Football has a funny habit of turning injury lay-offs into origin stories. We tell ourselves that absence makes the heart grow fonder and, somehow, that a spell on the sidelines makes a player stronger, wiser, more determined. Sometimes that is literally true. Gareth Bale spent almost a year in the gym during his early days at Tottenham and came back as a physically unstoppable force, a man who looked like he had been rebuilt in a laboratory and programmed to terrorise full-backs. But usually, the transformation happens entirely in the eyes of the beholder. Fans miss a player for months, and in that vacuum all of his flaws are conveniently forgotten. His best moments are replayed on a loop in their minds. His absence becomes the obvious explanation for every bad result, every defensive collapse, every meek surrender. And when he finally returns, he is greeted not as a footballer but as a returning hero, a saviour who has come to restore order to a chaotic universe. That is exactly what happened with Lisandro Martinez at Manchester United last season. After a cruciate ligament injury kept him out for close to a year, his reinstatement to the starting eleven felt like a trophy in itself. The defence had been a shambles without him, or at least that was the narrative that hardened with every passing week. United fans were laser-focused on the idea that one little Argentine warrior would fix everything. In those first few weeks back, it looked like they were right. He was aggressive, he was at the heart of everything good, he was clearly the best centre-back at the club by some distance. The relief was real. The belief was real. And then, slowly, the old doubts crept back in, because Martinez is not a calm, reliable anchor. He is a lightning rod. He attracts chaos. Sometimes he creates it, and he does so with the kind of undeniable passion that makes it impossible to look away.
Gary Neville once described the World Cup pairing of Lisandro Martinez and Cristian Romero as “the best, worst centre-back pairing in the world,” and that line has aged like a fine wine. It sums up Martinez’s entire Manchester United career far better than any statistic or tactical breakdown ever could. On his day, he is a monster. He is aggressive without being reckless, brave without being foolish, and he reads the game with the kind of intelligence that makes a defence look ten times more organised than it actually is. He loves a tackle, he loves a duel, and he can thread passes through midfield with the vision of a number ten. That is why United spent so much money on him and why fans fell in love with him so quickly. He plays like he cares, and supporters will forgive almost anything in a player who visibly bleeds for the badge. But there is a flip side to that coin, and it is ugly. When his aggression is not properly channelled, he dives into challenges he cannot win and leaves acres of space behind him. When his positioning is slightly off, his lack of height becomes a brutal vulnerability that any half-decent striker can exploit. And when he tries to play the clever pass, he sometimes plays a pass straight to an opponent who is standing exactly where the danger is. This season has been a horror show of such moments. Against Everton, a pathetic clearance effectively served as an assist for their first goal. Against Ipswich, a simple blunder gifted them their second. Against Fulham, he scored a ridiculous own goal that looked like the punchline of a joke. And then there was the Tottenham match, where Dominic Solanke bullied him all afternoon. Even after Solanke had already got away from him once, Martinez failed to adjust. He was more concerned with wrestling his man than watching the ball, and United paid the price. These are not isolated mistakes. They are a pattern. And the worst part is that the same fans who were idolising him last spring are now calling for his contract to be ripped up at the earliest possible opportunity. That is not necessarily an overreaction. It is the natural end point of a relationship built on hope and denial.
The problem for Michael Carrick is that he cannot simply leave Martinez out of the team. United are in an absurd defensive crisis, the kind that makes sensible people question whether they should have bought a new goalkeeper, a new full-back, two new centre-backs, and a new defensive midfielder years ago. Harry Maguire is their most reliable option, but he cannot play every match and he is not a long-term solution. Leny Yoro, the young defender signed with so much promise, looked completely overwhelmed in the Carabao Cup defeat to Brighton. Ayden Heaven, thrown in beside him, was not ready for that level. Together they were a disaster partnership, and Carrick had no choice but to go back to Martinez despite his terrible form. That is the quiet, unglamorous reality of management: sometimes you have to pick a player who is struggling because every alternative is worse. Martinez’s season has been a nightmare. He has been responsible for goals, he has been skinned alive by centre-forwards, and he has lost the composure that used to define him. Yet every time Carrick looks at his bench, he sees options that are either too inexperienced, too fragile, or too raw to trust. It would be easy to say that Martinez should be dropped, but who comes in? Who actually protects United’s goal better than he does right now? That is the question nobody wants to answer, because the truth is ugly. The club’s recruitment has been so poor for so long that they are reliant on a man in his thirties and a defender who has always been a high-risk, high-reward gamble. Carrick’s persistence with Martinez is not stubbornness. It is survival. He is trying to keep his ship afloat with a crew that is leaking from every corner, and the fans who are screaming at him to make changes are the same ones who would scream even louder if the changes went wrong.
