Is it down to just poor recruitment?

[devilish]

First of all this is not an Anti Ole thread? I am firmly in the anti Ole camp but on this regard I think its way bigger then that. So with all cards on the table let's proceed

Our recruitment has been judged as abysmal. I do agree with that wholeheartedly. However I was listening to a blog and something hit me. There seem to be a common trend with the signings we make. A player comes in, he does well then it goes down to the shitters after that. RVP, Hernandez, ADM, Shaw, Bailly, Matic, Lukaku and now even James, Maguire and AWB are showing early signs of decline. If it wasn't for last season we could add Pogba to the list as well. He started reasonably well, then his performance dipped the season after, he had a great season the season after that and he vanished this season. So what is wrong with us?

Sure not every player follow that pattern. Some players like Mkhitaryan and Bastian were shit from day 1. However why there seem to be this pattern were players performance tend to nosedive so sharply once they 'settle down' with us? Is it down to complacency ie knowledge that since the club struggle to sell/buy players then United will probably keep the players there irrespective of how badly they do? Is it down to coaching? The fact that Moyes fired most of Sir Alex men, that both LVG and Mou had to work with people from failed administrations and that Ole hired nobodies and gave jobs to the boys doesn't really help. Or could it be both?

Sir Alex could squeeze talent from an ageing Scholes/Giggs while turning average players like OShea, Fortune, Phil Nev and Cleverley into quite useful players to have. Ever since he retired we're doing the exact opposite. I still think that the club should have been wiser on the transfer market. Having said that, there seem to be more on this that meet the eye.

 

[Skills]

It's because nobody holds any of our managers accountable for coaching the players. All the focus, effort and energy is constantly spent on players the club could be buying - that people forget to ask what has this manager actually done to make full use of the resources at his disposal?

 

[Roughseas]

All the signings we’ve made have been good, in terms of what was required for the manager’s specific style of play. The problem lies in that each consecutive manager had a different style, rendering the previous signings a difficult fit. That’s why were accused of having no long term plan or vision. LVG in an interview said he was surprised Deadwood didn’t ask about his vision or style when he was interviewed for the job.

 

[Offside]

No it's not. It's down to getting crap managers in as well that don't fit the club at all. Ed is also responsible for that. The fact he gave Ole the job without even waiting until the end of the season just shows how clueless he is.

 

[Red_toad]

No it isn’t only down to poor recruitment. Look at Burnleys team and name where their players are better than ours? Not being able to beat Burnley was down to poor management and coaching. If we had a manager who could get the best out of the current squad we’d be 3rd or 4th in the league easily.

 

[NoPace]

Poor recruiting, management and retention. This squad would be doing well I imagine, though we'd still need a DM and a #10 like we do now.

------Rashford---Martial----- (Depay)
Zaha----------------------DiMaria (James)
------------Fred----Pogba-----------(McTominay)
Shaw-Maguire-Evans-WanBissaka (Lindelof, Williams)
-----------------DeGea (Romero)

 

[ottosec]

The players we're signing always do well at their clubs, yet they turn to shit when they come here. That's obviously not a coincidence.

Our coaching/training structure has been shit since Moyes came and sacked everybody and brought in all his donkeys instead.

 

[Rozay]

It’s not ‘just’ down to anything. It’s down to a lot of things.

 

[Zen86]

It’s poor recruitment. We’ve bought players who just aren’t good enough, while also buying the wrong players for the type of football we’ve played.

 

[devilish]

It's because nobody holds any of our managers accountable for coaching the players. All the focus, effort and energy is constantly spent on players the club could be buying - that people forget to ask what has this manager actually done to make full use of the resources at his disposal?

Football has grown too big for the manager to be accountable for everything. We're not in the 70s anymore. It's about time we appoint football people, at board level, who would bring in the best coaching staff on the market. Instead we allow managers to hire whoever they want including friends and family.

