16 Conclusions from Man Utd 0-1 Man City: Red cards, kicked arses, offsides, Fernanderson, Haaland

· Football365

Two controversial VAR decisions in the Manchester derby fell one each the way of City and United, yet both ultimately hurt United.

The first Manchester derby of the 2026/27 season is in the books, and what a relief to just be able to focus on the football after City ran out deserved 1-0 winners.

How nice it is not to get all bogged down in arguments about VAR and what the juddering fck offside even is any more after a game that was almost, if anything, for me, Clive, too devoid of controversy.

United can and will complain about the City winner, but they were also extraordinarily cack. It’s one thing to feel that the game has slipped away from you because a big decision went in the opposition’s favour; but this game started to slide out of United’s control when a big decision went their way.

1. An early-season derby is always going to feel of outsized importance. Always feel like it carries extra weight, extra heft, for what it might tell us about how the rest of a long season might pan out for those involved.

And especially so when everything it tells us seems to confirm existing suspicions about both sides. For Manchester United, that’s pretty bad news. They were desperately poor, and Michael Carrick may soon run out of road in which to bristle at doubts over the passion of a side that failed today’s test in that and all the other most basic ways.

For City, though, a fourth win in four confirms a nascent title challenge for a team and manager about whom the very real pre-season, post-Pep doubts are slowly fading away.

They had won their most recent Premier League and Champions League games despite not playing well. Here, they were excellent in adversity and the 10 men deserved this seismic success.

2. The wider discussion of this game, though, will fall not on the performances of the two sides but on a pair of refereeing decisions. We’ll have our cake and eat it by shaking our heads sadly at refereeing decisions dominating the debate while also having them dominate our conclusions. The elephant in the room will be simply too large if we don’t.

We’re not at all comfortable with either decision. City can feel mighty aggrieved with the circumstances around Phil Foden’s first-half red card. United are justified in full-blown rage about the City winner.

3. The oddity here is that, despite the large and controversial (and, to our mind at least, wrong) decisions apparently falling one in favour of each side, there was no sense at all of Things Balancing Out.

Both decisions ultimately favoured City. An observation that thoroughly damns United.

4. Let’s go through each in turn. The order of events for Foden’s altercation with Bruno Fernandes leave ‘Red card for Foden, nothing for Fernandes’ as perhaps the least understandable of all possible outcomes.

The facts are these. Bruno fouls Foden by kicking him in the shin. While Foden is on the ground he then kicks him up the arse. Significantly, that kick up the arse is a clear separate action, not related to the initial foul.

Foden, his pride and arse wounded, lashes out foolishly with a kind of swishing kick to Bruno’s midriff. At this point, Bruno flings himself to the ground in apparent but surely fictitious agony.

How significant that last detail was in prompting Michael Oliver’s very quick reach for the red card only he will know, but it would be hard to imagine it had no consequence given how Bruno was able to weasel out of the whole thing scot-free.

The VAR backed up Oliver’s decision and highlighted that Foden’s kick was a ‘secondary action’. It is hard to sympathise too strongly with a player of Foden’s experience allowing himself to get so easily wound up by a known shthouse, and we have the standard level of parental respect for the defence of ‘But he started it’… but we also don’t quite know how to finish that sentence.

Bruno did start it. Bruno was the primary aggressor – even among ‘secondary actions’.

As Will Ford has already noted , there is a quirk in football where an action committed from the ground always seems to be officiated more harshly than a similar act from a standing position. In play, there is perhaps a justifiable argument around control and intent, but it seems to carry over less justifiably to these kind of post-foul shenanigans.

Bruno’s second kick, the one directed at Foden’s arse and anus, was the most forceful and deliberately malicious act of any. It was also a clear ‘secondary action’.

Not sure how the conclusion from it all can really be that the less forceful retaliatory kick deserves a red card, while the first and more violent of the secondary actions is deemed unworthy of punishment.

5. And then there’s the goal. First of all, there’s a standard bit of VAR here. Because we’re fairly sure the assistant referee (perfectly understandably) reckons both Erling Haaland and Enzo Fernandez were offside, rendering the subjective matter of the latter’s involvement moot.

But once it’s revealed that Haaland is in fact being played onside by Patrick Dorgu’s outstretched toe, attention shifts to the subjective.

Here, we think, comes an example of the fundamental flaw of VAR. One that will never and can never be resolved. The foundational lie upon which the entire VAR edifice is built: that every decision has an objective right answer and a wrong answer.

Every time another decision comes along that challenges this notion, off we go to rewrite and redefine the laws anew in the mistaken belief that greater specificity will lead to clearer and more objectively agreeable outcomes. It won’t happen because vast swathes of football’s laws are built on inevitably and necessarily subjective foundations.

6. The war between the two rival factions of officiating can never be won. Consistency will always be all we want until all we want is common sense. Common sense will always be all we want until all we want is consistency. Twas ever thus.

