It does if they don't want something they share broadcast to the media. If they don't care then they should go ahead, I reckon Lingard doesn't care all that much.
Andy Mitten: United carried out an investigation into leaks from the dressing room
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He is a bit of an idiot. The United podcast on The Athletic is piss poor. Laurie has a bit of info, but Mitten and Anka are abysmal.
Can you give us a summary mate?
No different than engaging a management consultancy like Mckinsey or Bain.
You pay them alot of money, but you don't have to implement a single thing they propose.
Makes sense from the clubs perspective.
Many people think Rangnick is behind the changes that are happening behind the scenes - he does not"
Andy Mitten believes that Ralf Rangnick did not fit the job he was given, and that the second choice would have been a better alternative. He also says that Rangnick has had a very limited influence on United apart from the job he has done as manager of the first team.
Ralf Rangnick will lead Manchester United for the last time away against Crystal Palace on Sunday.
Erik ten Hag will not join Ajax on the club's final tour in Curaçao, and he is already in discussions with United where it is planned for next season. He has not officially started the job, but United's employees expect a meeting with Ten Hag next week after the season has ended.
But let's stick to Rangnick. I have seen some supporters call him "the best thing that has happened to the club in many years" over the last month. Why? Well, he speaks well of himself, he is intelligent and he has criticized underperforming players as the fans do. He is better with the media than Ole Gunnar Solskjær, he appears to be someone who knows what he is doing, but how is he really as a football manager, the job he was brought in to do?
The fact is, he's been weak. Football has been boring, and so have the results. One can not camouflage this. United still concede far too many goals, the one thing he was brought in to stop.
Some fans seem to believe that he is responsible for the many changes that are happening behind the scenes at Old Trafford. He's not. In January, he was asked to concentrate on the first team, and he had almost nothing to do with the hiring of Erik ten Hag. He was not at the meeting about the future manager in Manchester, nor did he go to Amsterdam when John Murtough went several times to meet the Ajax boss.
Rangnick also had nothing to do with the leading scouts who left the club either, because he - again - was told that he should focus on leading the first team, something he did not do in a good way. This is not a man who went into United and solved the problems. It is a man who got the job despite lack of experience with the manager's everyday life, who knew little about the Premier League, and who after a few weeks talked privately about how strong the weak teams were - teams that took points from Manchester United.
There are mitigating factors here. The German lost three coaches within a few weeks of joining Michael Carrick, Kieran McKenna and Martyn Pert, and he did not want to lose any of them. Some United fans saw it as if he got rid of them, removed the dew meat, but that was not true. The coaches he brought in in the middle of the season have not impressed the players. They see them as inexperienced and in deep water, but then these same players Solskjær also failed in the Norwegian's last months.
Some United fans want to believe that Rangnick is everything Solskjær was not. After all, getting rid of the Norwegian should lead to a dramatic recovery for United with a coach who was better tactically, right? Error. The players wanted to play for Ole until the last two months. They do not want to play for someone who publicly criticizes them every week, they do not like that. Would you like your boss to publicly criticize you? Or would you prefer that they handle these problems privately as Solskjær tried to do? Rangnick was brought in to lead these players, and get the best out of them, not to strongly criticize them.
Rangnick had ideas, but within a few days of his arrival, I heard a steady stream of criticism from within the club from people who actually wanted to help him. People who in November said he was the best possible hiring said within a few months that it was a mistake.
I said that at the time, and I want to say it again: Rudi Garcia, who came out of the interview process second behind Rangnick, better suited to the difficult role of interim manager. No, he did not have the profile of people like Guardiola or Klopp, but the Frenchman had joined big clubs when they struggled and turned it around, even when he did it in the middle of the season, and even when those clubs had big names with equally big egos , as Francesco Totti in Rome. His young Lyon team knocked Manchester City out of the Champions League in 2020.
Garcia impressed United, and he was brought to Manchester for a second interview, but John Murtough decided on Rangnick, whom he had met before. Darren Fletcher also agreed with the decision, and influenced it. Are the two best suited to decide who will be United's manager? How Ten Hag does it will be an indicator, and I hope it goes well, but there has definitely been concern from some. When Nicky Butt recently said "United can not continue to have temporary managers or people who learn while doing the job in positions of power at the club. They need people who have been there, seen it and done it »to me, then there are many he may have talked about.
United think Rangnick has good ideas when it comes to youth football. At senior level, he has identified two players for United, the 24-year-old midfielder / striker Christopher Nkunku who thrives in RB in Germany, and Aurélien Tchouameni, the 22-year-old midfielder who has had two brilliant seasons since breaking through on Monaco's first team, and later on French national teams. What United do with that information is up to United. Rangnick was surprised that United had not followed Nkunku.
