What went wrong with our squad

What went wrong with our squad needs to be answered in two parts

2005-2014

During this period we were successful. We had a squad packed full of highly talented individuals and we had a superb manager. However, we didn’t invest and the average age of the starting XI kept creeping up. By the time SAF left, we had 8 players playing regularly who were 30+, plus Rooney who physically was that age also.

Summary: We should have been buying one or two quality young players every year but we didn’t, probably due to the leveraged debt

2014-2018

We spent money like it was going out of fashion just as the market boomed, without a plan and whilst constantly chopping and changing managers. This has led to a mediocre FrankenSquad whereby not only are our players nothing special, they are also less than the sum of their collective ability when on the field because we have such a mish-mash of styles, abilities, strengths and weaknesses

The shining light at the moment is the last window is the first window I have liked since the Glazers arrived. Yes we are short on attackers currently but we bought in three young players who immediately improve the starting XI and should do so for the foreseeable. Now we need to build on this next Summer with another three/four high end signings. No more pissing around in the middle ground with £30m/£40m bids here and there. Identify the right players and spend the money, as we did with Maguire and AWB

Woodward's transfer rebuilding has been an illusion. Three players come in. One is an established Premier League top player, HM. The second, AWB, is a young player with plenty of promise and the third, DJ, was expected to be a bit player and who knows what kind of future. Three players go out. Sanchez is an established international whose career is on a downward trajectory. Lukaku is an established international professional goalscorer entering his peak years. Herrera again at his peak years is an international professional picked up by one of the top teams in the world at £200,000 a week. None of the outgoing players positions have been replaced. At best the three in and the three out are even steven. There was no rebuilding and the unfilled gaps left by the departing threesome leave a severely weakened team in two key positions, striker and central midfield.

I give Ole credit for the development of AWB who is clearly working on his offense. James has been a revelation. Expected to be nothing more than a sub, he has developed into a solid starter. As Neville said last night "he is electric." And Ole has promoted from within the squad he inherited to the point that McTominay is a solid starter. Consensus MOM in the last match they won. So, thanks to good management, they've ended up replacing the loss of one starter with four starters.

The problem is the squad is threadbare. It cannot sustain the loss of key personnel through injury. That's what's happening right now along with the inexcusable fact that the squad has been left with only two proven central midfielders/#10. As a result players are being played out of position and the midfield is incapable of creating chances for the attacking players.

Fix the central midfield, solve the right attacker problem,, and provide desperately needed depth and this is a top four club. It would help to have the person making the big decisions actually know what he's doing.

lysglimt said:

Ask yourself this - how many Points would we have if we had a proven goalscorer, and a very good midfielder ?

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Exactly ...letting Lukaku, Sanchez and Herrera go with zero replacements is biting us in the ass already and the season has just started. The kids may be the future but they are patently not fully ready yet. Relying on Martial, Rashford (not a striker imo) and a 17 year old as our only strike options was madness and we are in a complete crisis with injuries in this area already. Not bringing in a MF creator means the same lack of cutting edge as last year if Gomes cannot step up and he doesnt look ready (yes he's better than Mata but who isn't !).
I fully now expect a January window panic buy which will seriously hamper our rebuild funds next summer.
Its just bad planning as usual from start to finish.

Josep Dowling said:

Do you honestly believe this, when will some see the reality that's right in front of you?

Our form since the PSG away game has been relegation form. No away win since then either. The squad has no one to come off the bench even when the whole squad is fit. With a few injuries we are having to use youngsters with no first team experience who are clearly not ready and in some cases not good enough either. Our best players have terrible injury records.

Players like Mata have been given important roles this season when they were being shuffled out by Mourinho. There is a reason, because they weren't good enough in the first place.

And on top of this we have already lost to Crystal Palace and West Ham, drawn away to Southampton. We haven't had a difficult game yet considering Wolves's form and Chelsea being in a similar situation to us.

I haven't seen many positives this season. Even with buying two new defenders we are still conceding goals. This squad of players creates as many chances as LVG. If Solskjaer wasn't an ex United player the fans would have lost patience already.

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What reality is this? 6 fecking games in and the usual candidates are losing their shit. We are poor and the season is going to be a struggle, no argument here, but to write us off for top 6 now is ridiculous. The exact same thing could be said about Spurs, but I bet the house on you still having Spurs in the top 4. And now we are pretending the Chelsea result doesn’t count? I understand the pessimism for the season, but why does it have to extend beyond common sense?