But on the subject of interfering with play and offside, we feel with increasing force that common sense at the apparent expense of consistency was preferable. When the best definition of interfering with play really was “I know it when I see it”. Attempts to codify the specific things that constitute interfering with play have only served to narrow the definition, allowing for some egregious outcomes.

7. All that being said, this specific goal still feels extraordinarily straightforward. It just should not be a goal. Even within the narrowly defined parameters of what now constitutes an ‘interfering’ offside defence, we challenge anyone to explain to us how Enzo Fernandez going for and narrowly missing a full-length diving header while occupying the full attention of Lisandro Martinez and at least some of Senne Lammens’ doesn’t meet this definition from the latest rulebook.

> A player will be penalised if they are… Clearly attempting to play a ball which is close when this action impacts on an opponent

Fernandez’s actions seem to fit that description so utterly, so perfectly, that footage of this incident could be used in a PowerPoint presentation as an example of precisely what this clause means.

There is wriggle room around the red card, but there seems to be none here. United will surely receive an apology from Pro Ref, which will no doubt make them feel so much better.

8. What United should be grateful for, though, is the fact the post-match attention and fallout will land so entirely on those two big controversial decisions. Because it will mean far less attention than might otherwise have landed upon United’s football. Which, pretty much from the moment Foden departed, was largely rotten.

Especially and infuriatingly so because at the time of the red card they were probably ahead on points after a few cagey opening rounds.

A brief but ferocious flurry of attacking activity from City had been dealt with in the opening minutes, and United had gained first a foothold and then a degree of control in the following half-hour.

But the red card scuppered them.

9. In terms of its impact on the overall game, a red card for an attacking player is often the most interesting. And it’s the most interesting specifically because it creates the fewest ripples. Neither team has to make wholesale changes to their shape or method or tactics; they just have to refine them to exploit an advantage or mitigate a disadvantage.

City simply shifted from 4-2-3-1 to 4-2-2-1. The £200m midfield double pivot perhaps retreated a few yards, the full-backs and wide players narrowed. There was nothing huge, but it proved significant.

This small enforced City change had a deadening effect on United, whose own threat from wide positions is largely non-existent at the best of times. None of United’s front three are paint-on-the-boots wide players by inclination, and the team’s chief creative driving force is obviously the determinedly central Bruno.

10. What the reduction in numbers allowed City to do, something that would have seemed unduly negative with a full complement but proved wonderfully effective, was starve United of that central space.

City had the excuse now to condense that middle third. To minimise the gaps between Fernanderson and the back four. To bring those full-backs in tighter to the centre-backs.

It left United a more limited and less compelling attacking force against 10 than they were against 11, and all while allowing City to retain three genuine counter-attacking players in Haaland, Rayan Cherki (later Iliman Ndiaye) and Antoine Semenyo. It all worked out perfectly for Enzo Maresca, who no longer appears to be facing an impossible task.

And yeah, we called the Fernandez and Anderson axis ‘Fernanderson’. Fight us.

11. They were both magnificent on their Manchester derby debuts Especially Fernandez, but especially Anderson.

This was not only his first taste of Manchester derby action, but of Proper Derby action altogether in senior football having never faced Sunderland with Newcastle or Derby with Nottingham Forest.

You’d never have guessed. He threw himself into the game with everything you could want from a derby-day midfielder. Crunching tackles here. Early reducers in the officially-sanctioned no-yellow-cards-in-the-opening-skirmishes. And ultimately just the quiet, steely control of a game full of overheating heads and discarded plans that you might expect of a seasoned veteran of this kind of occasion.

Fernandez, meanwhile, utilised all his trademark diplomacy and was the very ideal kind of man to just help calm everything down when it threatened to boil over. The one gripe we have with Maresca today was his decision to hook Fernandez just after he’d had a yellow-each barney with Harry Maguire that was just about to become another big talking point in a game so desperately short of them. Boo! BOOOO!

12. Haaland was also magnificent once City were a man light, taking on the role of chief hold-up merchant with alacrity and then doubling down as City ran down the clock to seal victory with something approaching embarrassing ease.

His approach in those final minutes was genuinely fascinating. Time and again he would receive the ball around the halfway line or even deeper, and his goal would be simple: advance as far up the pitch as possible.

His method, though, was the key. Ordinarily, you might think the best way to do that would be to attempt that forward progress as quickly as possible to maximise gains in the most efficient manner. But Haaland didn’t do it that way. It’s hard to explain beyond saying things that sound ridiculous like ‘running less fast than he could run had he wanted to’ but what he did, you see, was get up the field by running less fast than he could run had he wanted to. He was drawing tackles, allowing team-mates to join the fun and just generally breaking United hearts and spirits in a way a simple full sprint to the corner flag couldn’t have.

And all after scoring his ninth goal in eight Manchester derbies.

13. Really, though, City had heroes all over the pitch. Gianluigi Donnarumma had embarrassingly little to do until a stunning last-minute save to deny Bryan Mbeumo a narrative-shifting, potentially season-altering equaliser. Marc Guehi was immense at the heart of defence. Everywhere you looked, there were shifts being put in by the men in blue.

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