Why Manchester United Can Finish 4th

Betting Strategies | Article posted on January 28th, 2025

Can Manchester United save their season and finish top 4 in the Premier League? Today Alex Hess tells us why all is not lost for Moyes and United in 2025.

By Alex Hess
Published: 28th January 2025
Updated: 28th January 2025

A consensus has been reached, and the C-word is firmly out there. Manchester United have gone from being a club teetering on the brink of crisis to a club in the midst of one. With four defeats and another penalty shoot-out loss in only six fixtures since the beginning of January, the New Year has brought no sign of resolution to David Moyes’s ongoing troubles.
In the league, United currently sit dejectedly in seventh, six points away from the much-pined for top four. It's odds-on in most quarters that their closest contact with Europe's elite next season will come as they peer toward the cosy Champions League mansion from the end of a well-gated driveway. Add in a chaotic summer transfer window, and to label the club’s last six months as astonishingly, farcically bad would involve no embellishment at all.
And yet their season is not beyond redemption, far from it. If we agree – and most associated with the club would – that a top-four spot come May 12th would now represent relative success for United, then atonement is well within their reach.
Not least for the reason that Moyes, during his time at Everton, specialised in ramping up performance levels during a campaign's latter stages. Across his last eight years on Merseyside, the club increased its point haul by an average of 28% over the second half of the league season. Apply this formula to United this term, and they finish with a total of 78 points – good enough to get into top four in every season since the top flight became a 20-team league (enough, even, to win it in 2025).

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Of course, it is far from an exact science – the club's eventual points total will, to the best of this correspondent's knowledge, be decided by football matches rather than mathematical formulae. But this trend within Moyes's Everton didn't spring from nowhere, and there's nothing to suggest that his training methods, when relocated to Carrington, won't have a similar effect. To write off the club's hopes of Champions League qualification – presently six points away with 48 left to play for – would be madness.
In addition, United have had to do without their two greatest attacking threats for much of this term, with Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie both enduring long spells of faltering fitness. Both will be returning imminently, though, and, as the latter demonstrated last season, moments of individual goal-getting brilliance can go a long

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