Man United's most baffling decisions

Nas-JR said:
- Hiring Ragnick on a 6 month stint as a manager (not a manager) in preparation for him to take over as sporting director, only to bin him because he correctly identified what the club needs to do to succeed (open heart surgery).
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Rangnick was never supposed to be our Sporting Director. He was set to be a consultant advisor with limited power and influence.

The reality of the consultancy role is that he would only be expected to work a handful of days a month.

The club wanted to draw on his expertise and experience but when that role was offered, it was not done with the idea that he would be an integral part of the new hierarchy involving Arnold, Murtough, Fletcher et al.

Only when the season finishes and a new manager arrives will it become clear how Rangnick fits into the new set-up at Old Trafford.
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In reality it was an extra payoff/security because he walked away from a long-term deal at Lokomotiv Moscow for just a six-month deal with us. It didn't make financial sense for him unless we could offer something additional.

So when it was decided it wasn't necessary to have him included in 1 or 2 meetings every month (bringing him up to speed etc would cost the time of our other people), he was instead paid off the rest of his contract without having to do more work, which possibly was the plan all along (but done this way instead of paying a larger lump sum as manager).
 
  • Funding Real's transfers when we bought an ageing Casemiro & injury prone Varane, both on big wages & considerable transfer fee.
  • Sanchez to play on the wings when it was clear he didn't have the legs for it.
  • Sancho when we had Rashford on the left wing & he didn't have the mobility for the type of winger we were looking for.
  • Maguire & AWB in a counter attacking team, neither were suited for different reasons.
  • Ron v2.
  • Ole's permanent contract - he hadn't shown enough to be considered a permanent manager imo.
  • Not sacking ETH & Amorim much sooner.
  • Hiring Amorim knowing how wedded he was to 3 at the back (Liverpool knew about it, surely this would have been covered during the interview).
  • Onana, the least said the better.
  • Rashford's mega contract.
  • The fees for Hojlund & Antony.
  • £10m or so to extend Ighalo's loan.
None of the above required any hindsight, it was clear from the outset that we shouldn't be making those moves. That makes it worse.
 
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ClaytonBlackmoorLeftPeg said:
Gill didn’t want to be do the job with anyone other than SAF. Yes, under him it would have been better - but not SAF good! It was well timed from him (from his perspective).
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From a club/company running perspective though, it was a baffling decision both were allowed to leave at the same time. Perhaps slightly cowardly from Gill.
 
IrishMcD said:
More recently, and the one that annoyed me the most, Ralf Ragnick being convinced to take the mangers role short term so he could identify the issues with the playing staff before getting into his proper role as Sporting Director. He identified the problems, called out the issues and the board fired him because they realised his fix (and my god, how right he was) was “open heart surgery” and going to cost a lot to fix. Didn’t help that the Twitter brigade of supporters turned on him because he didn’t prove to be a successful manager and couldn’t turn Martial and Rashford into prime R9 and Ronaldinho
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This one still makes me mad. What a stupid time that was. He only took on the interim as a prerequisite to getting DoF and got flamed for being a shit coach with arguably our worst ever PL squad filled to the brim with mutinous growling.
 
Nas-JR said:
- Hiring Ragnick on a 6 month stint as a manager (not a manager) in preparation for him to take over as sporting director, only to bin him because he correctly identified what the club needs to do to succeed (open heart surgery).
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IrishMcD said:
More recently, and the one that annoyed me the most, Ralf Ragnick being convinced to take the mangers role short term so he could identify the issues with the playing staff before getting into his proper role as Sporting Director.
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This is a very weird Caf myth. Rangnick was not going to be Sporting Director or DOF. He signed up for a consultant role. It would be purely advisory. He wouldn't be an actual decision-making employee of the club.
 
astracrazy said:
From a club/company running perspective though, it was a baffling decision both were allowed to leave at the same time. Perhaps slightly cowardly from Gill.
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I agree. It would have been a big challenge, perhaps he didn’t want to take that on. Ultimately the club couldn’t do anything about it.
 
Big Ben Foster said:
This is a very weird Caf myth. Rangnick was not going to be Sporting Director or DOF. He signed up for a consultant role. It would be purely advisory. He wouldn't be an actual decision-making employee of the club.
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To be fair, that's what Vivell was and now he's our head of recruitment.
 
Lash said:
To be fair, that's what Vivell was and now he's our head of recruitment.
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Yes that's true, but Rangnick was announced as the incoming Austria manager a month before we binned him off. The consultancy was never going to be more than a part-time gig.

That said, I'm still annoyed we didn't listen to him.
 
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Annihilate Now! said:
The Ashworth one takes the cake for me. The whole thing was a shambles.
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This has to be it and is only down to negligence and incompetence. How do you get a DoF that you have fire after five months because he did things differently to how you wanted them to be done and had different opinions on who to hire as manager/head-coach? Did you not talk to him at all? Did you not ask these questions of him, how he works, what type of manager he would favor if he was hired, what direction he wanted to take the club? The mind truly boggles when you think of it.
 
