Fallen Giants

From the theatre of dreams to the rubble of regret. How the UK demolition sector allowed its global leadership to slip away.

I’m not a Manchester United fan. Let’s get that out of the way up front. I support West Ham, and have done for more years than I care to count. And for most of those years, I dreaded our meetings with Manchester United. They didn’t just beat us. They dominated us. Humbled us. They humiliated us. You’d go into the game already resigned to the likely outcome. It wasn’t just the quality of their players or the brilliance of their manager; it was something more intangible. An aura. A sense of inevitability. Manchester United weren’t just a team; they were a force of nature. They were, quite simply, the gold standard.

Funny thing is, I used to feel the same way about the UK demolition industry. For a long time, it was feared and revered; respected, and admired. Not just here, but around the world. Our methods were studied. Our equipment was envied. Our expertise unmatched. Clients wanted a British firm not just because we were good, but because we were the best. Like Manchester United, we had built a legacy. And like Manchester United, we thought that legacy would last forever.

But that’s not how the world works.

There was a time when Manchester United represented the very pinnacle of footballing excellence. Under Sir Alex Ferguson, they were ruthlessly efficient, fiercely competitive, and astonishingly consistent. Their recruitment was smart, their youth development was visionary, and their leadership was rock solid. You didn’t need to support them to recognise their brilliance. They made success look effortless; but only because they worked tirelessly to make it so.

And while United were lifting trophies, the UK demolition industry was quietly achieving its own greatness. We led the world in controlled demolition. Our engineers and operators executed high-risk projects with surgical precision. We took down tower blocks in dense city centres, bridges over motorways, and disused industrial sites with minimal disruption. Our safety protocols were world class. Our training programmes were emulated. We weren’t just doing the work; we were defining how the work should be done.

But success has a nasty habit of curdling into complacency.

Manchester United started believing that their name alone would carry them forward. That their past glories were enough to secure their future. They stopped evolving. They appointed managers without vision, signed players without purpose, and lost their tactical identity. The football world changed around them, but they stood still. They didn’t just get caught; they got overtaken.

The same thing happened to the UK demolition sector. We believed our own hype. We assumed that because we’d been the best, we’d stay the best. We thought we were too big to fail. We weren't. And just like United, we didn’t even notice how far we’d fallen until it was too late.

As a West Ham supporter, I can say this with a degree of satisfaction I never expected: I now look forward to playing Manchester United. The fear has gone. The inevitability has gone. I watch a club struggling with its own identity, unsure of what it wants to be or how to get there. There’s money, yes. There’s still global recognition. But the edge - the one that made them different - is gone.

And that’s precisely the feeling I now have when I look at our demolition sector. The swagger remains, oddly enough, but it feels misplaced. We still have a few good individual players; those players still deliver a good performance from time to time. But those individual flashes of brilliance are not enough to compete on the world stage. We talk about leadership, but leadership requires more than history. It requires vision, accountability, and progress. We’ve clung so tightly to the idea that we were world leaders that we’ve overlooked the uncomfortable truth: we’re not anymore.

Nowhere is that more painfully evident than in the wake of the CMA scandal. If Manchester United’s decline was defined by poor decisions, UK demolition’s fall from grace has been marked by something far worse; deliberate and calculated wrongdoing. The bid-rigging exposed a rot beneath the surface. Clients trusted us to act with integrity. The public trusted us to operate fairly. That trust was broken. And it hasn’t been rebuilt.

So, what do we see now? In both cases - Manchester United and UK demolition - we see institutions with a proud past and an uncertain future. The warning signs were ignored. The competition was underestimated. The assumption was that the world would wait. But it didn’t. Others caught up. Others surpassed.

For United, that means losing out on Champions League nights and becoming a punchline in football banter. For demolition, it means finding ourselves less and less central to the global conversation we once led.

And still the two stories continue to run in eerie parallel. There’s a grim symmetry here. Two once-great names, so used to winning that they forgot how to keep winning. They stopped evolving. Stopped learning. Started assuming the world would wait for them. It didn’t.

Manchester United is a club that keeps throwing money at the problem, hoping for a quick fix; a flashy new signing, a high-profile manager, a new big-name sponsor. But nothing sticks because the problem is deeper: they don’t know who they are anymore. They’ve lost the culture that made them great.

Demolition is doing much the same. We publish mission statements. We host poorly-attended seminars. We give people medals and meaningless titles. But these things don’t rebuild trust, and they certainly don’t spark a renaissance. The problem isn’t surface level; it’s structural. We’ve forgotten how to innovate. We’ve forgotten how to lead. We’ve lost our swagger. Or rather, we’ve kept the swagger. We just stopped earning it.

There’s a phrase in football: “they’re living off their name.” It’s usually said of players who peaked years ago but still pull in a big paycheque because of what they used to be. That’s us, in a nutshell. We’re living off a name. Off a reputation that no longer reflects reality. And if we don’t change that, soon we’ll find that the name itself doesn’t mean what it used to.

But here’s the thing: neither Manchester United nor the UK demolition industry seems particularly interested in real introspection. The signs have been ignored, the alarms silenced, the competition dismissed. Both keep pretending that the world still sees them the way they used to be seen.

They’re wrong.

Manchester United are no longer feared. They’re barely even respected. They’re a bloated, confused shadow of what they once were; less a football club, more a brand shuffling through its greatest hits tour, hoping no one notices the empty seats. And right now, that’s us too. The UK demolition sector is coasting. Still talking like a global leader, still acting like the top dog, but with a bark that is barely audible.

This isn’t a lull. It’s not a blip. This is decline. And if we’re not honest about it, if we keep shrouding it in nostalgia and self-congratulation, we won’t bounce back. We’ll continue to fade.

In a decade’s time, we’ll still be talking about what we used to be; but we’ll be doing it not from the top of the industry Premiership, but from the demolition Championship.