An era will end in 2023. An era which began back in the days when Alex Ferguson’s chewing gum punctuated the Old Trafford touchline, and has survived six managers, two caretakers, one interim and the departures of 194 fellow Manchester United players – including Paul Pogba twice.
United have let it be known they will listen to offers for the services of Phil Jones this month. And given the absolute nothing that has been his contribution to the cause since he signed a new £13.6 million four-year contract in 2019, whichever club calls to ask about him presumably won’t even have to reach the end of their first sentence before United are tapping ‘Confirm’ on their Uber app.
It's not Phil’s fault he’s been injured, of course. He’s managed only 20 total appearances since the day he sat alongside Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as they performed the perfunctory crooked smiles demanded for any announcement of a new deal being penned. That pen, though, or rather the use of it, has cost the club a lot of money.
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It turns out £3.9m a year doesn’t buy you much these days. At least, not if you’ve given it to Phil Jones for the function of providing football services. United knew he had a record when it came to lengthy spells out with injury. He’d had ankle, knee, shin and toe injuries since becoming a Red Devil back in 2011, and a troublesome hamstring problem had kept bugging him during the decline of Jose Mourinho’s spell as manager.
So it was a shock to many assembled in the Carrington media room ahead of Solskjaer’s press conference previewing a Premier League trip to Fulham when a missive was passed around to confirm that Jones was going to be at United for four more years. Sure, Ole could walk on water at that point early in his successful stint as interim boss, but could he heal the most wounded of the wounded?
It turns out not. Within a week, Jones was out with illness and he would soon be subbed with a knock at half-time of a 4-0 shellacking by Everton and again withdrawn at the interval as United’s season ended with a 2-0 humiliation at home to relegated Cardiff City.
Since then he has played 296 minutes of Premier League football in three-and-a-half years. One has to worry about the mental health of anyone who has spent so much time trying to overcome a knee injury and so little time performing their basic human function of going to work and contributing to a team. And from United’s point of view, they could do with getting far more bang for their considerable buck.
To that end, the news that they will let Jones leave in one form or another – whether in January or when his contract ends in June – is probably four years in the making. That some of his expressions have become memeable content, and his defending has been a source of light relief for opposition fans at times, takes nothing away from his admirable desire to battle back to fitness, and he probably still has something to offer at the Premier League level. Just not at the challenging-to-win-the-Premier League level.
Ferguson once claimed Jones could be a successor to Duncan Edwards, his reading of the game being of such a level that if his body had been able to follow his head’s orders he’d have been a United and England regular. But it was clear long before that 2019 contract extension that the ship had sailed in that regard, and it is a shame for all concerned that things should end with him sloping off into the distance with no recent experience in front of a United crowd to speak of.
There are far sadder stories to have come from the world of sport, but that doesn’t make this one any less tragic. A decent footballer has been unable to play football. The cost involved to the club will, of course, be a bone of contention. But the headline news is that both United and Jones might now be able to get the fresh start they’ve both needed for a good while.
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