Varun1 said:
  • Maguire & AWB in a counter attacking team, neither were suited for different reasons.
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I'd sign every of your points but this one is odd. Can you explain? Aren't Maguire & AWB especially good in a rather deep setup where everything is nice and compact?

The obvious mistake here was buying him for that price. AWB was expensive as well, but not absurdly as Maguire. There were quite a few clubs in those years who probably couldn't believe their good luck with the prices we accepted to pay. I am stiff baffled by the Antony one.
 
The Antony and Felliani transfer sagas are the only unjustifiable ones.

The rest all can be justified in a vacuum but are indicative of a lack of overall strategy.

The Ashworth one is more realising you were had someone who didn't fit in , wasn't contributing enough inventive thinking and not falling to sunk cost fallacy so fair enough.
 
Sneijder transfer saga. One of the football's longest-running transfer rumours, which never happened.

We badly needed a creative midfielder at the time, but United didn't want to "overpay" and always prioritized other targets. I always thought Sneijder would have been a great fit to the United squad post CR7's first stint.
 
Nas-JR said:
This one is purely created to poke fun at ourselves (because if you don't laugh you'd cry right??). I consider Ruben's stint , from the circumstances around his hiring to his recent sacking, to be a perfect example of shocking executive level decision making. It made me realise how often the man united executive team had made these kinds of baffling decisions so I thought it would be worth going through them.

These are the ones I can think off on top of my head:

- Hiring Ragnick on a 6 month stint as a manager (not a manager) in preparation for him to take over as sporting director, only to bin him because he correctly identified what the club needs to do to succeed (open heart surgery).

- Paying a 6-figure compensation package to get Ashworth, and wait 6 months of gardening leave (which your co-owner was aware would happen??) only to bin him 3 months later!

- Hiring a new manager to replace a managerial great, giving him a 7 year contract and a grand total of 1 player in the summer to support his rebuild. That 1 player was fellaini who was bought for more money than his release clause which expired a month earlier

- Getting ETH after your worst season ever in the premier league and giving him a total of three signings (eriksen on a free, a back up left back and martinez) before the start of the season having lost 6 first team players ( matic, mata, pogba, lingard, bailly, cavani, telles). Then panicking and paying 90 mil to buy antony (available for 60 mil earlier in the summer) and 65+ mil on a 30 year old casimero.


This thread is actually meant to be light-hearted so apologies if this opens up old wounds!
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Your first two are my top two as well, but also to add to your third point, getting duped by fake lawyers on deadline day to fail to sign Herrera. Woodward's first summer window was car crash.
 
ETH was surprised to get a contract extension at Ibiza instead of getting sack by finishing 8th.

SAF and Gill left in the same summer. To make matters worse all the coaches was also sacked by Moyes to replace with his people. Needless to say disaster follow.

Allow a banker and his mates run the club to the ground for more than a decade.

Didn't have a modern football structure for so long and far behind all other big clubs.
 
astracrazy said:
I'd add Gill leaving added to the chaos.

Gill should have stayed for one extra season to oversee the change, with Woodward shadowing him. I highly doubt Gill would have allowed Moyes to completely sack the whole backroom staff if I'm honest.

Over one summer, we lost our CEO, longstanding manager and all the backroom staff. It's hardly surprising it all went to shit.
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This! Moyes sacking the whole backroom staff was the catalyst for all thats happened since. If it ain't broke don't fix it! All he had to do was watch and learn, get everyone to show him the ropes and keep the wheels turning. The fact that the board allowed it to happen shows how incompetent they are.
 
Someone turning up to Bilbao and trying to buy Herrera using physical cash.
The fact LVG clearly just pulled the plug out of the fax machine and Real bought the lie that it broke.
Phil Jones ever renewing contract.
Forcing the players, at gun point, onto that bus that paraded around Hong Kong after finishing 15th.

Might be some seasoning on the last one.
 
tomaldinho1 said:
Someone turning up to Bilbao and trying to buy Herrera using physical cash.
The fact LVG clearly just pulled the plug out of the fax machine and Real bought the lie that it broke.
Phil Jones ever renewing contract.
Forcing the players, at gun point, onto that bus that paraded around Hong Kong after finishing 15th.

