Manchester United Football Club—the once-proud crimson empire of Sir Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson—is being hollowed out like an old church overrun by termites.
The pews are still polished, the hymns still sung, but the altar is rotting, and now, the lawsuits are coming.
Axel Tuanzebe, a man built like a tank and trained in the art of defending with grace and fury, has lobbed a live grenade straight into the heart of Carrington. He is suing the club for clinical negligence.
Let that sink in.
Not a tantrum, not a contract dispute, but a proper grown-up lawsuit—lawyers, depositions, evidence. The kind of thing that reeks of x-rays gone missing and ice packs slapped on torn ligaments like a wartime field hospital.
It’s not just a football story. It’s a symptom of a broader disease, a chronic institutional ailment, and the whole place is coughing blood.
Tuanzebe’s suit alleges that the club botched his recovery from a back injury—his sacrum, to be exact. The bone that anchors your spine.
The club allegedly misdiagnosed it, played him too early, jabbed him full of painkillers, and effectively ended the promise he once held as one of United’s brightest academy products.
All while hiding behind the usual platitudes of “match fitness” and “getting minutes under his belt.”
This isn’t just a tragedy—it’s malpractice masquerading as football management.
Tuanzebe, remember, was supposed to be the future. He captained United in a League Cup game at just 21.
He went toe-to-toe with Kylian Mbappé in the Parc des Princes and didn’t blink. Now he’s suing the club that forged him, alleging they ran his body into the ground.
But to really understand this mess, you have to look at the deeper, darker pattern—United’s Frankenstein-like relationship with the human body.
They’ve been mismanaging injuries like a drunk surgeon since at least the early 2010s. This isn’t new. The Tuanzebe case is simply the latest flare fired from a burning wreck.
Owen Hargreaves once lit this fuse.
Back in 2011, he said the club turned him into a “guinea pig”—pumping him with injections that made his knees feel like glass. That’s not metaphor. That’s what the man said.
He took one injection in particular that he claims even the doctor himself said he’d never used before. A test case. On a footballer whose knees were already cooked. That’s not recovery—that’s Russian roulette in the physiotherapy room.
You can go further back, too. Remember Louis Saha? Darren Anderton’s long-lost cousin in fragility. Antonio Valencia playing on a broken leg. Robin van Persie rushed back time and again until even his titanium limbs couldn’t keep up.
And what about Phil Jones? A man who somehow devolved from “next Duncan Edwards” to a punchline, broken down year after year until he simply faded out of relevance. A victim of poor management or just bad luck? Who knows? But the evidence piles up.
Even last season, Erik ten Hag’s injury list read like a hospital intake log after a motorway pileup. Casemiro, Martinez, Shaw, Mount, Malacia, Varane, Evans, Højlund—the absences came so fast and furious it felt like a cursed bingo sheet. You could pick eleven injured players and field a stronger side than the one available on matchday.
Last year, the New York Times did a deep-dive that laid bare the chaos. It wasn’t just bad luck—it was systemic. The conditioning, the recovery plans, the rotation.
Everything was off. Players coming back too soon. Others being used past the point of caution. And in the shadows, you could hear the whispers—old ghosts muttering the same thing Hargreaves once screamed.
Now Tuanzebe’s lawsuit has put it in ink.
It’s no coincidence this is happening at United and not Arsenal or Brighton or even Spurs. It’s not just one physio’s bad call—it’s decades of rotting infrastructure, of executive churn, of egos with bigger offices than ideas.
From the Glazers to the directors of football who come and go like seasonal flu, no one has taken accountability for the long-term health of the players. Not physical, not psychological, not tactical.
United is the kind of place where the past is worshipped and the present is ignored. The museum gleams, but the MRI machines groan.
You wonder how this circus has gone on for so long. The answer lies in the same place it always does in football: the scoreboard. So long as the goals went in and the silverware piled up, no one looked too closely.
But now? Now United is a bloated husk of a club. A stock asset bleeding value. A shell corporation wearing a holy shirt.
The games are grim, the results inconsistent, and the whole operation feels like it’s held together with masking tape and nostalgia.
The Tuanzebe case will go to court, or it’ll get buried in an out-of-court settlement with some NDA and a check with more zeros than medals he won at Old Trafford. But the damage is done. Another homegrown player turning on his own club. Add him to the list.
And what of the current crop? You think Kobbie Mainoo’s knees aren’t watching?
These young stars might be firebrands on the pitch, but they’re not blind. They see how the club treats its wounded. They read the headlines. The trust is corroding.
Tuanzebe isn’t just suing for himself—he’s become a symbol. Of the mismanaged body. Of wasted potential. Of a football club that forgot that its players are made of flesh and bone, not steel and branding.
And somewhere, deep in the Carrington corridors, behind a frosted-glass office door, there’s probably a middle-aged administrator—one of the countless suits who survived five managers—wondering how it all got this bad.
Here’s the truth: it didn’t get this bad overnight. It rotted slowly. Like wood soaked in rain, year after year. And now, finally, it’s snapping under pressure.
Maybe Tuanzebe is the reckoning. Maybe he’s just another footnote. But either way, the lawsuit is real. The anger is real. The pain, the needles, the ruined sacrum—that is real. And Manchester United are going to have to answer for it.
