Going off some of the replies in here, it definitely seems like some folks didn't notice United and Ten Hag selling/releasing 20+ players between 2022-2024.
Half the squad gone in just over a year
- Thread starter Shane88
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I believe the current squad the hierarchy is building will not be overhauled if a manager is sacked and I believe one of the key requirements of we go for another manager would be that they can use the squad we have in addition to maybe 1 or 2 signings.Getting rid of Deadwood since 2014, at some point you have to wonder how many players over the last decade were unnecessarily sacrificed that a good manager could have made use of. No sooner have we completed one rebuild we immediately embark upon another. Pissing another £400-600m down the drain.
Maybe, just maybe every new manager doesn't need a new squad.
Absolutely astounding that Murtough got another job after overseeing the 2 worst transfer windows in history. Actively destroying a club.
Shame as he is so uniquely good at that one skill, you’d really think the anticipation, bravery and athleticism for it would transfer to other parts of his game but it just doesn’t seem to. I really liked him under that season under Ole where we came 2nd playing counter attacking football, really fitted him well
All good moving on so many players, but you can't be spending big on players like Ugarte and Dorgu to replace them. Otherwise you end up where you started. And I'm not even convinced about some of the other players we've brought in too.
Now this is what you call an overhaul.
We genuinely have recruited horribly over the past decade.
Compared to the best run clubs we've been miles behind. INEOS are atleast buying good young talent for the u21s and youth teams and some actual Premier League proven talent.
I predict INEOS will sign Baleba and target the best English talent to fill the squad out in key positions. I thought we'd have signed Branthwaite but we signed Heaven instead with a long term view in mind.
I could see us also going for Wharton next summer if he's deemed mobile and good enough to play with Baleba.
Its going to be a shame to lose Mainoo as an academy and English player but he'll have to be replaced for us to have English first team players. Rashford, Sancho, Mainoo, Shaw and Maguire will all have to be replaced soon too.
Hopefully the best young English talent will be monitored over the next year.
Compared to the best run clubs we've been miles behind. INEOS are atleast buying good young talent for the u21s and youth teams and some actual Premier League proven talent.
I predict INEOS will sign Baleba and target the best English talent to fill the squad out in key positions. I thought we'd have signed Branthwaite but we signed Heaven instead with a long term view in mind.
I could see us also going for Wharton next summer if he's deemed mobile and good enough to play with Baleba.
Its going to be a shame to lose Mainoo as an academy and English player but he'll have to be replaced for us to have English first team players. Rashford, Sancho, Mainoo, Shaw and Maguire will all have to be replaced soon too.
Hopefully the best young English talent will be monitored over the next year.
Could be. I've always thought it just stems from past success and people not being able to adjust their expectations, and so confusing players just not being as good as the ones before with a lack of effort, bad attitude, etc.
We've had players with crap attitudes but it's not like they get more stick than anyone else.
And now it just seems to have become cool constantly think half our squad is "deadwood", even if the player in question makes about 50 appearances over the season so is blatantly needed or useful for something.
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Baffles me how people can't see his glaring faults. All you need to do is see his last game for West ham to see how terrible he can be (and was quite often!)
We leverkusened all the old or problematic players.
That’s what tends to happen when your recruitment is consistently poor.
Well I hope so, that's what we should have been doing for years. Instead of giving every new manager the time and money to try to build their own squad.
Could well be an element of that too.
There are fans who want the squad rebuilt every year or two it seems. A real toxic element has developed within the fanbase who at any given time seem to hate most of the current squad.
No doubt but you'd think at some point we'd have realised that letting every new manager identify their own targets and launch yet another rebuild, wouldn't fix our problems.
Not that I am a huge fan of any particular players in that picture, but it's hard to go along with the common trend of "good" that I'm seeing here when we've actively gotten significantly worse since this picture was taken and have not yet shown signs of doing better than this team did. Of course there was one big change since then 
Great photo! I was buzzing with that performance. Shame it didn’t work out for many of them but we were good on that day.
I mean of the players who have left, who is good enough to still be in the current squad? McTom maybe, as a squad player? Who else you got
By all accounts we have reached that point post ETH. At the very least it’s a combination of manager and management.
100%. I think instead of balance we’ve over corrected in the other direction
Been saying this. He would have thrived under Amorim in that no.10 role. Bloody ETH!!!
Good shout. But not as good as Yoro
It was the club seeking money for PSR. ETH wanted him to stay
I think it's pretty normal after seeing Manchester United of all football clubs in the wilderness for 12 years.
Yeah and you would also have had similar responses when ten Hag cleared out the 'dead wood' from a squad that finished 3rd.
It feels like the "deadwood" thing has been a theme on here for about 10 years now.
What actually happens is players get older, or don't react well to the manager changing every 2 years, where they might not fit or be able to adjust to the new one's ideals. Or their mate might get dropped, sold, they might not adapt to the environment or cope well with being criticised every single week, etc.
Deadwood to me is someone who sits on the bench all season or makes about 8 appearances in 2 years. We've had a few of those but even then it's generally been injuries rather than anything else.
When someone's making 30+ appearances a year like most of those names in the opening post, it means they aren't dead wood, and if they leave someone needs to replace them and fill the gap...and if you look at how we seem to get progressively worse every time this happens, we clearly aren't replacing them very well.
