Couldn't have said it better. The most frustrating thing is that he is enabled to play like a maniac when he has the talent to be our organizer.
He's turned into the equivalent of Russel Westbrook
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- Appearances
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- Assists
- 13
- Yellow cards
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He's turned into the equivalent of Russel Westbrook
I was going through the posts on this thread and it seems some have built a habit of writing off players. Bruno has been the most influential player since he joined, the impact he had on the team is evident. He was arguable the best player in the league for some time, winning the player of the month award multiple times. (Was a joy to have on fantasy premier league as well 
). His return is good. This year, while not playing at his best (and playing out of position for some time with 4222), he has 9 goals and 14 assists so far. Since joining, he's had 50 goals and more than 25 assists to his name, not a bad return. He creates chances - the most chances created by a player in the league this season. But still, some fans write him off as an average player or someone who we can not rely on.
Now, again and again, is he perfect? is he complete? No. But then, who is? The main area to improve at is his ball retention, he often has misplaced passes. However, he is almost the only player who is not going for the easy sideway/backward pass and is actually looking for players running for a pass. Yes, this needs to improve. Should we deem him useless for that? Come on! I can't complain about him taking long shots also. I actually want more players to do that. We barely score from outside the box and this needs to improve.
He is vocal on the pitch and that annoys some, not me. He is an old school kind of player. A player that actually hurts when he loses. Some just go dance on instagram after a defeat, he is not that kind of player. He is passionate on the pitch, has a winning mentality and has good leadership skills. The things he says in interviews show that also.
He is over-worked and it is the manager's responsibility to find the right games to rest him. I mentioned this in Mata's thread; I'm sure Mata can still play a game of football every now and then. He has brains and we need that on the pitch. Why not rest Bruno? He can not play all games in a season.
He is a very good player and we are lucky to have him with us. He will have more to offer if the overall performance of the team improve that's for sure. He is a player to keep for years to come.
). His return is good. This year, while not playing at his best (and playing out of position for some time with 4222), he has 9 goals and 14 assists so far. Since joining, he's had 50 goals and more than 25 assists to his name, not a bad return. He creates chances - the most chances created by a player in the league this season. But still, some fans write him off as an average player or someone who we can not rely on.Now, again and again, is he perfect? is he complete? No. But then, who is? The main area to improve at is his ball retention, he often has misplaced passes. However, he is almost the only player who is not going for the easy sideway/backward pass and is actually looking for players running for a pass. Yes, this needs to improve. Should we deem him useless for that? Come on! I can't complain about him taking long shots also. I actually want more players to do that. We barely score from outside the box and this needs to improve.
He is vocal on the pitch and that annoys some, not me. He is an old school kind of player. A player that actually hurts when he loses. Some just go dance on instagram after a defeat, he is not that kind of player. He is passionate on the pitch, has a winning mentality and has good leadership skills. The things he says in interviews show that also.
He is over-worked and it is the manager's responsibility to find the right games to rest him. I mentioned this in Mata's thread; I'm sure Mata can still play a game of football every now and then. He has brains and we need that on the pitch. Why not rest Bruno? He can not play all games in a season.
He is a very good player and we are lucky to have him with us. He will have more to offer if the overall performance of the team improve that's for sure. He is a player to keep for years to come.
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A man after my own heart. This is my view on football too, certainly the way I grew up watching football. First and foremost, I judge a player based on if he ‘played well’. Goals have always been important, but there are so many micro stats now.
I personally think Ronaldo is almost solely responsible for this huge change in attitude. Messi is, in my opinion, a far better football player than Ronaldo, and the only way he could compete with him was to drag him into some sorts of stats race. Before them, players were winning Ballon’Dor’s without needing to score the most goals necessarily. It was simply for the ‘best player’ (although some of the awards were strange!). Messi (although arguably R9) is the best player I’ve ever seen play football, and I could see that if football pitches never had goals on them at all. Today’s football fan could probably get away without watching the game at all you feel. Just follow Opta on Twitter.
100%.
I'm sick of the game now being defined by the latest and greatest utterly useless stat. Xavi did an interview a few years ago where he stated he wasn't a fan of passing statistics, because they don't answer the question of whether there was a better option available, was the receiving player in the right position etc.
Football has well and truly been moneyballed.
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It's almost like a cycle that can't be broken.
Players like Fernandes will play hero-ball (taking on low percentage shots or overly ambitious passes) because the team is kind of shite and can't "play well" with sustainable football with patterns of play like you and @Rozay allude to. But concurrently, players like Fernandes playing the way they play also contributes to a team struggling to "play well" because the instant idea is to play in this domineering all-guts-no-glory style that we're so used to playing, then fails when we're against sides who either 1. sit deep and can absorb the pressure; or 2. play better football so we see far less of the ball (which makes said high risk high reward play much less capable of working).
