The publishers of an excellent biography about Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s path to the Manchester United hot-seat settled on a title of The Red Apprentice.
It felt apt. Accurate too. It is also a damning indictment of Solskjaer’s three-year reign at Old Trafford. No Manchester United manager should be learning on the job. That isn’t Solskjaer’s fault, of course. He answered the call from his old club when United sacked Jose Mourinho in December 2018, initially as a caretaker, and who could blame him?
‘I suppose it was like coming in on loan,’ Solskjaer wrote candidly earlier this year in another book on leadership.