Manchester United’s ‘culture’ is overrated. Busby and Ferguson swam against the tide | Barney Ronay

Another summer of rebuilding appears under way at Old Trafford but attempts to recreate the philosophies and glories of previous eras look doomed to fail

There was an interesting programme on BBC Radio 4 this week about the notorious Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish. The man o’ war is of course the alpha of the jellyfish world, the big swinging tentacle of the deep ocean trench, not to mention the only jellyfish most people have heard of besides the ones that appear on English beaches in spring looking sad and dead and reproachful, surrounded by bottle tops and cigarette butts.

Except it turns out the man o’ war isn’t a jellyfish at all. It is instead a kind of co-operative, a fusion of many small lifeforms into one large, successful stinging thing. The overall effect is a high-functioning mini-society of cells and organs and venomous pincers, the marine equivalent of a furiously angry rolling maul in a 1980s rugby union international, all eye-gouges and V-signs and furious Scottish oaths. In the programme the man o’ war was presented as a successful quirk of evolution, the survival of the collective as opposed to the individual, sustained by that shared culture and purpose. And also as a metaphor for modern city life with its many diverse, interlinked, self-sustaining parts.

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from Football | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jun/22/past-foreign-country-manchester-united-summer