Fernandes at Sporting was quite comfortably the best player in their team and probably in their league. But his departure led to the side becoming a lot less reliant on one single player and more of a cohesive unit. They then won their first title in God knows how many years. Now obviously it was a lot more nuanced than just the above, and I am in no way saying we should sell our best player of the last two years to succeed(!), but we probably need to reign him in and stop indulging in the way we play. Particularly in bigger matches. A first half performance like the one vs Atletico against City this weekend and it's properly curtains.
As for point 2, those teams are not even limited to the top teams anymore. A lot of teams now who take a more calculated approach often come to Old Trafford and play us off the park, could be a Southampton, Brighton - doesn’t need to be a City.
And as for your last point, I think we do. An attempt to ‘reign in’ won’t work, and will just postpone what needs to happen for us to really blossom into the butterfly. Anything short of a divorce will continue to be a mixture of brilliance and frustration but very little structure and consistent pattern IMO. We can, at best, be a very good team but not the ‘best’. We won’t be the best team around with Bruno as some sort of centrepiece.
And if it makes anyone feel better, we can sell Pogba too.
Mmm. I’m not sure either way as of just yet. I do think we should hold fire on giving him the new deal and parity to De Gea/Pogba/Rashford salary - because then we’re lumbered with him no matter what.
It's honestly the thing I hate most about football now.
Football is more widely debated on forums and social media now and I feel this has led further to the stats overload. People champion their favorite players by using their stats rather than performances especially when comparing them to another player.
Its especially mindboggling coming from United fans when typically our legends never really excelled statistically compared to some of their peers. Cantona, Rooney, Scholes, Giggs all had good stats but nothing particularly ground breaking but they are remembered for their performances. RvN and Ronaldo shone stats wise but they also performed well. That is the standard at this club.
That’s fair enough. It’s all opinions, I think I made mine fairly early in that it was clear to me that Bruno was not going to be the man we need in our midfield to get us back to being the very best team, although I’ve also consistently said that he was the man we needed for where we were. Like, I think Bernardo Silva or Luka Modric are better players and more suited to playing for the very best teams in the world than Bruno, but I think we needed a Bruno far more than them at the time we joined. We quite simply were not a team ready for a Bernardo Silva yet. That said, once we had established ourselves as a top 3 side, I think we need a Silva more than we need a Bruno to become #1.
I also think Bruno is better than VDB, and at the very least, has a different skillset, but I think a team that can get the best out of VDB is likely to be better than a team that gets the best out of Bruno. Not many teams will get the best of VDB, and Bruno was far more needed for United than VDB ever will be. But I don’t think Bruno would have been better than VDB at Ajax. And Ajax were a far better unit than we have ever been. Some people look down on players and call them ‘system’ players pr whatever. Just shows football. It is a team sport. It is these systems that when done properly will more often than not win. Iniesta was better than Bruno, but I think it’s a fair assumption that he wouldn’t have been better for United. Perhaps organised football is the best platform for him.
As for the contract, we will almost certainly give him a new contract. His stock is high, is amongst our best players and we will want to protect our asset. The only way the club sells a player like Bruno is with a clear plan of how a manager wants to play which doesn’t suit him. Short of that, we will want to keep as many goals around as we can. It takes a bigger vision with more detail to say a top goalscorer perhaps doesn’t fit.
If only these people who’ve spent decades working in football had the vision of your average redcafe poster, football would be so much more sophisticated.
Bit rich coming from one of the caf’s longest standing football micro-analysts.
I really enjoy wasting my time talking about footy. I definitely do not think I have a grand vision of the game that failed managers like Ole would benefit from. It’s a weird kind of hubris, to think so much about something so frivolous!
Probably important to take this in the context of Grealish being criticised for not returning enough goals/assists. And of course this is a man who managed Andres Iniesta, so he understands the value of players who don't neccesarily produce in terms of those broad stats. Though of course both players still perform extremely well when looked at through more advanced statistics.
It's absolutely true that there are limits to what stats can tell you though. In fact generally the more knowledge someone has of statistical analysis, the more qualified the conclusions they draw from it will be. Any idiot with access to google can look up stats, the skill is in knowing how to apply them in a useful way without reaching beyond their limitations. There's a reason clubs hire people with actual qualifications in this area rather than random fans with FBref bookmarked on their phone.
At the same time if you take something like the decline in the amount of long-range shooting in top level football as an example, that's directly influenced by the advent of statistical analysis and a greater understanding of which type of chances carry higher xG. And Pep's teams were at the forefront of that change. We also know he pours over the data supplied to him by his highly-paid analytics team. So while it's correct that we shouldn't define a player on just statistics, the value he actually places on that deeper analysis is immediately evident in his own team.