 

[Red1968]

Yes, its been all about recruitment since Moyes. Each manager seems to have been hamstrung by Woodward but has also made bad choices. We consistently get players who have excelled elsewhere but cannot adapt to the pressures of playing for the club, are used in the wrong way or just lose their mojo in a serious way. Its the square peg in the round hole problem. We need to get a manager who will be allowed to bring in the right players for the scheme. We also need to get players who can excel in the EPL and can tough it out. I think Ole is in over his head but at the same time the club is hamstringing him just as it did with others post SAF.

 

[Web of Bissaka]

Big chunk of those players mentioned at OP and otherwise should be included already have their own "problems" before joining us.

 

[R'hllor]

Was saying the same for last few years now, not one player we bought improved after joining us, they join with certain status ( world class, very good, good etc.) and after that there is this period where they manage to be around the level before they joined but then its downhill from there, them not falling to far would be biggest achievement, sad really. I mean look United vs West Ham match thread and see comments about Matic etc. thats why i found weird comments of those lunatics who tried to defend Ole with "his 3 signings are 100% success" lines.

We cant even pull a scam, you know make them look class long enough before we flog them off for decent money. Thats why we cant earn shit in most cases when moving players, besides high wages, their wages dont match the perception of their quality in eyes outside the club. Even in case of Lukaku, ADM we didnt profit i think.

Always mentioned Coutinho case as example, they bought him for what 13 mil!? (not sure how many clubs were also interested at the time) and improved him, made him to look like a player worth of 130mil?! in Barca eyes, after which they used that money to buy CB. We are not capable to pull something like that.

 

[Tel074]

No it isn’t only down to poor recruitment. Look at Burnleys team and name where their players are better than ours? Not being able to beat Burnley was down to poor management and coaching. If we had a manager who could get the best out of the current squad we’d be 3rd or 4th in the league easily.

I beg to differ .. That team on Wednesday night cost over 330 million in transfer fees that's just total incompetence. We now have has beens and never will be's in our starting line up.

There isn't a manager we could get to make that squad of shite easily top 3 or 4

 

[Tom Cato]

No it isn’t only down to poor recruitment. Look at Burnleys team and name where their players are better than ours? Not being able to beat Burnley was down to poor management and coaching. If we had a manager who could get the best out of the current squad we’d be 3rd or 4th in the league easily.

Can we coach aging veteran Juan Mata to not miss the ball on open net?

 

[Zen86]

Can we coach aging veteran Juan Mata to not miss the ball on open net?

Don’t let reality get in the way of a good story

 

[DoomSlayer]

It’s not ‘just’ down to anything. It’s down to a lot of things.

This. It's a complex issue and we are failing in many aspects, not just the player recruitment.

If it was down to one thing only, I'd point the finger at Woodward because he created the current set-up at the club and has done feck all to change anything significantly in the last 2 years. I do believe he is incompetent and too soft for this job.

 

[Paul_Scholes18]

I think most of it is down to management. We do spend our money poorly too and pay far too much for every player we get.
Also our medical staff and fitness coaches seem to be doing a terrible job too.
The people at the top do not have a clue about which managers, players, staff and whatever they need to bring in and work on.
Glaziers and Ed is the big problem here about all these things.

Di Maria is a great example. Starter brilliantly for us, but LVG coached him to play it safe and stop playing his own game. Due to that he lost confidence and turned to crap for us. At PSG he is playing great again.
Mourinho coached the player alright at the start, but then had his typical meltdown near the end that destroyed everyones confidence. He also turn very negative with his football when it is not needed.
Ole just like Moyes is just not good enough at all. Ole the worst one that I see almost 0 attacking patterns from and we can't even defend set pieces. You wonder what we actually do in training. Play counter attacking drills all the time?

 

[Jaqen H'ghar]

Poor recruitment with regards to both players and managers. There does not seem to be any vision or direction.

Lack of accountability for the players. One manager gets the sack, new manager gives everyone a clean slate. Some know that they wouldn't be getting anywhere near the money they get at United, so would happily run down their contracts. But the club, unable to get rid of them, gives them new improved contracts to 'protect' its assets. A classic case of sunken cost fallacy.

