shouldn’t halt all that well-earned momentum.

Now, for the negatives: Boy, did the Red Devils look like shit! There are forgivable ways for a good team to lose a game like this—say, if the decisive goals are more or less flukes, and the underdog’s goalkeeper stands on his head, and the head-stander’s defense helps in the heroic resistance against the attacking onslaught from a favorite that dominates the game everywhere except on the scoresheet—but this loss was not one of them. It may be true that the Tigers looked relatively toothless outside of the kinds of dead-ball plays that got them their pair of goals, but it’s also true that United’s defense never really made it hard for Hull. We are in a time of set-piece supremacy in England, a land that already cheered corner kicks the way Spanish fans cheer consecutive passing sequences, and United will be in serious trouble this year if they keep trotting out lineups where Harry Maguire is the only guy who can reliably get his head onto a cross. Despite being down at least one goal for more than 70 minutes, the Red Devils never fully controlled the game in possession, and only rarely put Hull’s defense under any real stress. Hull, the odds-on favorite to return straight to the Championship at the end of its first Premier League season in almost a decade, didn’t even need a notably outstanding outing to handily beat a team that, coming into the game, could just about seriously consider itself a dark-horse title contender! This is not the kind of thing you want to see!

And while the normal caveats about the unreliability of early-season results apply here, United more than most teams knows the potential cascading effects of bad vibes. It’s now been almost a decade and a half since Alex Ferguson left and Manchester United stopped being Manchester United. At this point, the only things just about as common at Old Trafford as bad stretches and awful feelings are false dawns and lights at the ends of tunnels turning out to be yet another onrushing train.

Michael Carrick oversaw the latest transition from depression to optimism when he was named interim manager back in January, and he more than earned the full-time job with the way he got the team to turn things around. Nevertheless, Carrick is still unproven at the highest level, and is now tasked with a challenge at which several of the biggest names in the business have failed. A week ago, United fans felt great about the prospects of this season, and the team’s future under the leadership of a coach who at last seems to finally get it. Today, United is two tricky fixtures (home against a frisky Ipswich Town, then away at a very good Everton) away from a Manchester Derby at Old Trafford. Another bad performance or two coming into that game, followed by a beatdown therein, and we may already reach the start of the once-promising Carrick era’s ending.

I for one do expect United to get back on track. This in no way looks like a champion-caliber roster, but then again, only Arsenal has one of those. With cool-headed management in the boardroom and on the sidelines, the team should have what it takes to ensure that Saturday’s loss was just a blip, and to go on and have another good season safe in the table’s upper quadrant. Still, it says so much about how tenuous any sense of optimism is at Man United that a single result, in what everyone accepts as the most meaningless part of the season, can transform a period of serenity into squeaky-bum time for an entire club and its legions of fans worldwide. What agony. What joy.