Rangnick also had the issue around Cristiano Ronaldo - which could be both something positive and something negative. Ideally, Rangnick would not play with Ronaldo since the way he plays does not fit in with the way Ralf wants to play, but he does not want to be the person who signals the start of the Portuguese's career, so he still has to choose teams like him. know that will not work fully and completely. And yet Ronaldo has been his most important player, the top scorer.
Erik ten Hag has said that he is looking forward to working with Ronaldo, and called him a football giant, but what else could he say? He earns too much at United for United to get rid of him, and he could be a significant problem for the new coach before he starts. Ten Hag needs to build their own center of power, to get the players on their side, something Rangnick never did.
Ronaldo, for his part, has complimented his new manager. He wants United to do well, as everyone in the club wants. It is beneficial for both of them that it works, and maybe they have even talked together to find out where each other stands?
But back to Rangnick. Has he been very impressed by those who work around him? That answer can be very interesting when he is finally allowed to answer it properly, but do not expect a "yes". But so far Rangnick has a contract with Manchester United, and even if he had left the club tomorrow, it is still the case that employees on their way out sign confidentiality forms. Many of them are currently being signed so many employees are disappearing. Some are pushed out, others jump off on their own initiative. Having Manchester United on your CV is not a bad thing, despite the first team's results.
A person at Old Trafford told me that Rangnick is obviously an intelligent person who knows how to build a project, but that he was not a first-team manager, and that it showed. He had not been a manager for a while, and was not familiar with the nuances.
I also talked to someone who had worked with him in Germany at senior level, and he thought that although Rangnick has many talents, he was one who worked better with young players on the way up than established world-famous players with big egos. One, a director of Schalke 04, said that Rangnick spent years micro-managing projects, rather than changing things in a couple of months. After all, he said no to Chelsea because he said he needed more time than the temporary job he was offered before hiring Thomas Tuchel.
When Rangnick arrived at United, and brilliantly spoke to the media for 28 minutes at Old Trafford, he said half jokingly that he might even make himself the next United manager. He believed that he would be central in carrying out that appointment. If his United team had won everything, his opinions might have had more weight, but Rangnicks United failed to beat teams at the bottom of the table, and were smashed by Liverpool and Manchester City.
United were also knocked out of the FA Cup at home against a Championship team, and by Atlético Madrid at home after two weak performances against the Spaniards. The preparations before the match in Spain were poor, where Rangnick did not say the eleven until just before, and with players who were unsure of the new system that they had not trained on. Victor Lindelöf played in an unfamiliar right-back role, and was subjected to repeated targeted attacks, but somehow United managed to get a draw.
Rangnick recently canceled a training session at short notice - and was presented as the Austria national team manager that day. Yes, managers cancel training at short notice in all football clubs, but there were many inside Carrington who were not impressed.
When Rangnick got the job, Murtough said the following:
"Ralf is one of the most respected coaches and innovators in European football. He was our first choice for the role of interim manager given the invaluable leadership and technical skills he will bring with him from almost four decades of experience in management and coaching. Everyone in the club is looking forward to working with him during the coming season, and then for two years further through his advisory role. "
Rangnick wants to have an impact, and he wants to reshape the club, and he wants to earn a lucrative consultation fee. He wants his role to be meaningful. He wants to present a detailed folder with his opinions about United next week, and he wants to talk to Ten Hag after the last game of the season, just as Solskjær talked to Rangnick. It would be a sin of omission if Ten Hag did not listen to Rangnick's opinions. Maybe they match those of his own - and Rangnick believes that United's squad lacks that level of physicality and personality for a modern top team. Maybe he has a point, he clearly knows more than you and I, but from next season I will not be surprised if he is set aside as a project that simply did not work.
This is everything alot of posters have been saying even before he got here.
The fact that he never managed a football club in almost a decade. The fact that he isn't a manager. The fact that he hasn't won anything of significance, EVER.
Now you can see he has completely lost the players. His staff are amateurs and nobodies in football.
Ralf came with far too big an ego, without anywhere near the qualifications required to manage a club like ours. He thought he could change things, but when it didn't work and he wasn't respected, which led to him throwing people under the bus to save his own reputation.
What a disaster of an appointment and a wasted season as a result.
I get that its difficult to appoint an interim manager and expect him to work miracles, but any half decent manager should have been able to motivate this lot into fourth place.
Mitten is just confirming what many of us have been seeing over the last few months.
Thank you for that excellent summary. You're a legend for that.
This is very helpful, thank you. An example of why I spend so much time here.
The more important investigation that they should carry out is.
"Why do players play so well when they first join MUFC, then turn to complete crap, a few months* later."