This last bit is just speculation on my part, but I think having overpaid underperforming 'stars' is at least demoralizing the squad, or at worst creating a toxic dressing room atmosphere.

 

[Alabaster Codify7]

Don’t let reality get in the way of a good story

We could coach our club and manager to not offer a past it slow non entity 160k a week contract extension.

 

[AneRu]

It's because nobody holds any of our managers accountable for coaching the players. All the focus, effort and energy is constantly spent on players the club could be buying - that people forget to ask what has this manager actually done to make full use of the resources at his disposal?

This. Managers at United are given the luxury of 'building their own team' so it's all made to seem like the solutions to this club's ills only exist in the transfer market but never on the training pitch.

At today's presser Ole was basically postponing any form of accountability until he has signed six players. As he prefers British talent that alone will cost us at least £400m and with the Glazers spending an average of £70m net per season we are looking at around six years since we find the January window difficult to do business. By which time Maguire, De Gea, Fred etc will be looking to retire.

Basically there is zero accountability at the club otherwise Woodward would be back in investment banking.

 

[Ali Dia]

I keep banging on about it but I think you can put the players into a few categories.
Mentally never really up for a challenge this size: shaw, morgan s, Di Maria, miki, depay etc
Not enough left to prove: Sánchez, bastian, falcao, pogba now
Don’t play football the way we want to as a club : Mata , fellaini, Matic?
Not good enough? Insert as many players here as you like.
Injury prone: also everyone

I think we were selling this plushy don’t worry we are just going to spend our way back to the top garbage to new signings instead of checking their real desire to come here for anything other than money and fame. The whole thing was just the emperors new clothes and has been since woodworm has taken the reigns

 

[Wumminator]

I think it is pretty much all down to recruitment. It has been shambolic for ages.

 

[Neil_Buchanan]

It's not just down to recruitment but it plays a huge part. If just a few of our transfers had worked out as hoped (say Bailly, Di Maria, Schneiderin) we would be in a much better position.

 

[Paul_Scholes18]

Poor recruitment with regards to both players and managers. There does not seem to be any vision or direction.

Lack of accountability for the players. One manager gets the sack, new manager gives everyone a clean slate. Some know that they wouldn't be getting anywhere near the money they get at United, so would happily run down their contracts. But the club, unable to get rid of them, gives them new improved contracts to 'protect' its assets. A classic case of sunken cost fallacy.

This last bit is just speculation on my part, but I think having overpaid underperforming 'stars' is at least demoralizing the squad, or at worst creating a toxic dressing room atmosphere.

I don't agree with the accountability. Feels like the players gets to take most of the blame and the manager/owners gets away with things all the time (maybe not here, but with the media they do) . Mainly Ole and Moyes having a good ride with the media. LVG not too bad either. Mourinho got more sticks I think due to having higher expectations on him.
The manager need to start working on things when things are not working out and use new ideas.

What we need to do is start focusing on coaching a style that suits our players and our clubs long term goals.
Those goals should be to reach the top again.

Sadly we do not bring in the right managers nor seem to be driven to reach the top again.

 

[sideshow_bob]

Down to a lot of things:

- recruiting shit players
- an imbalanced squad
- culture of rewarding failure (renewing Jones, Lingard, Shaw etc)
- refusing to recruit a DOF
- recruiting past-it managers that aren't able to coach & motivate this younger generation of footballers
- owners are comfortable/disinterested
- CEO failure to recruit/delegate in areas where he's inept
- not enough pressure from fans

 

[Red_toad]

I beg to differ .. That team on Wednesday night cost over 330 million in transfer fees that's just total incompetence. We now have has beens and never will be's in our starting line up.

There isn't a manager we could get to make that squad of shite easily top 3 or 4

That team man for man is better than Burnleys. You may beg to differ, but there should only be 1 winner. A good manager would get better out of our squad.

