Gary Neville spoke exclusively to GOAL about Manchester United's dreadful season, Arsenal's trophy hunt and Specsavers' Best Worst Pitch campaign.
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Man Utd out of Europe for 2025-26Arsenal again failed to deliver silverwareNeville teaming up with Specsavers for grassroots causeFollow GOAL on WhatsApp! 🟢📱WHAT HAPPENED?
Manchester United will not compete in European competition next season after they finished 15th in the Premier League – their lowest return since 1973-74 when they were relegated from the top flight. The Red Devils are also reeling after losing last Wednesday's Europa League final to Tottenham Hotspur. Had Ruben Amorim's side won in Bilbao, they would have secured direct qualification into next year's Champions League, but Neville believes this could be the wake-up call that the club needs to realise it's in trouble.
AdvertisementGetty Images SportWHAT NEVILLE SAID
Speaking exclusively to GOAL, Neville recalled: "I was in a pub watching it. I didn't react at the end of the game. It sort of, to be fair, was something that felt quite expected. The club has made a lot of poor decisions over the last 10 years, and I think Wednesday night, it all came home to roost on and off the pitch.
"The financial stresses that this will bring, but also the performance in a big game like that. I don't believe that football players, wake up in the morning and don't care. I believe they genuinely do care, and I believe those Manchester United players do care. But the reality of it is, it's too much for them, and it's too much for everybody at the club at this moment in time. And there's no doubt that there is going to need to be changes there.
"There's obviously a manager who's relatively new who's going to need to do a lot of… he's going to need to do quite a lot. He's gonna need to do quite a lot of work in changing and adapting that squad to get what he wants. And he's collected a group of players who have had a difficult time before he came, even more difficult time since he arrived.
"It would have been a silver lining around the dark cloud last Wednesday night if Manchester United would have won. But the fact that they didn't win, maybe it's what the club needed. Maybe it's the low that ultimately everybody at the club sort of… when you win a final and you get into the Champions League, you can sometimes tell yourself, 'yeah, we're OK'. We're not OK. The club's not OK. It needs drastic change, and I'm hopeful of that drastic change coming. How far that will set Manchester United back that loss, we don't know yet.
"But fans are patient. They love the club. They love the players. They love their manager. And they recognise that one day, Manchester United will return to success, but it could be quite a while off yet because of what's happening in the current phase."
THE BIGGER PICTURE
GOAL also asked Neville, as a co-owner of Salford City, what his message would be for Mikel Arteta if he was in fact part of the ownership group at Arsenal, who have gone five seasons without a trophy and finished second in the Premier League for three years running.
"To be fair, I don't think you need to give Mikel Arteta a message. He's a smart guy, he's a good coach, he's built a good squad there. They just haven't got over the line. I think the message that came out of Arsenal… I don't need to say it because they said it themselves at the end of the season on the pitch.
"Martin Odegaard and Declan Rice in an interview with Sky, then Odegaard as captain and Arteta spoke to the fans. They said quite clearly it's not good enough. We want it today to be about a title, a celebration, and it's not. We haven't won a trophy again, and we need to win silverware, and we need to come back next season and do it. So that's what they were in their words. I don't need to say it for them.
"We can't be sat here in twelve months doing another interview where we're talking about a team that's achieved again. We have to talk about a team that's won. You have to win if you're Arsenal Football Club. I'm not sat here as a player who won a lot of trophies saying that every team has to win, but if you're Arsenal Football Club, if you're Liverpool Football Club, you have to win trophies. If you're Manchester United, you have to win trophies.
"That's the expectation. It's never going to fall away. Anything less than that has to be deemed as not quite achieving what you set out to do. So in twelve months' time, Arsenal have to be on a podium with a medal around the neck while still competing for the Premier League title.
"If it's going to be an FA Cup or a European title or a League Cup that they're going to win, they have to still be right at the very top close to wherever the league title winners are going to be. Or preferably, you want to be the title winners. That's the trophy you need."
SpecsaversDID YOU KNOW?
Neville was speaking to GOAL after being unveiled as the latest high-profile footballing figure to get involved with Specsavers' Best Worst Pitch campaign, with 50 clubs to be provided with new line marking machines, paint, GPS pitch mapping and maintenance training in an attempt to help grassroots football.
He said: "Players of my age particularly have obviously been developed through what would be part pitches, Sunday league games, playing for schools, and we understand the challenges of games being called off and pitches being under pressure and the fact that these are all volunteers who were trying to keep the game flowing at grassroots level.
"So the idea of Specsavers contributing towards equipment and training and developing pitches, making sure that they're more playable and they're in better condition is just something that tapped right into what I like. I've watched 250 games for Salford City and, and saw the challenges at step eight, step seven, step six of the pyramid about how even bigger challenge it exists for those types of clubs. And then you think about it from a point of view of kids playing in local areas near where I live and all around the country.
"Pitches are a challenge, whether it's a lack of pitches, a lack of facilities also, the quality of the facilities in pitches. So it was something that I can talk to quite a bit about the passion now for grassroots football.
"I think without grassroots football, the game's dead. We all started at either school playing on sort of pitches or playing for our Saturday or Sunday team locally. You don't just basically turn up at Manchester United or Chelsea or Liverpool as an academy player without having been developed from the age of four, five, six, seven, playing on park pitches, playing for your school, playing for your Sunday league team. And without that, you don't get the England players of today. But more importantly than that, football is the largest participation sport in this country, and most of those players play amateur level.
"It's the heartbeat of basically communities up and down the country on a on a week-to-week basis, whether it's them playing themselves or it's going watching their local club. So at all levels of the game, it's important that we don't forget where professional football and Premier League football comes from. It starts very much at the bottom rung of the ladder, and that's grassroots football, and that's where all of us came from and the players that I played with at United."
