Championship contender, crisis club or cash cow? What you see at Manchester United depends largely on what you want to see.

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Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is in the mood to play hit songs. He said that Manchester United's most enthusiastic fans are "the best in the world." The players who are lucky enough to wear the color of the team are the "luckiest" on the planet. And, of course, it is inevitable to pay tribute to history, to the club’s "habit" of winning victory from the big mouth of failure.

Solskjaer is shiny, and for good reason. Manchester United just gave Atlanta a two-goal lead in the Champions League and have regained victory anyway. Cristiano Ronaldo delivered again. Manchester United had been at the bottom of the group at the end of halftime and was eliminated, but now it easily sits at the forefront of the group. The fans sang Solskjaer's name in a post-match TV interview.

Once he signed, the British broadcast signal switched back to the studio. The atmosphere there is very different. As one of the guests, former Manchester United midfielder Paul Scholes was not particularly excited. "I was very worried in the first half," he said. His tone was severe and his expression serious. On Sunday, Manchester United will face Liverpool. Scholes felt the storm clouds gathering.

As he spoke, footage of the exciting winner of Manchester United was played. Ronaldo's header went into the corner of the goal. "Imagine Jurgen Klopp looking at that," Scholes chanted. Ronaldo took off his clothes during the celebration, and another stitch was stitched in his legend. "He will rub his hands." Old Trafford was falling into delirium. "Just play like this against Liverpool and see what happens."

In stark contrast is the essence of modern Manchester United, a club in which what the eyes see and what the ears hear are not always-or even often-inconsistent. This ability has been like this almost since Solskjaer began to rule three years ago. This ability has confused the senses, turned everything into nothingness, progress and stagnation, promise and despair, success and failure all at the same time. As the Rorschach test, Manchester United has become a football team: what you see in the ink scattered in front of you depends largely on what you want to see.

Of course, in many ways, this may not be ideal. As a general rule, the team that wins the trophy is not a team that has very different opinions, nor is it a team that fluctuates sharply in and between games, nor is it a team crisis that never seems to have failed more than twice. Especially league champions are often strong, stable, clear and convincing.

Of course, this should be Manchester United's top priority. This is where Scholes thinks the club should be, the cornerstone of the natural order of football: only at the end of May, Manchester United can become the best team in the Premier League, and everything can be truly harmonious and balanced.

But this is certainly not the only priority for Manchester United. It is-only when you want to interpret it as criticism, will it be interpreted as criticism-not only focusing on becoming the best team in England, but also focusing on becoming the biggest club. In a sense, this may be just semantics. It is not.

From a sports perspective, Manchester United’s tendency to act as some kind of fuel cell in a seemingly endless debate is clearly a shortcoming, which is a reasonable condemnation of Solskjaer’s rule. Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool will not be affected by such drastic fluctuations in public perception. Their exact position in England's ranking may be disputed, but their attribution at the peak is not disputed.

However, the sense of movement is not all. It is easy to blame Manchester United every three months, because its main executives use their quarterly conference calls with investors to modify and modify their social media engagement data. It's easy to think of it as more evidence of how capitalism and/or technology are disrupting the game, how Manchester United's priorities are out of touch, and its leaders are confused as to whether their job is to win championships or build followers on Instagram.

The truth is that it's both. This is an awkward coexistence, but the club is both a sports team and a business. These numbers are not a transparent bid to distract private equity managers from underperforming in the field. They were brought up because private equity managers might care about them as if they were - or even more than - they cared about whether Manchester United won or lost last weekend. These numbers are important.

From this perspective, it is hard to imagine any better strategy than this version of Manchester United. It has all the inconsistencies and contradictions, and each of them can accept all imaginable explanations. It is a gift that is constantly given, a virtuous circle, as the highest attainable form of movement for the content machine. Probably by accident, not by design, Manchester United found themselves in the best platonic engagement location.

This is perfect: the presence of so many talented players means that this team will never be bad, in any real sense. It will never lose the competition for a Champions League seat, so there will never be a real danger of missing the important source of income provided by European football.

Most of the time, the team will win: occasionally convincing, occasionally lucky, occasionally despite all available evidence that it really shouldn't win. However, it is crucial that it will not always win. Of course, always winning is what fans want, but in fact, this is not a particularly fascinating story. If a team always wins, there is nothing to say. Look at Bayern Munich, or Paris Saint-Germain, or even Manchester City. They won again and again, and the whole world shrugged.

But not Manchester United. Sometimes, Manchester United will lose. It will never lose often to real danger, for example, ninth-extraordinary players will see this, remember-but sometimes it is not enough to have these players. Sometimes the opponent will have a better system, or Manchester United will be less than the sum of the parts, so sometimes Manchester United will lose.

However, no matter what happens, there will be something to say. Whether or not Manchester United's dice drops in any particular game, it will be eye-catching. The team can be anything you want: a motivated team, or a team threatened by failure. Sometimes, as Scholes proved, it can be two things at the same time. Pictures can explain one thing, and words can be another.

It makes every game full of meaning. Every game may be the beginning or end of something, or it may be the day when the club gains indisputable glory or is in deep crisis. There will always be something to say, a position to take, and an opinion to express. This means that there is always something to sell, because there is always something to see, hear, read, or click. This means that Manchester United is always there, front and center, sending a lot of content into the atmosphere.

