Fellaini and Herrera have become symbols of a divide at United

Sometimes people, through little want of their own, take on a meaning greater than themselves. When the actor Dennis Hopper died in 2010, for instance, he was mourned not only as a well-liked film star but as a symbol of the free-thinking, anti-establishment idealism that defined a generation of American counterculture. At the other end of the scale, the rapper 50 Cent was routinely cited at around the turn of the millennium to be everything that was wrong with Hip Hop, a once-electrifying music genre that had degenerated into crass, commercially driven dirge.

Every now and then, the same thing happens in football. You might recall that a few seasons back there was a banner often held aloft at St James’ Park which featured the face of pudgy playmaker Hatem Ben Arfa superimposed on the iconic portrait of Che Guevara. Ben Arfa had been frozen out of the side by Alan Pardew, a manager whom the fans saw as being unhealthily chummy with their club’s much-criticised ownership regime, and the symbolism could hardly have been clearer.

Similarly, Paul Konchesky did not cover himself in glory during his one season playing for Liverpool, but he will be remembered on Merseyside as a far more poisonous presence than his handful of defensive lapses deserve. Roy Hodgson will forever be viewed by Anfield as a manager who not only played the obliging yes-man to an existence-threatening hierarchy off the pitch, but wilfully embraced mediocrity on it. Konchesky, brought along from Fulham and seen as “Hodgson’s man”, saw these values foisted upon him by association, whether he liked it or not.

A similar phenomenon is underway at Manchester United this season, with not just one player being appointed as a symbolic figure, but two. Ander Herrera and Marouane Fellaini have come to represent the two sides of an ideological divide: between how the fans think their club should function, and how they see it as having lost its way since the post-Ferguson tailspin took effect.

Laboured on the ball, uneasy on the eye and the result of a botched transfer policy, Fellaini has in recent months become the poster-boy for all United’s many perceived ills. Like Konchesky, Fellaini spent the David Moyes reign seeing his presence construed as the on-pitch manifestation of the small-club mentality of a manager who was dragging a great club down to his pedestrian level.

But it isn’t just Moyes’ mundanity which Fellaini is seen to embody. Fellaini was also the sole recruit of that catastrophic summer transfer window in which deals for Fabio Coentrao, Cesc Fabregas and, funnily enough, Ander Herrera, were all bungled very publicly due to various feats of hesitancy and incompetence. When Fellaini did eventually join, it was for £4m more than the buy-out clause that David Moyes had himself demanded be part of the player’s Everton contract, and had expired a few weeks earlier.

United’s transfer business has remained a source of ire in the two and a half years since, with much cash being hurled liberally around (nearly £300m, in fact) but little in the way of a coherent strategy, and very few bona fide successes to speak of. Of the various failures, Fellaini is seen as the worst.

All of which would be less significant if things were going to plan on the pitch. They’re not: Louis van Gaal’s plodding, risk-averse style has, rightly or wrongly, been held up as the antithesis of the fabled “United way” – a rather idealised and undefinable concept, but one which invariably involves adventurous passing, flying wingers and the refusal to accept defeat. Certainly, it is hard to identify any of those traits in the current side. And the man who epitomises the club’s abandonment of these venerable traditions? You guessed it.

Fellaini, with his ungainly manner and his heavy-handed, physically reliant style of play, has often struggled at United, not least when asked to play as a deep-lying midfield puppeteer, a role that not only ignores his strengths but emphatically underlines his weaknesses.

For a crowd accustomed to the effortless ingenuity of Paul Scholes, Fellaini’s telegraphed passing and clumsy stampedes upfield represent a regression to methods unbecoming of their club. Canvas fans for their opinion and it won’t be long before the phrase “not a United player” crops up. To compound matters for Fellaini, the Old Trafford’s famously media-shy former midfield virtuoso has now conquered his stage fright and remodelled himself as a scornful complainant-for-hire.

“He’s not been great, has he?” said Scholes during Fellaini’s first season. “You have to admit that. For a central midfielder at Manchester United I’m expecting a few goals at least. For the money they paid for him, I’d be expecting a lot more, to be honest with you.”

On the other side of this philosophical battle sits Herrera. A rosy-cheeked, graceful, ball-playing midfielder of diminutive stature, he shares few obvious similarities with his team-mate. Factor in his likeable eloquence of the pitch with the healthy dose of combativeness he provides on it, and it is not difficult to see why the Old Trafford crowd have taken to him.

Herrera is also a creator, a player whose defining traits are initiative and invention, occasionally an eye for goal. He is frequently left out of the team.

With United appearing to be under explicit instructions not to try anything which compromises Van Gaal’s game of bloodless keep-ball, Herrera’s willingness to interrupt these spells of stagnancy with the odd moment of zip and incision – fun, even! – has seen him heralded as an icon of dissent.

The thing to recognise is that both sides, while grounded in fact, have been blown out of proportion. Fellaini will never be a string-pulling maestro but nor is he anything approaching a bad player. His habit of making even the simplest tasks look a desperate struggle makes him appear a lot worse than he is, but even when he’s bad, he’s useful: without his penalty-box muscularity, United’s fans wouldn’t have come away from Anfield with their most gratifying three points of recent memory.

Nor is Herrera the Bobby Charlton-Andrea Pirlo lovechild that his loyalists would have you believe. He is a busy, tidy presence, but too rarely shows the force of will that swings the momentum of a game. In recent weeks alone he has been helpless to affect two of United’s most face-clawingly tedious Old Trafford displays, during the visits of Sheffield United and Southampton. Whisper it, but many of his demotions to the bench have been less the result of Van Gaal’s despotic quest to extinguish artistry and more down to the fact he’s been a bit rubbish.

The point here isn’t that the fans are wrong – for the large part, they’re not – and anyway, we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking “the fans” have one unified opinion on anything (even Fellaini’s passing). The point is more that it’s easy to lose sight of complexity and nuance when something becomes an emblem of a grander cause.

All that said, there was little nuance in the case of 50 Cent – he really was irredeemably dire. For the moment at least, Fellaini can take comfort in the fact that he has some way to fall before the same can be said of him.