Collymore’s column: Man United’s embarrassing dressing room, Mourinho’s return, pressure on Nunez and more

In his exclusive column for CaughtOffside, former Aston Villa attacker Stan Collymore discusses some of football’s biggest talking points, including the men children that are populating Man United’s dressing room, why Jose Mourinho is the right man to replace, ten Hag, what Darwin Nunez needs to do to win over the doubters, plus much more.

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Man United’s dressing room is an embarrassment

The home dressing room at Old Trafford is filled with men children from front to back.

The whispers, the leaks, the soft centre, the lack of responsibility… How on earth did a club fine-tuned under Fergie, hard, streetwise, driven and ambitious become the excuse of a squad we see today?

Players coming off the pitch whispering and sniggering like six year olds is one of the most embarrassing things I’ve seen in, lets face it, a pretty embarrassing season for United.

Where’s the leadership? The desire? Bottle? All I saw were pristine white kits in the first minute and pristine white kits after 90 odd minutes, barely touched with sweat or blood or tears or grass.

At virtually every club I played for, when we played against Spurs, who were seen as a club of fancy Dan’s who loved to play but didn’t like to duke it out, coaches to a man would say “make sure they get those f**king lilywhite shirts dirty today,” a reference to the kit colour but something deeper. Something that said ‘when it comes to it, these fancy Dan’s wont fancy it.’

That was Manchester United at Crystal Palace; fancy Dan’s that simply didn’t fancy it.

The German model needs to find a home in English football

How can it be that one club in Europe spends a billion pounds to limp into a Conference League place along with a £5k one-off seat behind the dugout, and another team finds waifs