The issue really is that stats add far more to the actual management of a football team than they do to the discussion around it.
Totally agree.
Agree for the other parts but I'm not sure he needs to be sold though. We haven't actually ruled out that he can't refine his game. They overlap but I think his is more an emotion thing than an intelligence problem. For others, no one has a problem with positive passes however looking off teammates in advanced non-scoring positions to attempt some prayer of a pass to the furthest person forward is just killing promising attacks before they can even take off. There are traits in Bruno's passing that he needs to curb so he first of all doesn't become a bottleneck in our attack and second doesn't stop us from developing a balanced attack. Not necessarily now but when the time comes to challenge those are far more potent and sustainable for success.
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That’s fair enough. It’s just how I see it. I don’t think he has the skill set to play in a midfield that wants to stand up in the face of a press and still put play together regularly, and I’m not sure it’s a case of just ‘telling him to’. This doesn’t mean he isn’t a top player either, more a case of ‘wrong type’ IMO - similar to how Aguero was largely seen as the wrong fit by Pep, despite also being able to present fantastic stats in his defence, and the way many posters on here have been dismissive of Haaland going to City for ages because they don’t see him as the right fit.
To me it isn’t just an issue of wrong pass selection, but also the skill set to allow us to keep the ball in all phases at a higher level. In my humble opinion, of course.
Man City 4:1 Man Utd
please do not offer this guy a big contract, please
Another nothing performance from him in a big game.
He's a numbers player. Pads his own individual stats out but at the expense of the team he plays in.
Probably not a coincidence Sporting won their first league title for 20 odd years the season after he left.
He's a numbers player. Pads his own individual stats out but at the expense of the team he plays in.
Probably not a coincidence Sporting won their first league title for 20 odd years the season after he left.
Too many big games when he is a hindrance.
His pass completion is only 1.2% less than KDB or something 
If you watch the games you see that Bruno is really just the Lukaku of midfielders.
If you watch the games you see that Bruno is really just the Lukaku of midfielders.
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He’s not a world class player
Yeah, it’s night and day in terms of actual performance level.His pass completion is only 1.2% less than KDB or something
If you watch the games you see that Bruno is really just the Lukaku of strikers.
If I speak, I am in BIG trouble.
Good comparison even though you probably mean the Lukaku of midfielders.His pass completion is only 1.2% less than KDB or something
If you watch the games you see that Bruno is really just the Lukaku of strikers.
Speak up God damn it!
Correct
fecking useless today, utter crap.
His goal & assist output masks his performance level, but he really hasn't been his usual self since about December 2020. This season he hasn't been good enough, and the quicker we lessen our reliance on him in attack, the quicker we can play as a more cohesive attacking unit.
Please speak. Was against his signing for precisely what we see on a regular basis.
Football is not all about statistics. There are areas of his game that kill the team on a consistent basis.
The Sporting fans explicitly told us his general game was very erratic. You can't have a player at this level whose general play is this bad so often.
I don’t like him
This stat has always confused me. Watching them it's not obvious that KDB's general play is so much classier and more assured. Maybe it's because he puts in a lot of crosses or something as there's no way they're equals at ball retention. Or as footballers.His pass completion is only 1.2% less than KDB or something
If you watch the games you see that Bruno is really just the Lukaku of midfielders.
We’ve really shown him the United way. Turned to shit just like every other player that signs for this club.
Like Pogba was these past 5-6 years, Bruno may just be our new tactical headache. How do we control games and dominate with him playing frantically all the time like he's on acid or something. He's sometimes brilliant in the final third but great teams are build on a high level collective and he doesn't do enough in this regard.
There's a reason why no big teams were in for him and why Sporting have been flourishing since he left. Thats all i'll say.
Another nothing performance. Worrying how he's let his mentality go to pot this season.
Hmm, why would that get you in big trouble, don't most people think that?
It is a bit of the Lukaku equation where raw stats are given too much importance over actual performance.
The one thing I hate is when he's tackled on the edge of his own box and just goes down
He's not hurt cos he gets back up but dammit, get up and win the ball back
He's not hurt cos he gets back up but dammit, get up and win the ball back
Really let me down today as he has for a while now. Several times he failed to pick the right pass and that is the difference between players like him and De Bryune
You'd be surprised, I see all the time people constantly making excuses for him and saying he played well just because he got a scrappy assist.
In fact the opinion that he hasn't been good for well over a year is a controversial one, many fans have short memories and rely on his statistics to claim that he's been good the entire time he's been here.
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