*Bruno excepted, who took 18 months, before he too, turned to crap.
"Why do players play so well when they first join MUFC, then turn to complete crap, a few months* later."
*Bruno excepted, who took 18 months, before he too, turned to crap.
This is the most important issue. I was saying in the Pogba thread, that while he isn't blameless, he's merely following the trajectory of every other player who has come into this club post-Fergie. Literally, everyone (except maybe Lindelof who's been consistently average in his time here) has either started off well and gone to shit or was just shit as soon as they got here.
Every one of them. We simply don't improve players.
Yeah much like Whitwell & Stone he prefers to play cards close to chest until he has anything concrete to report
What are you talking about? Rangnick was in charge of Red Bull Leipzig as recently as 2019. He finished third in the Bundesliga, qualified for the Champions League and reached the German cup final (losing to Bayern). "A lot of posters" apparently need to do some basic research.
I don't disagree. I like Mitten though, I do think he's coming across a bit big headed recently, with him being the senior guy on that popular pod and dishing out his glory years stories. He's never struck me as insightful about the actual game of football, tactical understanding etc. And he was very pro Ole, so he definitely doesn't like to ruffle feathers when it comes to the United DNA lads. With Rangnick I think he's been quite unfair. He said on the last pod that under both Ole and Ralf United haven't been coached to play football (and he probably called Ole later to apologise).
I think many are forgetting that prior to Atletico we were performing below our xG which cannot be on a manager, really. And he tried to implement his pressing game, but quickly found out that some players are not equipped to play that style, some aren't fit enough, and some don't follow direction. He then proceeded to make us more safe at the back, while we squandered numerous chances game after game. No backing in January from the board, lost Mason and has really had to play Elanga both because of a lack of numbers and because Rashford has completely lost it this season. Prior to Atletico I think Rangnick was doing relatively well, given the shite he inherited from Ole and the situation he walked into (no leverage as an interim with a squad full of misfits). As soon as he started to savage the team publicly it was always going to go downhill fast. I still think it was needed, just to state in no uncertain terms that the next manager will require enormous backing and that squad needs dismantling in the summer, with no chance of glossing over what has turned out to be the opposite of the famed cultural-reboot Ole and Woodward were "working on".
All this is not to say that he's not go flaws as a manager, just that I think it's rich from Mitten to be acting all up about how he has to say it like it is with Rangnick when he was silk gloves with Ole, who most of us knew was never ever going to be even a good manager. It's hard to take his opinions seriously, but he can be entertaining and his biggest value is probably his access to people, whether or not he puts his own spin on things.
Had we gotten a more convenient manager to step in as interim, get us to top 4 (a tall order regardless, given this bunch of ..) we might well be continuing as before with no hope of a serious rethink. As is, we've now confronted the fact we're miles off the top and we've been run terribly for years, which hitherto had never been acknowledged (Ole "we're a fantastically run club" is the opposite of what Rangnick has been saying for months now).
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I wonder if it was a more thorough investigation than those launched before buying certain players over the past few years...
I already posted this in the performances thread about 50 mins ago!
Its Linda.
Mitten has had this opinion from the start to be fair, he’s been tapping into the players opinions, and possibly murtough’s.
He’s said a lot of this stuff on the Athletic podcast over the last couple of months, but it sounds less damming when it’s not in writing
Which category does Sancho fall under?
Yep
Speaks a lot, says nothing
If true, this player in question should have been involved in the first team throughout this season and is likely to be an English player where he has good connections with the British press.
Rashford
Also likely to receive positive press, as the press would want to keep the leak sweet in order to get more in the future.
Yikes. Maybe Real would like him now that Mbappe has put them in the mud.
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Not sure training is going to fun going forward. He is going to try and get them fit, disciplined and actually good.
What this shows is that:
1. There's more than one leaker. Because this leak is complaining about a previous leak, so it obviously can't be the same source.
2. This leak is coming from a senior member of staff, so it's not just the players who should be suspected.
Sounds like Ronaldo
Mitten has dropped hints on the podcast multiple times about Murtough, he’s also well connected with the likes of Fletcher and the coaching staff
Everybody is focusing on the players, yes the players might have been moaning, but doesn't mean they were the ones giving information to the press. As you say it could be one of the staff.
Ronaldo is quite image conscious also. I'd say it's someone like Matic.
Jumping before he is pushed?
Could be any of the older players. And, to be fair, Ronaldo loves a topless pic on the 'Gram.
DDG is probably just as likely. I've always thought he could be a potential leaker given how long he's been in England building a relationship with the English press, and how happy he is to do interviews.
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Its Rashford isn't it.
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More gravely? Blimey!