 

[Tel074]

That team man for man is better than Burnleys. You may beg to differ, but there should only be 1 winner. A good manager would get better out of our squad.

I'm not arguing that I agree with the point . My point is Moyes was a worse United manager. He had a way better starting 11 than we have now

 

[Dan_F]

Can we coach aging veteran Juan Mata to not miss the ball on open net?

He didn’t miss to get us into the next round of the FA cup. If we’re relying on one chance a game we’re fecked.

Reality is it’s a mixture of everything. However, we’ve also tried a variety of managers, which would suggest that’s not the main problem.

 

[Jaqen H'ghar]

I don't agree with the accountability. Feels like the players gets to take most of the blame and the manager/owners gets away with things all the time (maybe not here, but with the media they do) . Mainly Ole and Moyes having a good ride with the media. LVG not too bad either. Mourinho got more sticks I think due to having higher expectations on him.
The manager need to start working on things when things are not working out and use new ideas.

What we need to do is start focusing on coaching a style that suits our players and our clubs long term goals.
Those goals should be to reach the top again.

Sadly we do not bring in the right managers nor seem to be driven to reach the top again.

By accountability I don't mean fan and media opinion, I'm talking about real consequences.

The owners own the club and brand, so any failure affects them sooner or later as decreased revenue and brand value.

The players that underperform while still getting paid obscene salaries and getting their contracts renewed aren't really being held accountable in my opinion.

 

[Lost bear]

This. Managers at United are given the luxury of 'building their own team' so it's all made to seem like the solutions to this club's ills only exist in the transfer market but never on the training pitch.

At today's presser Ole was basically postponing any form of accountability until he has signed six players. As he prefers British talent that alone will cost us at least £400m and with the Glazers spending an average of £70m net per season we are looking at around six years since we find the January window difficult to do business. By which time Maguire, De Gea, Fred etc will be looking to retire.

Basically there is zero accountability at the club otherwise Woodward would be back in investment banking.

I think you’re spot on there. The coaching is clearly poor, and the way Ole and Carrick appear while watching the game gives the impression that even they don’t expect it to work. How are the players going to have any confidence in it?

 

[onetwo3oclock4oclockrock]

That team man for man is better than Burnleys. You may beg to differ, but there should only be 1 winner.

I would say we were the better team, even though the result was terrible.
24 Shots 5
7 Shots on target 2
86% Pass Success %58%
10 Dribbles won 1
72 Possession 28
Missed a couple of absolute sitters, they scored two out of nothing. Not good enough, of course, but looking behind the result (I know it's not something football fans like to do..) it actually wasn't that terrible.

 

[chromepaxos]

The problem is lack of structure throughout the footballing side of the club. Putting it down to just being about recruitment or the lack of a DOF ignores all the other areas in which we are crap.

Our injury record is terrible: where is our world class head of sports performance and injury prevention?

Our coaching is patchy at best: where is our world class performance and tactical coach?

Our defending at set pieces is terrible, our recruitment is shite and our own corners are awful: where is our world class head of analytics?

Without these pieces in place (and more: Old Trafford is falling apart and rumours are that our medical dep't is way behind the curve so we need infrastructure investment too), no amount of recruitment will change things, and no manager will succeed.

 

[Asger]

Maybe too much pressure they get from fans?

 

[Jericholyte2]

The players in the squad with higher talent ceilings are still getting the best numbers for the team.

If we had more players with higher ceilings we’d be doing better.