Might be some seasoning on the last one.
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Had nothing to do with the club
 
Chronologically in "recent" years:

1. Neglecting proper player recruitment/generational change setup (especially in midfield) leading up to SAF's exit.
2. Hiring a complete non-football guy (Woody) as chief executive to effectively replace Gill.
3. Hiring David Moyes mainly due to some kind of romantic fantasy. Should've gone with a proper world class manager - would've made the transition much better.
4. Doing a complete clear-out of backroom staff when Moyes came.
5. Hiring Ole as a permanent manager in the first place, but also keeping him on at least 6 months too long, possibly longer.
6. The Ronaldo transfer
7. Having Rangnick for 6 months only to completely scrap him without listening to his advice.
8. Giving EtH the chance to mess up the club with his awful transfers + keeping him after the FA Cup win.
9. The whole Ashworth saga.
10. Keeping Amorim after the EL disaster and finishing 15th. (hiring him was bad as well, but hard to predict it would go that wrong)

More general points that apply through the whole period: Awful scouting and transfers, overpaying transfers/wages, questionable staff hires, no consistency or transition plans from manager to manager.
 
There are many but surely none beats offering DDG a new contract of £375k after the abomination of a year he had from World Cup 2018 and especially the second half of the 18/19 season. To offer him a new contract at that amount was insane. He was already the highest paid goalie before this I believe and we were only two years on from seeing how bad the Rooney extension aged, yet we did it again.
 
Rangnick as caretaker is genuinely one of the most bizarre. It's also a factor in our pursuit of Amorim too.

You don't hire someone who can only play one really specific way when the squad isn't set up to play that way mid season.
 
Where do you even start over the past decade, you could make a list as long and wide as the wall of China.
 
NZT-One said:
I'd sign every of your points but this one is odd. Can you explain? Aren't Maguire & AWB especially good in a rather deep setup where everything is nice and compact?

The obvious mistake here was buying him for that price. AWB was expensive as well, but not absurdly as Maguire. There were quite a few clubs in those years who probably couldn't believe their good luck with the prices we accepted to pay. I am stiff baffled by the Antony one.
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The mistake with Maguire and AWB (and most of the Ole transfers, Ronaldo perhaps the most glaring example) was that they weren't remotely suitable to the sort of front-foot, pressing-style he (allegedly) wanted to move towards.

We spent three summers constructing a squad largely unsuited to the style we apparently wanted to play.

Ten Hag quickly reverted to the "Ole-ball" style when he arrived for that exact reason.
 
Binning off Dan Ashworth so soon after all the hassle it took to bring him in which has been mentioned a few times in this thread already

Hiring Ralf Rangnick as interim manager with the intention for him to stay on as some form of consultant once the season ends only to bin him weeks after the season ends (also mentioned in this thread).

The signing of Bebe and basically the fact that Fergie had no idea who he was. I think he was signed on the recommendation of Carlos Queiroz?

The kit swap at half time in a league match during the 90's. I think it was at Southampton?

The signing of DVB. I remember the hype when we first signed him. Everyone raved about it. We signed him and subbed him late on for his debut in which he scored. It was looking good. Then the guy was barely used. Seriously what was the point of signing him for such a huge fee only to barely get used? I had a similar opinion of Lindelof and Fred when they first signed too. They weren't used much at all during their first seasons but they at least went on to become regular starters. That never happened at all for DVB.

The decision to sell De Gea to Madrid in year 2016-2017 whatever year it was. The decision wasn't baffling as the player clearly wanted to move but the incident it led to was baffling. What was it, something about broken fax machines? The transfer window then closed before anything was final.

There's the whole fiasco about Ander Herrera in the summer of 2013 where three men were disguised as Manchester United employees turning up to the Bilbao offices. Surely something leaked from United's end that led to that baffling incident.

The signing of Zoran Tosic because I'm sure that was only agreed to get Adem Ljajic to join us. In the end Ljajic ended up not joining us so we basically signed Tosic for no reason. I could be wrong on this story though.

The hiring and sacking of Ruben Amorim. The decisions themselves aren't so baffling as I believe he wasn't the right manager for us in the end after talking a good game at the beginning of his tenure. However, United wanted a manager with a system right? Watch our next manager be completely different when it comes to style of plays and tactics. It really is no different from going to Moyes to LVG to Jose to Ole to ETH to Amorim. Every single one of these managers are completely different. It means all the players these managers signed for their specific systems and styles are basically useless to the other managers. There's no plan at all. If there's any kind of consistency then Glasner will be our next manager (I believe he's not the right choice either).

Moyes fixation on Cesc Fabregas. The guy clearly didn't want to come to us yet Moyes spent the entire summer trying to get United to sign him. I still believe if Moyes wasn't so stupid, he would've been a solid manager for us. His decision to get rid of the United coaching staff when Fergie advised him not to do so was baffling too. Not to mention the banning of chips (was it chips?) in the canteen. Disgraceful.

Fergie's decision to field about 8-9 defenders against Arsenal in the FA Cup. It ended up being a genius move but I remember thinking wtf when I saw the starting lining up before the game. To this day I still believe it was a baffling decision. Great decision but still baffling.

Only at United these things can happen. There's so much hilarious stories. The history (good, bad and the hilariously bad) is why I fecking love this club
 
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