1. Lack of intent. In Fergie team, they can turned up sleeping in first half but later second half if they are down, they even throw the kitchen sink. Even when there are times we couldn't up catch up the scoreline at least there was intent.
The current team play all the same and doing the same thing when at 0-0 , 1 goal down or 2 goal down.
2. We spent heavily on players with jacked up price then bluff ourselves into thinking we got world class players but they are actually duds.
3. We relied too much on academy players thinking every youth are going to be a class of 92.

RedSky said:

This is half the problem with the forum right now with Jose fanboys willing to throw the club under the bus because their messiah got sacked for being a cnut.

Everyone knows the likes of Mata, Matic, Young, Lingard, Pereira are painfully average and at best should be only playing in cup games. Yet four of those started at the weekend.

That's not even taking into consideration the amount of dross we sold in the summer. All our Managers with the exception of Ole have allowed the dross to linger at United. It's going to take at least 1 if not 2 summer windows to finally be shot of the garbage.

Let's also not do the old 'well they might come good under a new Manager' excuse. No they won't. They're not fit to wear the shirt. Get. Rid.

P.S. Please, please, PLEASE sign a right winger!

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The even bigger problem is that they also added to it.

RedSky said:

This is half the problem with the forum right now with Jose fanboys willing to throw the club under the bus because their messiah got sacked for being a cnut.

Everyone knows the likes of Mata, Matic, Young, Lingard, Pereira are painfully average and at best should be only playing in cup games. Yet four of those started at the weekend.

That's not even taking into consideration the amount of dross we sold in the summer. All our Managers with the exception of Ole have allowed the dross to linger at United. It's going to take at least 1 if not 2 summer windows to finally be shot of the garbage.

Let's also not do the old 'well they might come good under a new Manager' excuse. No they won't. They're not fit to wear the shirt. Get. Rid.

P.S. Please, please, PLEASE sign a right winger!

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Couldn't agree more.

Also in pre match Jose said Lindelof can be bullied and not a good head of the ball, wonder why did he sign him. Sums up our recruitment since SAF retired.

Btw, Ole also deserves blame for the set up. We have pushed our creative player deeper and then added players who contributes nothing to the #10 position. Playing Mata and Matic just pointless.

If you want a balanced analysis on what happened and why we are here we are, the team on Talking Sport covered it de luxe.

Their dismay at the speed of the fall was apparent, spoke about Glazers and the appointment of Woodward and a lack of football people at the top of the club. Said that Ole is not someone who should oversee a rebuild given inexperience and would likely not to be attractive to big name players.

After a panel discussion they said there is no pattern in what they do, signings are haphazard and that Woodward is responsible given he has final say for managerial appointments and decisions on signings. Suggested that the club was a few years ago the pinnacle of world football, since Fergie left and the Glazers purchase it's no coincedence they have floundered and will not not be easy to rebuild.

My point from the other side of the world, is that the club has lacked professional football direction under Woodward, his ego transcends his ability and is reluctant to lose any sort of control. The parallel between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Man Utd is terrifying, it's a glimpse into our future if nothing is done.

To read the caf and see the usual suspects defend Woody and the Glazers because of some financial imperative is insane, they are not and will not be successful given their background. Appointing and leaving a merchant banker in charge of the football operations of a club the size of Utd is a clear indication of their priorities. This last transfer window underlined Woodys failings, finally transfer some players out but fail to replace them, extend average and aging squad players rather than replace them. Issue a nonsensical statement about ambition, and leave the club without a genuine striker, a right winger and competent midfield. Provide some leaks about last minute targets, hope that placates the plebs , rinse and repeat.

No one watches the team with expectations currently, how sad and dispiriting is that, and it's been 8 years under their control and the team in a football sense has gone backwards big time.

Ole has been left stranded with insufficient signings and a threadbare squad, welcome to Woody world.

Simple answer - Woodward. 6 years of dysfunctional appointments, poor negotiating and ignoring the scouts, then ignoring the manager, then ignoring both of them, repeat ad infinitum.

Take Maguire. I think he's a fine player. On his own he isn't solving our defensive woes but he's a definite improvement on what we had. Before he went to Leicester he was available for a reasonable price and he'd been on Fergie's radar as a teenager (and Moyes') so there's no way our scouts didn't know about him. But they decided against bidding for him, which wasn't in itself unreasonable if they thought they had better players/targets. Then we get to the point where he's a £50m player and our manager wants him desperately. Woody says he's too expensive and tries to buy Varane for £100m and a box of croissants. Next year comes around, our defence is even more shot at and so we end up spunking £80m on him. There are other targets the scouts must have recommended but presumably the coach wanted this one, however overpriced.