 

[tjb]

It's a mixture. But as far as the football side of things go, it probably is 60 percent of the problem. I've seen a Chelsea team reach a champions league finals with Avram Grant and consequently finishing second in the league over a Wenger coached Arsenal and a Benitez coached Liverpool. I've also seen Pellegrini win a league with City yet flop fantastically at West Ham. Like any sport, a lot of what happens on the field occurs as a result of the talent of the players a team has. When Moyes took over United, even though we had weaknesses in the defensive side of our game due to aging, we still had formidable players in our attack. Moyes caused the players to underperform, as you could see their individual talent in play for us and for other teams, but it simply was not honed in a system that would get the best and most consistent results out of the squad. Van Gaal took that squad and completely annahilated all the quality we had over the course of two years and replaced them with mediocre players. This is where we really started to recruit poorly. We started signing cheap unrefined players that had never proven themselves prior to signing for us. Players like Rojo, Darmian, Shaw, Blind, and Herrera were signed with no prior history of consistently good player prior to their arrival at united. This can be proven by their average rating scores on whoscored. In addition to this, LVG's ego and destructive behaviour ensured that we sold 90 percent of the players that had proven consistently effective for us, keeping the mediocre players and selling our best ones ( as we could actually make a profit on them). Out of all of those players that Van Gaal signed none of them proved effective.

This is where we needed to start selling and buying as quickly as possible to offset the poor recruitment we had done in the two years prior ( which I blame mostly on Van Gaal). Instead we started a strategy of spending massive amounts on individual players like Pogba and Lukaku instead of filling as many holes lacking quality as we could. Neither Pogba nor Lukaku were saviours and should not have been expected to lift up the rest of the group. What is clear, particularly with Mourinho in charge, was that the recruitment process was not handled by Mourinho as he would have signed a lot more players with the amount we ended up spending on Lukaku and Pogba.

What is clear is that we stopped having enough quality in our squad to challenge for the league after 2015. This was as a result of replacing good players ( some aging) with very mediocre replacements. After that we point, we continued to spend heavily, but on individual players who did not have the quality their transfer fees demanded to lift the rest of the squad. We were so focused on signing superstars that we lost sight of building a capable squad. I would say that we have recruited poorly, but the decision to sign players like Pogba and Lukaku, sacrificing the building of the rest of the squad, came directly from Woodward, as opposed to the scouts.

 

[Im red2]

I think when the Glazers came in the club was being run perfectly by SAF, and the Glazers were very happy to let him continue on with the football side of things. Meanwhile they where laying the foundation for their main aim which was IMO to earn a fortune from the club. After SAF and Gill left then they set their own man Woodward in charge of the club. They did not take the football side of things seriously and left that in Woodwards hands. What they should have done at that point in time is appoint football people to look after the football side of things while letting Woodward deal with sponsorships and financial matters. I do not think they where interested in winning anything, but I do think they were interested in being in the top 4 for ECL qualification because of the money. Seems they neglected the most important part of the club because of their greed for their dividends and bank accounts. They simply let Woodward do what he wanted, and so he did. The problem was that old ED did not have a clue about football, as has long been proven, yet there he still is in charge of all things with only the Glazers to answer to. Interesting that a PR man Neil Ashton has now been hired to better the image of Ed Woodward (lipstick on a pig). I am afraid the club has been kidnapped and is being milked, and things are going to get a whole lot worse as long as the Glazers are in charge. Because when it comes down to it they are the people making the decisions. They have no interest in the club as a football club. They are just milking it for every cent they can. And with Joel Glazer pulling the plug on the Fernandes fiasco, it seems they are losing patience with him (Woodward). Surely they will find another puppet easily enough if they need to. Poor Ole is the one having to face the media and his hands are tied, he knows we need more signings and says that he is being backed, when really he is not, if he came out and said the truth he would be fired. If I was him I would come out and tell the truth about the situation and resign. The way I see things is that anyone spending money on United in any way right now is helping the milkers to milk the club. It is a sorry state of affairs but it is becoming more and more clear that it is a fact. A noose has been hung around the neck of the club by the leeches, and spending money on the club is helping them tighten it for the final hang job. Yes things are going to get a lot worse.

 

[Mark Pawelek]

Football has grown too big for the manager to be accountable for everything. We're not in the 70s anymore. It's about time we appoint football people, at board level, who would bring in the best coaching staff on the market. Instead we allow managers to hire whoever they want including friends and family.

100% agree.