This weekend, Manchester United beat Liverpool is completely feasible. Or lose to Liverpool. Or draw with Liverpool. There will be results, but this is not the same as a conclusion. In any case, no one can last, and no one can last until the next game or later. There will never be, without these bosses, without this team, without this manager. Manchester United will continue to stay the same, always close at hand and always far away, the most reliable source of participation in football, and the club has fallen into its own perfect feedback loop.

In the coming months and years, this is not something that is often said, but this week it is almost possible to show a little sympathy for Newcastle United’s new ownership group. Of course, not because of the loss to Tottenham Hotspur. Not to fire manager Steve Bruce. It is not even necessary to issue a statement urging club fans to stop wearing thobes and kaffiyehs because this is offensive.

No, one aspect that makes the view of the Saudi-backed consortium almost possible is the decision by the rest of the Premier League to temporarily shelve related party transactions: that is, the company and the owner of a club suddenly and completely coincidentally decided to spend huge sums of money to sponsor the owner’s team .

Approximately 18 Premier League colleagues/competitors in Newcastle supported the motion with a view to imposing some permanent restrictions on this practice in the future. Manchester City abstained from voting, probably because they realized that supporting it is the highest level of hypocrisy.

Newcastle’s immediate reaction was to threaten to take legal action against the Premier League. Of course, this is not simple, because it-when you think about it-basically acknowledges that getting a large number of Saudi companies to sponsor Saudi-backed teams to fast track their growth is a fundamental part of the business plan.

But this may be offset-in this case-many Premier League teams have been doing this for years. Not only Manchester City, it is the most important billboard in the Etisalat world. Leicester City also has its home court, King Power Stadium. Curiously, the Everton training ground is sponsored by USM: anyone can guess what benefits the name of the Russian mining giant will bring in the club’s locker room, but it is clearly worth it.

You see, this is the problem with the cynical decision made by the Premier League to avoid anything close to morality as long as the money continues to flow. This is an attractive method because it saves the league from having to make any difficult subjective decisions. Until, in other words, something so timid appeared that the timidity of others paled in comparison. In the long run, opt-out is not a tenable position. It's time for the British Football Association to do this.

In a way, you must admire Gianni Infantino. So far, those who occupy our so-called football blue sky administrative level have come up with so many ridiculous and absurd ideas so quickly and continuously, we should be accustomed to this. They should not be able to detect stupid new depths. Those wells should have been mined long ago.

Therefore, thanks to Infantino's boldness to go lower than anyone has dared to go so far. It turns out that hosting the World Cup every two years is just an entry-level thing. The real galactic brain idea is being ordered, as he did to the various European federations this week, if the game is played once every two years, and when it is played, the team will not be allowed to participate in consecutive games.

That's right. FIFA President Infantino is the most powerful person in the game and the person responsible for protecting the largest sport on the planet. He considered dividing the World Cup into two so that it is not actually a World Cup. Infantino seems to think that if you cut a golden goose in half, you might get two golden geese.

However, we also have reasons to be grateful. Infantino may not fully understand King Solomon's strategy, but his doing so at least exposed the fact that FIFA's plan to double the number of World Cups is collapsing.

The powerful European and South American alliance is firmly opposed. The same is true for the European Union and the International Olympic Committee. The players union FIFPro opposed. There is a reason. This is a bad idea.

It turns out that football is not the only sport that doesn't like celebrating second place. "There is NHL," David Sullivan wrote. "There is no second place trophy or medal, and similar traditions/superstitions, that is, any team award lower than the Stanley Cup itself will be discarded.

“The league now awards the President’s Trophy to the team with the best regular season record, but there are also cases where players bow their heads, look away, behave awkwardly, refuse to acknowledge or touch the trophy they won, and slip away quickly. As much as possible.”

At least there are trophies awarded for winning the division championships, which I pointed out to me during "research"-which looks a lot like asking the Americans I corresponded with recently-last week's column. To some extent, you can win multiple times in most major leagues in North America, so even the team that lost the finals can reflect on the fact that they are the winner.

But there is no doubt that this is the most sad and exciting email this week, and it may always be. I don't want to edit too much, even the length, because it deserves your full attention.

"I was 22 years old and won two silver medals and one bronze medal at the Tokyo Paralympic Games," Jared Clifford wrote. "My silver medal came from 5000 meters (the hottest running day in my life-"feels like 43 degrees and 85% humidity") and a marathon (I vomited my guts in the last 12 kilometers*).

[*Note: I left this sentence to prove that Jaryd is Australian. This is probably the most Australian phrase imaginable. ]

"I am defending the 5000m world champion and marathon world record holder. I understand that disappointment can coexist with pride, especially when you know that you have given everything. I am disappointed that I did not win that gold medal, but I am very disappointed. I am proud that I have never given up, I have given everything I have for it.

"What else can you do? Sometimes, you were just defeated by a better opponent that day. For me, silver represents my journey from a teenager to the present, all the blood, sweat and tears. This also inspires me to one day It turned into gold. My teammate Scott Reardon sat in an ice bath after 5000 meters and told me that “sometimes it takes a silver medal to win a gold medal.” In 2012, he won/lost a silver medal in the 100 meters in 0.03 seconds. He said that in 2016, he won the gold medal because he learned a lesson from the silver medal."

This last sentence summarized what I was trying to express better than I had in a thousand words or so, because it happened. (I will add Jaryd to the list of people who are not allowed to send emails frequently because I am afraid of appearing in front of me.) You can think of it as losing the gold medal, or you can think of it as winning the silver medal. The latter seems healthier to me and more important to Jaryd.