Now again, not in itself unreasonable but then seemingly there was no money left for a midfielder or forwards and we even had to get rid of some to afford Maguire it seems. So actually what should have been a sensible, if ludicrously overpriced, purchase ends up leaving us just as weak as we were before. Genius really.

Everything is wrong with Utd now. Players with no passion and idea, coach who cannot bring the best out of the players and zero tactical ability and a COE who knows nuts about Football. We need a Roy Keane in midfield, we need a passionate captain who holds everyone to the highest standard. We need a manager who knows how to utilise resource he has on hand and lastly, we need a COE who understands football and makes the best footballing decision. The current doesn’t looks like a team that can overturn a deficit. Never in my mind that I had the confidence that they will beat West Ham once we fell behind.

Spurs have same points as united and they have Kane, son and moura who would each be the best forward on united.

Having the transfer strategy of a 10 year old on fifa hasn’t helped.

Clear as day Rashfords best positions was always left forward. We then acquire Ibra which effectively pushes Martial into the left forward options. Then we go out and buy Sanchez who’s spent majority of playing career as a left forward...and to top it all off we have just recently gone out and bought James...who’s best/favoured position is...you guessed it, left forward.

Is there anyone within the upper echelons of the club with more cells than amoeba that might actually stick a hand up...err excuse me guys. Should we not have some options on the right side as well?

How many season now have we had either Mata, Lingard, Valencia and even Dalot play right forward. It’s truly unbelievable.

Then we get on to what seems an obsession with converting ageing players to play different roles. I dread to think how many games Valencia and Young have played for this once great club as full backs!!...errr excuse me guys. Would it not be better to perhaps buy a specialist fullback and not convert our ageing squad members.

More problems at centre back where we didn’t have 1 stand out performer. Instead we had 6 that are bang average. SIX of ‘em!! So average in fact that no previous manager quite knew which one was worse and became so confused as to which ones to keep and which ones to get rid of...errr excuse me guys. Why don’t we roll the dice. Bin 4 off, generate some cash and go and buy a good centre half instead of this painful merry go round of which ones in form, which one isn’t injured.

Balance of this squad is horrific. I remain happy that Lukaku, Sanchez, Smalling, Fellaini have gone. We’re thin on numbers but the 3 we bought this summer is at least a step in the right direction. If we can get our next 3 transfers right as well then we could be in to something.

The moment we start to score on consistent bases, all the doom and gloom will be lifted. We have no fear factor nowadays because we are not scoring enough goals. It's not a very complex issue. It's time to replace our forward line which includes strikers,wingers and AM. Rashford, Martial, and Lingard can't be our starting 11 players every game. This is the area where all the managers post SAF have failed to address hence this mess.

Paper midfield.
Injuries.
Franchise player would rather leave.

roonster09 said:

Couldn't agree more.

Also in pre match Jose said Lindelof can be bullied and not a good head of the ball, wonder why did he sign him. Sums up our recruitment since SAF retired.

Btw, Ole also deserves blame for the set up. We have pushed our creative player deeper and then added players who contributes nothing to the #10 position. Playing Mata and Matic just pointless.

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That pissed me right off, since he very much appeared to take credit for the signing at the time!

I mean Lindelof and Bailly are probably part of the reason the board didn't push the boat out for Maguire last year.

Ronaldo left

A squad drained of talent and stagnating. Under investment and grotesque transfer policy, Management disasters - we all know how we got here.

Now...

Get decent competition for Shaw and our defence should grow nicely. Great progress squad wise.

We're woefully short of quality in midfield still, not really Ole's fault, I doubt any manager would do that much better given the current squad and a temperamental Pogba. James is again, a great addition, McTominay developing well, Greenwood to get his chance. Progress squad wise.

We've cleared a lot of dead wood too. Great Progress squad wise.

Nothing much will change now until the money flows, and that is entirely in the hands of the Glazers.

If they have the will, and spend the money in big numbers, and quickly, then I trust Ole to spend it wisely, he has so far I think.

If Ole is indeed looking at bringing in the players we seem to often be linked with, the likes of Maddison, Sancho, an Erickson? Then for me he is on the right track if we're to start winning the trophies that matter again.