Just from the OP list. Mctominay would significantly improve our current squad, yet was mocked on here as a United player. Rashford had multiple seasons where he'd get 20-30 goals. Constantly slated for it. No one in our current squad is capable of that. Bissaka despite the caf thinking he was the worst fullback ever, was a better right back than anyone we've picked either there or as wing back since (I rate Amad highly but he's not a defender). Varane is better than any of our current defenders. Eriksen even with no legs is a better CM than playing a no10 there. Garnacho had more goal contributions than almost anyone else in our squad last year. So far this season we've played Mason Mount instead who will not get near the same numbers.
We aren't actually shipping out deadwood. We are just moving players on that were contributing to the team, and then not replacing them properly.
However players are often considered to become deadwood over night if a new manager comes in who totally changes the tactical approach. That the club never gradually moved from one approach to another but instead always tried a big bang destroyed hundreds of millions of squad value and hurt the club more than anything else.
I sincerely hope so. But the sad thing is people on here with no experience in football identified it as a problem years ago. So that shows you the competence of the people the Glazers had running the club.
Yeah, could well be the case.
I don't necessarily disagree with your definition of deadwood, I think it makes sense. In fact with how injury prone Mount and Shaw have been they're dangerously close to deadwood territory.
That said, some of the claims about the outgoing players here are wild. Rashford was not even close to the kind of form he had shown in the seasons where he was high-scoring. I am all for keeping good academy products as squad players and I was sad to see both McTominay and Garnacho go, but I think we need to aspire to even better standards - and I think we got good upgrades in the No. 10 position in both Cunha and Mbeumo. I liked AWB, he worked hard, but I think an injury-free Mazaraoui is an upgrade. Varane is undoubtedly excellent but we cannot count on aging players, I'd rather have upcoming world-class CBs like Yoro and De Ligt. Eriksen with no legs is not better than Bruno.
Hojlund and Onana weren't working, and we've lined up replacements for them too. I think the transfer policy looks just fine right now. The only misfire from the INEOS era signings seems to be Ugarte.
It's alright to go for a leaner squad this season because we have way fewer matches, but I would like to see more squad depth added as we go.
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Ah yes, total of 5 players, one as free agent who was ok, not brilliant, not complete rubbish, one on a loan, had his moments..
First two in red were bad.
The last one played 10ish games and were injured last season.
Shall we talk about how much dross Ole or Jose brought to the club? They did, but are nowhere near hatred as EtH. Oh right, one is a legend. Yes, your are right, the one that got us THE biggest dross in history of the club, now on a loan at Villa.
That's the worry for me, Ten Hag took over a squad that finished 3rd, 2nd and 6th (under Rangnick) and that 6th place finish felt like a new low post SAF, we were woeful that season and it didn't seem like it could get much worse. He took the majority of that squad to 3rd in his first season but then gutted it, he then finished 8th and that was the lowest point the club had been in 40 odd years. Then with the squad Ten Hag built we finished 15th last season and granted there were mitigating circumstances. If we finished 6th this year it'll be looked upon as a great achievement to jump 9 places up the table. But I wouldn't be able to shake the feeling that we would have wasted 4 years and about £800m just to get back to the level we were under Rangnick.
I hope this is the last time we need a rebuild and there'll be no more 'deadwood' for the managers to clear out if Ineos are building the squad with a lng term plan in mind beyond Amorim. From here on out I hope when/if a manager fails the fanbase stop blaming the players every single time.
McTominay. There weren't a lot of complaints when he left. And rightly so - he was never a satisfactory solution in CM.Great in both boxes, almost nada between them, where 90% of the game takes place. Difference now is he's in a system built to maximise his strengths, and in a weaker league. EtH did that too in a few games in his second season, which allowed him to have an impact, but it came at a cost and wasn't sustainable. If he stayed, it would have been as an impact sub. Probably for the best for both parties.
Funny, I seem to recall reading one or two critical remarks about our managers on here over the last few years....
I don't think either of them had a transfer record remotely as bad as EtH. Mourinho's was a bit disappointing, Ole's probably more or less average, EtH's downright catastrophic.
All 3 had at least one big-money disaster signing (Sanchez, Sancho, Antony). Jose did not bring in any major building blocks, but quite a few who were at least good squad players. You can argue the case with Pogba, but in the end I think he was too good to be considered a bust, but not good enough to be considered a success either. Ole bought Bruno and Amad, and really had few outright busts apart from Sancho. There's the CR debacle, but that was perhaps not mainly on him. EtH? Well, there's Martinez. Or would have bern, if he could have stayed healthy. Maybe Yoro, and Mazraoui and de Ligt, if we assume he called any shots in that last window. And the rest are either gone or on the block, or require some serious suspension of disbelief to not assume they'll soon be there. Tim Steidten levels of feckuppery.
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How’s Rashford doing at Barca? We don’t hate our own players, we just want them to put in a shift and work hard.
Lets see how we do this season, pretty sure we will be better than 1 goal a game
He wins that ball so much.....
It's mad, 7 of the team that started that cup final have either been sold, loaned out or released.