Harry Maguire will remain at Man Utd for an eighth season but his time at the club has featured some painful lows as well as some memorable highs. He reflected on that in Ireland this week.
Harry Maguire can remember the day he hit rock bottom. It had been building up for a couple of years, but at Hampden Park in September 2023, it all became too much, if not for Maguire, then for his family at the very least.
He was a half-time substitute in the fixture between Scotland and England, and so low had his reputation sunk that his every touch was greeted with cheers from the Scottish fans. The same had happened when he came on for Manchester United at Arsenal a week earlier.
This was where Maguire now was. The world’s most expensive defender, in the team of the tournament in the European Championship in 2021, but now considered such a figure of fun that his mere presence on the pitch gave encouragement to opposition supporters. It had gone from abuse to mockery.
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Maguire played pretty well in that game but still scored an own goal. Afterwards, he tried to work out why he had gone from a cult hero in 2018, loved for being one of the lads and serenaded for drinking the vodka and the Jäger, to the most derided and abused footballer in the country.
“Sometimes it did cross my mind at the time just thinking, ‘Why? I don’t know why it has done this. I don’t know where it’s come from’,” he said.
“My form dipped a little bit, yeah, of course, everyone does that in their career. But I was in a situation where I was just a lad from Sheffield playing for such a huge club.
“I thought this is what happens – this is the fault of the club not performing well. But when you look back it probably did go a little bit too far. At the time, I can remember thinking I just don’t know how this has really happened. I don’t know how it’s changed so quickly.”
It was still before 9am when a punctual Maguire strode into the Fitzgerald Suite in Carton House, taking up a seat on a plush sofa with the grounds of an idyllic rural retreat visible from the bay windows behind him.
The 33-year-old held court for 25 minutes on the highs and lows of an Old Trafford career that is unlike any other. Maguire can sometimes be formal in interview situations, but this was a figure who looked relaxed and at ease. It was more in line with his reputation as the funniest player in the squad.
It is the first time he has returned to Ireland with his club side since being booed at the Aviva Stadium when playing for United in a pre-season friendly in 2023.
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A year earlier, he had been jeered by United fans in Melbourne, while he was given the same treatment in Las Vegas in 2023. It was the middle of a slump that it felt like Maguire might never recover from. United stripped him of the captaincy and tried to sell him to West Ham that summer, and had a deal been reached over his wages, he would have gone.
Then came the Scotland game in September. Maguire insists that being so laid back meant he usually shrugged off the struggles and the abuse, but for his family it wasn’t so easy. Mum Zoe took to social media after that game to label the treatment of her son as “disgraceful”.
Maguire asked his mum not to put the post out, but she told him she wasn’t listening to him on this occasion and went public. Then the tide began to turn, helped by an improvement in his own performances. Now the 33-year-old has just signed a new contract, taking him into an eighth season at Old Trafford, and he is the poster boy for the kind of character and resilience needed to make it at United.
“I think there’ll be a lot who want to maybe just close the book and just go elsewhere and restart their career,” Maguire said of that period.
“I think it’s probably broken them a little bit earlier. I think it got to a point where it got really that low, the mocking and the abuse – if you want to call it abuse – that there was only one way it could go.”
Maguire believes there was a three or four-year period around his move from Leicester City to United when he was in the conversation to be the best centre-back in the world. That culminated with the Euros in 2021 and, like several of his international teammates, he struggled after a heartbreaking penalty shoot-out defeat to Italy in the final, having also seen United lose the Europa League final to Villarreal in the same manner.
It was also a season that unravelled spectacularly at club level. Maguire was sent off in Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s final game, a 4-1 defeat at Watford, and the way his form collapsed left him feeling regret for letting the Norwegian down. The appointment of Ralf Rangnick as interim manager only made matters worse.
“I was coming off the back of two big final defeats. The Euros on penalties, Europa League on penalties. I probably just didn’t handle that as well as I should have,” he said.
“I think there were so many lads who struggled in that period after the Euros. When you’re Manchester United captain and when you’re a central defender, you can’t get away with that. You can’t get away with struggling.
“There were lots of different things in that season. Losing Ole was a big, big loss. I felt a lot of responsibility for that as performances leading up to Ole losing his job weren’t good enough.
“The back end of the season was a mess. It really was a mess. I was the captain, and I took a lot of the brunt for it. We were all over the place, the back six months of that season.
“It wasn’t to do with Ralf, it was more to do with how us as players and as a squad handled it. I just felt like we didn’t handle it as well as we should have with an interim manager coming in, compared to how we’ve handled it this time under Michael.”
Maguire’s slump would eventually end with him losing the captaincy, unceremoniously dumped by Erik ten Hag in favour of Bruno Fernandes. He admits to “anger and disappointment” at that decision at the time, although his form since losing the armband has improved again.
But his Old Trafford career survived and as he looks ahead to what he hopes will be a title challenge, he rightly takes pride in the fact that he has lasted so long, pointing to David Beckham and Wayne Rooney for inspiration as players who also emerged from their own dark days at United.
“When you play at the top level, unless you are one of the superstars and a world, world-class player, you have ups and downs and you have things that you have to deal with,” Maguire said. “That’s why you see so many players have two or three years at the top, then they drop off and they wander off and go into a different country and you don’t hear too much about them again. To play at the top, you’ve got to deal with the ups and downs.
“I always looked to the experience with players like David Beckham and Wayne Rooney and how they overcame it. They were unbelievable, world-class players, so if it happens to them, it can happen to anyone.
“I just kept my head down. I have great self-belief, more importantly, that I’m a top player, and I believe that. I think that’s what helps me when things are tough.”
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