Even if, down the line, Ole and the club do part company, because he still has a lot to prove, I'm sure the next incumbent would be more than happy to inherit that squad.

Plop Mbappe, or the next Mbappe in there too, because, boy, do we need another striker, even if Greenwood comes good, and you're ready to go...

Nobody is going to create miracles with the squad we have now. Nobody.

Over to you, Glazers.

Man Utd has traditionally always had a strong core of English/ British players along with Irish and our fans are proud of that. We also seem to want our main player to be English and I think this has contributed to our downfall. All the managers after Fergie with the exception of Jose seem to be unduly influenced by this fan pressure and I think this has contributed greatly to our downfall.
When Ronaldo left fans wanted Rooney to be the king when the natural successor should have been Nani but Nani was branded with the famous intangible of having a low football IQ while Rooney was praised for his being extremely high. Every mistake Nani made was blown out of proportion while Rooney's were considered "unlucky". Nani has humbled many defenders from teams such as arsenal, Chelsea and Bayern munich but was never given much respect by fans except in 2010-11 when he was clearly outstanding. He was two-footed and an even better dribbler than Ronaldo, however, he was often openly criticized by Rooney for not crossing the ball which at that time was Rooney's main source of goals. The fans tore into Nani and his confidence became shattered.
Rooney although one of the hardest workers Utd has ever had was extremely limited in his play. At his best he would hit and run pass defenders but then later he would send endless passes over to the Right wing hoping to connect with crosses on the volley or half volley. His other main play was to cut in from the Left so as to shoot to goal with his Right foot ( Rashford's main play ). Rooney hardly connected with other strikers so players such as Falcao and Di Maria had a hard time fitting in considering most balls were played through Rooney and he preferred the Right wing passes over short passes and one-twos.
The best thing that Jose did was to come in and phase out Rooney, however, Rashford soon became the next English player that fans wanted to be the main player, even though he is extremely limited, being one footed, a poor dribbler and has a strong aversion to heading the ball. He is selfish and hardly connects to other strikers thus Lukaku struggled to fit in. Plus fan favorite Mata hardly ever contributes to build up play around the box, thus depriving Lukaku of goal striking opportunities. Mata undoubtedly has the ability but clearly avoids potential contact with other players as much as possible. He does not go for throw ins or headers and prefers to run back into midfield and do a side pass or back pass then runs away preferably into the box rather than staying outside looking to feed our main striker. Lingard appears to have learnt a lot from Mata, they both run around non-stop usually just out of reach of actually doing anything.
We made a big mistake letting Lukaku go, instead we should have gotten two solid midfielders that can pass the ball around and let Lukaku, Martial and Pogba move the ball around in attack.
Fans are now turning against Rashford but I fear that they will soon turn to Greenwood who undoubtedly has great potential but should be left alone to mature into a great striker.
I think that we need to buy the best players available regardless of nationality and if a great British player comes around at another club buy him, that's what we use to do, because if we continue with our present focus it will not matter who is brought in as manager because we will continue to underperform. This will also place our future superclub status in jeopardy as young fans around the world only support successful teams.
To be honest I do not expect much to change but I still will watch every match and hope that I am wrong.

You could put forward the argument that our squad has never been 'right' since we allowed a hole to appear in midfield when Hargreaves got injured all those years ago.

Same when we allowed Tevez to go.

Some people think this is all a post-Fergie problem but even though he won the title in his last year the standard of our football had been declining since Tevez, then Ronaldo left. It's not a new problem, it is an old one and it has led us here.

We keep playing/rewarding shit players with shit mentalities. Really as simple as that.

Why was it that rashford was allowed a big fat salary but Herrera wasn't, he led by example by working his socks off in midfield, great professional off the field and was our 2nd best midfielder behind pogba?

Wednesday at Stoke said:

Spurs have same points as united and they have Kane, son and moura who would each be the best forward on united.

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I don't want to go all Amadeus here but Spurs are having a bad season by their standards. They've out performed us in the league four out the six seasons since SAF left, and even in the ones where we did better they came behind us by only one place. They've also done better than us in the UCL too judging by last year's performance, although in fairness both clubs have done pretty poorly in the competition over the past five years. Obviously our Europa League win means we at least have a trophy to our name (yay!).

Basically, it feels a bit unfair to single out Spurs here as I think our situation is much worse than ours. It comes back to Eriksen not delivering his usual best. I'd actually say they're a decent model to follow as the board invested fairly well (see: value punts worked out, and also signed a good manager) which meant they were able to hold back on spending whilst all funds went into their stadium rebuild. Could you imagine if we'd have had to forego spending for one season to improve OT? Would be total chaos.