Amid all this misery, United’s travelling squad for their clash with Atletico Madrid included a familiar name: Matthijs de Ligt. And just like that, the fans have started rewriting history. De Ligt has not been good enough for Manchester United. That was the general consensus after his first season under Erik ten Hag. He looked slow, uncertain, and nothing like the brilliant young defender who captained Ajax to the Champions League semi-final. He struggled to justify his price tag, and there were plenty of people who quietly wondered whether United had bought a name rather than a player. But now, after Martinez’s catastrophic run, De Ligt is being recast as the saviour. The same people who were writing him off are insisting that he has always been the answer, that he just needed a run of games, that he was played out of position, that the manager before did not understand him. It is a familiar pattern, and it is almost laughable. De Ligt did not become a bad player overnight, but he has not shown anything at United to suggest that he can be the solution to a defence that is falling apart. He was injured during the Carrick-led upswing last season, so there is no recent evidence either way. But hoping for him to be a saviour is exactly the kind of magical thinking that got United into this mess in the first place. You do not fix a plumbing crisis by insisting the leak will be fine if you just swap one tap for another. The whole pipe system needs to be replaced. De Ligt may eventually have a good spell, but he is not a long-term answer. He is another player in a long line of defenders who have arrived at Old Trafford with big reputations and then shrunk in the glare of scrutiny. That is not a De Ligt-specific problem; it is an environment problem. United have broken players for a decade. The one constant is failure, and the players are just the temporary faces of that failure.
Perhaps the most damning fact in all of this is that Harry Maguire remains United’s best and most reliable defender at the age of 33, more than seven years after he was signed. Maguire was relentlessly pilloried for much of his time at United, often unfairly. He became a meme, a symbol of all the club’s bloated transfer spending, a player whose every mistake was magnified while his solid performances were dismissed as mere competence. Now he is the one holding the defence together. That should be a source of embarrassment for everyone involved in United’s recruitment strategy. It should also be a warning about how quickly narratives shift. The same fans who once chanted “slabhead” at their own defender are now desperately hoping he stays fit. The same pundits who called him overpriced now call him reliable. Football has no memory, or rather, it has a selective memory that changes based on what is needed in the moment. And this is not a coincidence. United have gone through a parade of centre-backs since Maguire arrived. Victor Lindelof, Eric Bailly, Phil Jones, Axel Tuanzebe, Raphael Varane, Lisandro Martinez, Matthijs de Ligt. Some were better than others, but none has ever provided a foundation. The real problem is not any individual player; it is the structural chaos around them. Managers come and go, transfer priorities shift with the wind, and the club has no coherent idea of what kind of defender they want or how they should play. The result is a defence that is constantly being patched up with expensive but ill-fitting pieces. And now INEOS have announced a bizarre plan: fix one area per transfer window. Attack in 2025, midfield in 2026, defence in 2027. That sounds sensible on a whiteboard, but football does not work in tidy annual segments. By the time they get to the defence, the attack will have already decayed, and they will be back to square one. The fans know this. The club, apparently, does not.
So where does this leave Lisandro Martinez? The honest answer is that he is not the answer. He never was. He is a good defender, sometimes a very good defender, but he is not a reliable cornerstone. His aggression is both his greatest gift and his fatal flaw. He will win you games with a perfectly timed tackle, and he will lose you games with a reckless lunge. That is the deal. The problem with Manchester United is that they have asked him to be something he is not: a calm, consistent leader of a defence that desperately needs one. Instead, they have got exactly what they bought: a passionate, chaotic, high-risk player who sometimes looks like a star and sometimes looks like he has never played the sport. The fans’ emotional journey with him is a microcosm of everything wrong with the club. They lift him up when he arrives, worship him when he is injured, adore him when he returns, then turn on him when the inevitable mistakes come. It is exhausting, and it is not healthy for anyone. Martinez deserves better, and so do the fans. But the only way to fix that is to build a proper defence, with proper depth, around a proper plan. That will not happen in one window. It will not happen by hoping De Ligt turns it around. It will not happen by sacking another manager and starting over. It will require structural change, patience, and a willingness to accept that the club’s problems run far deeper than any one player. And in the meantime, Martinez will keep playing, because someone has to. He will keep taking risks, because that is who he is. He will keep providing moments of brilliance and moments of madness. And the fans will keep riding that rollercoaster, because they have no other choice. Football is not a game of perfect solutions. It is a game of imperfect people trying their best. Martinez is trying. His best just might never be enough for the burden United have placed on him. But the failure is not his alone. It belongs to an entire ecosystem that has been failing for a decade. And until that changes, every centre-back who walks through the door at Old Trafford will be a temporary solution to a permanent problem.