The real awful thing is the amount of Top Reds fans who swarmed this forum out of nowhere this year and trying to show everyone the real way of supporting United, which is for them accepting mediocrity, while I'm pretty sure under the previous 3 managers they were slaughtering everyone anyway.
Anyway, you're welcome on my Ignore list.
No. The real awful thing is fans complete lack of understanding of the modern footballer.
United finished 6th last season and have only qualified for the Champions League a couple of times in the past few seasons. As a fan base we have been used to the vast majority of professional footballers wanted to come and play for Manchester United. They wanted to come and play at a club that was steeped in history and had a particular way of doing things, for example developing youth players.
This philosophy slowly dwindled after Busby retired and there are still a handful of us that remember finishing 13th in Division 1 and we spent a good deal of the backend of that season worrying about staying up, But we won the FA Cup and that steadied the ship somewhat, the following season we finished 6th, the season after that we were 2nd and finally the following year we were champions.
I know that you don't need a history lesson but the long and short of it is this, things have changed and the world has moved on. We haven't won the title since 2013 and coincidentally Fergie retired. So, we hired Moyes and that didn't work out, so we went to a big name in LVG and that didn't work out and then finally Jose and predictably that also didn't work out. Now we have Ole, somebody that played under Fergie and a man that understands the club and what we stand for a hell of a lot better than most of our fanbase, specifically the ones that have only been used to seeing us win things consistently.
The reason i brought up the modern footballer is because they reflect what i see in large sections of our online fanbase. They see that we no longer pretty much guarantee a champions league place, they see that our two biggest rivals are winning and winning well whilst both qualifying for the champions league. In City's case they see that they can pay pretty much anything and when you combine all of that with players agents that can say "sure, he will sign for you, but as you can only offer Europa league football, my client will be here solely to pick up a pay check and give you a half decent game every 6 or 7 weeks, if he has nothing else on at the time. Meanwhile the fanbase that i mentioned earlier are sitting at home and pulling themselves off to the latest FIFA stats on the playstation and questioning the manager and the recruitment process.
What we have done this summer is remove some of the deadwood, i'm sure we could have sold more but i also think it's pretty important to be able to actually field a team every week, so we are probably better off doing it in stages. We could have gone out and spunked massive amounts of money on say, Di Maria for example, but something tells me that wouldn't work out very well. So instead we signed 3 very talented, very young players. We have given a few acadamy graduates some game time and we are working hard to try and get back to where we want to be.
This isn't football manager, you can't just magically edit the database and all of a sudden have a winning formula.
Slighty off topic but somebody in this thread said something along the lines of 'did anybody ever see ole as a manager after he left' insinuating that it was a rushed, fan pleasing appointment that would never work. It caught my attention because somebody asked me on saturday on the way home from St Albans away whether i ever expected Mark Mosely to become Weymouth manager after he left as a player, i didn't fyi, but since he took over we have finished 2nd (on 97 points) followed by champions the next season and currently sit in the play off positions in the conference south. I know it is far from the same thing but my point is that it CAN work.