How and Why Sporting Dynasties Like Red Bull and Manchester United Crumble

At the start of the 2024 F1 season, the bookmakers had Max Verstappen down as a 1/8 chance to win yet another Drivers’ Championship.

His Red Bull team was even shorter than that – quotes of 1/20 the best available – to win a third consecutive Constructors’ Championship.

And then, well….

There’s every chance that Verstappen will win the title still, but after three-quarters or so of the campaign he’s lengthened to 8/15 to land a fourth consecutive crown.

Red Bull, meanwhile, have been well and truly usurped as the leading constructor; for context, with six races of the season to go McLaren were priced at 1/33 to end the Austrian outfit’s monopoly of the team championship.

While not winning is a new phenomenon for Red Bull to experience, it’s a feeling that has come with all manner of off-track controversies. Lurid allegations made against team boss Christian Horner have seen at least six key backroom staff members depart – three of them to McLaren, no less.

Verstappen himself hasn’t enjoyed the best of years as his car’s superiority has been challenged by others, with his foul-mouthed tirade in Singapore perhaps as much an outpouring of frustration of the season as much as anything else. The Dutchman has even threatened to walk away from the sport altogether.

Max Verstappen said that his punishment for swearing in a news conference could speed up his exit from #F1 👋 pic.twitter.com/0FTOiPEeiY

— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) September 22, 2024

It’s possible, whisper it, that Red Bull’s dynasty as F1 powerhouses is over; in the same way that they ended Mercedes’ domination of the sport a few years ago.

It’s always fascinating to explore the tale behind the tape when great sporting dynasties do come to an end. Have the players started to suffer from a lack of motivation? Has success gone to the head of the team’s leadership figures? Has the rug been pulled, financially speaking?

There’s many different reasons as to why a dynasty of success in sport can come to a premature end. And here, we’ve shined a light on a good handful of them….

Red Bull’s Wings Clipped

It’s not impossible, of course, that Red Bull will rediscover their wings and return to pole position as F1’s premier team.

But the scale of the difficulties they have faced away from the track – not least the loss of competitive advantage in losing so many members of key personnel, as well as rule changes on it, mean that they are unlikely to dominate Formula One for the foreseeable future.

In theory, Red Bull has the best car and, in Verstappen, the best driver. But McLaren have made giant strides in 2024, whereas Red Bull’s RB20 car has rather plateaued in terms of its forward motion.

McLaren made its most significant raft of upgrades prior to the Miami Grand Prix, at which their driver Lando Norris dominated.

After that fateful day, Norris twice more up to an including the Singapore GP, while his McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri also took top spot in Hungary and Azerbaijan.

Factor in victories for Charles Leclerc, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, and it meant that Verstappen had won only three of the twelve available races between Miami and Singapore. By his and Red Bull’s standards, that’s a minor disaster.

It’s not always easy to find answers and clarity amidst such a maelstrom, but F1 is different in that results are easily quantifiable – lap times, top speeds etc all evidence in technicolour of how things are going.

To that end, here’s Verstappen’s positions on the grid after qualifying in 2024, displayed in chronological order and starting with his pole in Bahrain at the start of the campaign:

Between Bahrain and Emilia Romagna, Verstappen enjoyed complete exclusivity at the front of the grid. But from there, he gained supremacy in just one of the subsequent eleven races.

While it’s not uncommon for Grand Prix renewals to be won from off pole, every position backwards you go on the starting grid, the harder your job becomes to go and win – those chances decrease exponentially with every row further back a driver finds themselves.

So while Verstappen has been found wanting in qualifying in the second half of the 2024 season, what are his actual race times like?

Here’s a look at whether he completed the race quicker or slower in 2023 or 2024. Even though the varying conditions play a part, there’s a clear trend at play:

Max Verstappen’s 2024 Race Times vs 2023

Much has been made of McLaren’s ascent, particularly in the second half of the season, as a factor in the changing scene at the front of the F1 grid.

However, although there’s been pockets of strong performance, the takeaway point is that – more often than not – Verstappen and Red Bull have been slower in 2024 than they were during the previous season.

So why has Red Bull’s dynasty crumbled? Behind the scenes ructions haven’t exactly helped, but the bottom line is that Red Bull have lost their competitive advantage – that is the most common cause of a sporting giant losing their grip on their monopoly.

Money Talks: Manchester United

The first ever edition of the Premier League, which took place in 1992/93 after the rebrand of the old First Division, was won in comprehensive fashion by Manchester United.

It was their first league title in nearly 30 years, with Alex Ferguson – whose knighthood would later follow – anointed as the man responsible in his first trophy win as Red Devils boss.

A whopping twelve more Premier League titles would be won by United between 1993/94 and 2012/13, as well as two Champions League triumphs, four FA Cups and three League Cups. All of which was overseen by Ferguson.

It’s one of the most remarkable dynasties in English football, with Manchester United recognised as one of the very best clubs, and most commercially successful, on the planet.

And then, like many great sporting dynasties, the whole thing came crashing down with staggering disappointment.

Ferguson retired at the end of the 2012/13 season, setting into motion an extraordinary decline. Replacements came and went in a blink of an eye – David Moyes, Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho, who at least brought some silverware back to Old Trafford in a unique League Cup, Community Shield and Europa League treble.

The root of United’s struggles can perhaps be traced directly to Ferguson’s retirement: the club losing their seemingly eternal figurehead, and the mastermind behind so much of their success.