Also somebody like Lucas would be playing here had we actually bid for him rather than only offered a loan (IIRC). A minor point but he'd have improved us massively at RW.

That said, they're giant bottlers and it's always fun to poke the bear (Glaston).

In my view the problem has actually been we’ve pissed around not making enough signings.

Since Moyes took over we should have brought in about half a dozen quality players every window until we got it right.

We’ve fecked about for far too long with players too old, too injury prone, too poor or taking too long to establish themselves.

What we actually needed was more churn, and we fecked up appointing Moyes and LVG.

Njord said:

If you on average add 5 players to your squad each season through purchases and promotions, which you expect will give you an average of ten years of service each, you will with a 40 % succes rate have a squad of 20 top players at all times. The more money you use the higher the quality.

This rule seems to apply to every top team around Europe, except us. Looking at the squads of the best teams, several of them will have 3-4 players outside their starting XI which would be regular starters for us. I wanted to look at what happened to put us in this position.

I saw the thread about Anderson retiring at 31 recently, and felt it was weird that he could still have been playing for us if things workes out for him. Thinking back at all the signings we have made since we signed him kn 2007, there's quite a few players that could still have been playing for us.

Rafael could have been a world class RB in his prime, if not for his injuries. Cleverley once looked like a future superstar, and so did players like Jones and Shaw.

What do you think is the reason why so many of our signings failed and consequently left?

In my opinion I think there are four main explantions:

1. We had a lot of players who constantly got injured. There might have been issues with our training methods before Mourinho, when I feel this improved.

2. Some of our players succumbed to the pressure of playing for United, others believed their own hype, and thought they had made it before they had.

3. The appointment of van Gaal hurt us badly. His squad management were horrendous.

4. In general, we have bought way to many duds. It seems we have hsd big problems with our scouting these last 12 years. Hopefully this is improving, as ae seem to have made three good purchases this summer.

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I would add item 5 - inadequate coaching. You are quite. So many of our players have either stalled or gone backward in terms of technical skills.
In every successful organisation, training and mentoring and process improvement is utilised to improve performance.
So. Why has the performance level of the majority of our players not improved.
It has to be down to inadequate training and coaching.

Problem is that some players are still there from Fergie's days, and they were bad then!

Other players were brought in and failed but are still here.

Other teams buy players for half the price we do as we sit idly by and then buy them 2 years later for 4 times the cost.


Edit and why did the Richest club in the world (tm) have to turn wingers into left and right backs, instead of buying good defenders, and rely upon no stats Lingard to try to win games.

Outrageous.

Not actually sure where to post this and whether it has been posted earlier but found it quite funny even though it seems they notoriously dislike Utd.

Tweet

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Even a shout out to the Caf.

Loads of spoiled brats in the players.

Manager who's overwhelmed and plays his favourites despite their bad form.

Useless management. Ed's useless and we've been saying it for years.

1. No leaders/winners (at peak Fergie we had VDS, Rio, Vidic, Evra, Carrick, Scholes, Fletcher, Giggs, Ronaldo, Rooney,...even Rafael was better than this lot)
2. No world class players (only DDG and Pogba will play for the other top 6)
3. No one who wants to fight (Park, Fletcher, Brown...)
4. Ashley Young and Phil Jones
5. Fred and Matic
6. Sanchez

I think Woodward and his team of negotiators are only capable of negotiating average players. I mean, if a manager gives them a choice of 3-4 players in decreasing priority, Woodward's team picks up the player who has least competition and throws bucket loads of money (something the priority 1 player would get) and sign him for big transfer money and ridiculous wages.
And that's why we have loads of players who look average, because that is the best they can give. At the same time, fans and papers would talk about the 400M or 500M we have spent and put the blame squarely on managers.

Fergie had a row with someone over horse sp**k.

Everything goes back to that

Terrible decisions is the problem. Ultimately we have wasted money on average players and not upgraded any of the average players we had already. We keep doing it year after year with no sign of improvement in the decision making process. In fact the decisions seem to be getting worse.

Herrera should have been kept
Mata needs to be replaced
Jones needs to go
Pereira is not good enough
Lingard needs to be replaced
A replacement for Lukaku needed to be found even if a temporary measure.
A world class winger needed to be purchased
An upgrade on Matic needs to be found