The irony of accusing me of "being incredibly simple, black or white" while ignoring that it's quite clearly not as simple as him saying "no" to a signing to save budget.
We pretty much did that with Antony, by all accounts, having been quoted £50 million for him at the beginning of the summer. We then made the wrong call to say "yes" when we had no one else and they wanted £85 million on deadline day.
Say "no" to Hojlund (who I think was over priced) and we risk having to resort to another Weghorst-type loan deal.
Say "no" to Mount (or Onana, or anyone, really) with a view to saving budget to afford Kim Min-Jae, and there's still the chance he chooses Bayern and we end up with just Jonny Evans anyway, except now we're short somewhere else.
We've clearly got the strategy wrong on more than one occasion, but it's simply not an issue I can place too much blame on Ten Hag for.
We aren’t saying ALL blame. We are saying some blame.
You are saying, “this is the hand he was dealt, that’s not his fault.” No, he had every opportunity to veto Antony, Weghorst, Hojlund, Martinez, Mount, Onana, Malacia, Casemiro, Reguilon, Amrabaat. He did not. As such, and because we look worse than we did last season, he deserves some criticism. He thought those players would improve us. For the most part, they have not.
If you want me to extend the argument like you have, let’s assume he vetoed potentially GOOD transfer additions that were raised by the club scouting group. That makes it even worse. I don’t believe we can criticize him for this because we don’t know who was proposed, but it’s possible he turned down top players…