What are fans protesting? I haven't got a grasp of all the details so I'm struggling to understand what the Glazers and Ed have done?
Our net spend in the last 5 years has been staggering. 2nd only to city I believe. It hasn't reflected in our performance so obviously that spending is going to be reigned in.
Our recruitment has been poor. Which is easy to say in hindsight.
Ed makes poor footballing decision and needs to appoint a DoF. Which is right. But a protest to demand a DoF is strange.
The debt placed on the club? Has it really restricted our spending.
I'm not defending the Glazers or Ed, I had a conversation with a Liverpool and a Chelsea fan last night and struggled to explain why the board is the problem. They couldn't see it - and I couldn't deny the facts they presented.
You raise some very good questions.
Yes we have spent a ton of money in the last five years which has not been reflected in an improvement of the team. One response, as you suggest, is to reign in spending. Another, in my opinion better, response is to replace the person who is spending all that money in a way that is wasteful.
It's not just that individual purchases can be criticized with 20-20 hindsight vision. It's the failure to recognize critical needs that the team has and fail to to recognize what the team doesn't need. What's so bad about the Sanchez purchase is not that the player fell apart after the fact but that the trade was ever made. He plays a left attacker. The two young players with the greatest promise on the team also played on the left so bringing in Sanchez put them on the bench. In the long run it weakened the team even if Sanchez played something close to expectations. Buying him did not meet any need that the team had. Our
When Herrera was injured last season it became painfully apparent how critically important he was to the team. OGS' fabulous initial victory run fell apart. The team had no replacement for him nor did they have a replacement for Matic whose shelf life was suddenly expiring. Herrera was permitted to leave for nothing and no replacement was sought for him or for Matic. So for his first full season in charge OGS was handed a team with only one proven Premier League central midfielder, Pogba.
I give OGS credit for rebuilding the team in the only way open for him which was to develop young players. Enter McT and Fred to the CM. But as we are finding out now the team has zero CM replacements. It's impossible to field a successful team in the Premier League without a decent CM.
Today's team cannot provide the ball to our attackers because it lacks a decent CM. So we don't score many goals and our central defense goes unprotected. IMO United's starting 11 are a competitive team for a top four position. The problem is teams have injuries and United don't have the bench, especially in CM, to manage injuries. This is not rocket science.
Woodward has been failing to identify the needs that the team has and invest accordingly in the proper players for six years. It's not a question of hindsight pointing out that a particular trade, like Sanchez, hasn't worked out. It is failing to recognize the teams critical needs and address them.
Where are we today? The team has a critical need for an attacking and a defending CM not to mention that we are one injury away from a debacle with our attackers. We seem to be only addressing one of those three critical needs and that in what has become the predictable flaky United way. It certainly seems like only one of the three critical needs will be addressed at best.
The team is only going to flounder if it's critical needs are not addressed. What will management do? Probably throw OGS to the wolves. His replacement then will make it six managers in the last six years and eight months. That's chaos and it's hard to see an outstanding managerial talent walking into this mess.