But the likes of Van Gaal and Mourinho have been prolific winners in leagues all over the world, so it would be churlish to suggest that the reason Manchester United’s dynasty was destroyed was due to a lack of a savvy replacement for Ferguson.

It would, however, be fair to say that United lost their way in the transfer market without Ferguson’s shrewd eye for talent. In the seasons immediately after his retirement, the recruitment team at Old Trafford brought in the likes of Marouane Fellaini, Marcos Rojo, Morgan Schneiderlin and Anthony Martial – none of whom had ever offered a suggestion they might form part of an all-conquering United side.

Indeed, in the years that have passed since, United have gone from mean machine to meme machine; such is the comedic timing of their work in the transfer market.

The degradation in Manchester United also allows us to consider one of the so-called truisms in modern football: that money buys success.

There’s no doubt that United were amongst the very richest clubs in the Premier League during the 1990s and 2000s, before overseas investment swelled the coffers of Chelsea, Manchester City and latterly Liverpool.

So is a lack of transfer spending, or their main rivals catching them up in that department, partly to blame for United’s downfall?

In the graphic below, we’ve plotted two lines: final league position and transfer rank (teams ranked in order of transfer spending).

And the results are as chaotic as you perhaps would expect….

There have been six seasons in which Manchester United have spent the most, or second-most, on new players in the past decade. Incredibly, those campaigns yielded nothing better than a pair of third-place finishes.

There’s been seasons in which the Glazers have tightened the purse-strings considerably; 2018/19 and 2020/21 in particular. In the latter of those, United finished in second place in the Premier League table – a tremendous effort given that lack of investment.

The takeaway point is that Manchester United are routinely amongst the Premier League’s most extravagant spenders. And, yet, they haven’t challenged for the title in more than a decade.

Does money buy success in football? It depends who’s spending it, it seems….

One thing is for sure: Manchester United’s dynasty hasn’t crumbled due to a lack of transfer spending. Nor has it been impacted by a lack of quality leadership – messrs Mourinho and Van Gaal’s trophy cabinets speak volumes.

Once again, it appears that United – like most lost dynasties – simply lost their competitive advantage: that ability to bring in classy young players, enabling an expert man-manager like Ferguson to mould them into champions.

Age Catches Up With Australia and the Chicago Bulls

One of the other reasons sporting dynasties crumble is that extreme loyalty is shown to ageing players that helped to lay the foundations for a team’s success.

But that leads to two different problems: a) most athletes’ abilities diminish over time, and b) by showing loyalty to older heads, it prevents younger talents from getting a chance to gain that all-important experience.

Australian Cricket Team

It’s an issue that the Australian men’s national cricket team had to face head on as their incredible run of success came to an abrupt halt in the mid-2000s.

Between 1999 and 2007, Australia were an unstoppable force. They won three consecutive editions of the Cricket World Cup in that timeframe, utilising a consistent group of players throughout that time.

The likes of Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist, Glenn McGrath, Matthew Hayden and Brad Hogg were vital to Australia’s ODI success, with the former quartet also key to their triumphs in the test arena too.

In fact, in that 1999-2007 timeframe, Australia won four of the five editions of the Ashes played.

The issue that was creeping up on Australian cricket was that their players weren’t getting younger. As of the 2007 World Cup, Ponting (32), Gilchrist (35), Hayden (35), Hogg (36) and McGrath (37) were elder statesmen of the game, and as limited overs cricket enjoyed an explosion of big hitting batting and athleticism in the field, their rather more old-fashioned approach to the game was ageing as quickly as their bones.

And by the end of the 2006/07 Ashes, in which the Aussies whitewashed England 5-0, the likes of Justin Langer (36) and the late, great Shane Warne (37) were also coming to the end of their careers.

When that collective all began to retire from international duty at around the same time, Australia became noticeably weaker – they were forced to field young, inexperienced replacements for their older heads, or perhaps players that might not quite have been up to scratch.

There followed a long period in the doldrums for Australian cricket. They lost four of the next five editions of the Ashes, while their results in all formats of the game would deteriorate quite markedly.

It would also take until 2021 for them to win the T20 World Cup; a full 14 years after the tournament’s inception.

It’s a reminder of sport’s ceaseless onward march. Winning today is fun….but maybe not at the expense of years of misery to follow.

Chicago Bulls

The Aussies learned nothing from the Chicago Bulls, whose players won together and aged together throughout the 1990s.

The Bulls won six NBA Championships inside a decade, including a pair of ‘three peats’, to define one of the most extraordinary dynasties in the competition’s history.

Central to their success was Michael Jordan, who was just coming into his own at the start of the 1990s. He would win all of the individual accolades that the NBA has to offer throughout the decade, but by the turn of the new millennium he, and his Bulls colleagues, were heading for the doldrums.

Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman, key figures in Chicago’s rise to the top of the NBA, were moved on to pastures new, while head coach Phil Jackson – who had masterminded their success – was surprisingly not handed a contract extension. He would go on to win five more NBA titles with the Los Angeles Lakers.

By the year 2000, the Bulls were shorn of their outstanding head coach and three of the players that had brought them incredible success out on the court. A lack of foresight and succession planning has left Chicago cast aside….they haven’t won the NBA Championship since the swansong of Jordan and co in 1998.

So for any sports team out there looking to build a dynasty of success, remember not to get too attached to your ageing players – succession planning, and a pathway for new stars to shine, will ensure that you have the best chance of continuing on your road to glory….rather than taking the slip road to nowheresville.