There is no light at the end of the tunnel

[jamesjimmybyrondean]

I honestly feel that bringing in Pochettino under this current club structure will continue the cycle and we will end up sacking him. We actually need a long term plan. Ole has that but he's not the man to implement it.

Bringing in another manager means we're resetting our plan once again and if at all a reset should happen I want it to be because we have a DOF with the new plan not another manager that could be sacked after a season. Ralf Ragnick is the best option as far as I'm concerned. He's a coach and a DOF. He's preferred style of play is exactly what we want and he has proven based on his past that he can carry out a rebuild. Best thing is to let him be interim coach for a season then he moves over to DOF and appoints a manager of his choice

The transition from Ole to Ralf as interim manager will be a bit smooth because they both have similar philosophies except one doesn't know how to carry it out. Ralf Ragnick when he becomes DOF will appoint a manager to carry out his philosophy which the club would have been a bit used to by then. This is when I will start to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

 

[dev1l]

We shall see. What I will say if we're going down the regular sacking route is that I'll be showing no patience, I'm expecting results straight away or get the next guy in. This is what people seem to want.

Knee jerkers. This place is full of them. Sad lot...their only aspiration is seeing the manager getting sacked.
Woody will gladly oblige...as long as his job is safe anyway.
We clearly didn't learn our lesson - now Woody is doing a Watford to appease the unpatience of a section of the online fans, some of which would not be posting in a year from now.
Short termism at its best

 

[EireRed_GS]

I think if United want to see any light any time soon, its not a new manager, its a solid CM we need to bring in.

The spine of our team is absolute rubbish/ near non existent. DeGea & Maguire... thats it. We can spend all the money on defence that we want, but when the MF is so bad, them defenders are just going to get put under pressure an awful lot more each game, and eventually start making mistakes and conceding at some point. This will happen to even the best of defences. We've seen it almost every game this season. CM is where the control of the games comes from. You cant drive a car with no engine.

If we do that, and maybe bring in a decent FW / RW there will be a significant improvement. But I cant see that happening any time soon though after the nonsense Ed has been spouting about its so hard to get deals done in a window (Real brought in no less than 8 in the last window )..

Which brings us back to the obvious main underlying issue. Woodward. The Glazers. We all know the general process and structure we need to go by to get back on track, but with these asset stripping leeches in charge. Its very unlikely to happen.

 

[devilish]

I lost hope the moment Woody said that it will be very hard for us to sign more then 3 signings per summer window. We won't be able to turn things around with such low turnover

 

[mu4c_20le]

Sounds like depression talking, OP. There's plenty to be optimistic about, the young players are getting experience and the likes of Rashford and Martial are learning the responsibility of being senior players and developing consistency. Even the recruiting department seems to have learend their lesson from their previous scatter gun approach, and are now operating with a more clear, coherent strategy that hopefully carries on to the next and future managers.

 

[sect2k]

It's all fine margins. Two stupidly thrown away leads in a week. If we hadn't we'd be 5th, 4 of top 4 and closing in on it with a great run of form.

Its just beyond frustrating at this stage. The villa draw was the last 5 years in a nutshell

It's not fine margins unfortunately, the football on display is awful, we clearly lack proper coaching and if Ole can't see that and rectify the situation, then he is out of his depth.

 

[Roboc7]

Knee jerkers. This place is full of them. Sad lot...their only aspiration is seeing the manager getting sacked.
Woody will gladly oblige...as long as his job is safe anyway.
We clearly didn't learn our lesson - now Woody is doing a Watford to appease the unpatience of a section of the online fans, some of which would not be posting in a year from now.
Short termism at its best

It was short term thinking by appointing a caretaker after some good results that has got us in this mess. If they’d stuck to their original idea of a proper recruitment process and a DOF that would of been some evidence of long term planning.

 

[Roboc7]

I still doubt he will be sacked. If he is then I won't be throwing any toys out of the pram, I'll just accept that's the way we're working and adjust my expectations of the new man accordingly. No semblance of any long term plan, just instant results or face the sack.

Either results get better or he gets sacked, this is a football club it’s what has to be done.

All they would be doing is correcting another bad decision, most likely they’ll make another one and another one but there isn’t a scenario where they blindly allow a total mess to continue.

 

[Valuedrug]

Unfortunately, I mostly agree with what you’re saying. Management only considers United a vehicle for making money for the Glazers.

It’s predatory commercialism run rampant, and having to negotiate the discrepancy between external expectations of United as a major club and the insufficient internal commitment to realising those expectations is draining the soul of players and managers. Must be such a relief to them when they go somewhere else, and once again experience a proper working environment. Just like at Lukaku and Smalling. Good for them.

Maybe some day we’ll luck out with a manager who can bridge this gap somehow. It sure isn’t Ole though. Give him enough time, and he’ll having us competing for the Championship I fear.

 

[Gandalf Greyhame]

Whilst I agree with parts of your post, I feel it does need a positive retort since a lot of the posters so far have quite frankly made me cringe, a lot.

You say our goal is top 4 and financial stability in a negative sense, but is that really a bad goal given the competitiveness of our league, and how important it is to have a financially successful club? With the money that has been pumped into the PL this century, it was only a matter of time before teams started flexing some financial muscle and making the league more interesting. Also, I don’t think we have ever had our start of season objectives officially announced, but I’d wager that the long term goals do involves trophies.

You say there is no vision to our recruitment, yet this past summer is the most clear it’s ever been. Young, British players that have massive potential, and one of them currently being tried out as our captain.

You say that when we “stumble across the right manager we won’t be giving them the right tools for the job” which is completely ignorant of one of the purposes of a manager, which is to get the most out of the squad he inherits, and improve them. I have no hesitation that there are several managers out there who would get more out of our current squad.

You say that Leicester and Chelsea have better recruitment visions than us which is plain false. Go and have a look at Chelsea signings over the last few seasons, they’ve had their fair share of flops and I don’t think Leicester have done anything that makes them any sort of strategic planning masterminds, rather they are benefitting from having a coach who knows how to get the best of the players at his disposal. That being said, their signing of Tielemans was one of the best pieces of business of any team in the league.

And this is a hard one to swallow, but you compare our decline to Liverpool and say there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, in the same sentence. The same Liverpool team who hold the champions league, are running away with the premier league, playing some of the best football in Europe and with no immediate sense that they are going to let up.

So my question to you is, how long is your tunnel? Because it’s pretty reasonable to expect us to get it right again one day, and to be honest there’s a part of me that thinks if we do take longer than expected to get back to the top, then at least we’ll be able to get rid of some overly negative fans for a while

Aiming for top four by itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, no. However, even that would require some sort of consistent vision as to whom you appoint in the hot seat, whom you recruit to wear the shirt and how your squad and the football they play should look like in general. It's not the choice of vision, it's the incompetence to realise any vision at all.

Over the last six years, we've failed financially (2nd highest spend after City), we've failed in the kind of football we traditionally play ( LVG, Mourinho ), we've failed at recruitment philosophies ( Sanchez, Di Maria), we've failed at managerial decisions (sacking LVG after FA cup, giving Mou a contract and then not backing him, hiring Ole before season was over), we've failed at squad management (LWs galore, no one on the right; ignored defence when buying forwards, ignored forwards when buying defenders; not replaced Herrera, Fellaini or Matic), and we've failed at learning from our mistakes. The only things we've succeeded at is making every top player seem like a shadow of themselves once they join us.

Each one of them is a grave offence, and should have prompted changes at the highest level. None of them did. The people who said said they wanted to sign Fabregas and Bale and ended up overpaying for Fellaini and Mata are still in charge. We may aim for anything we want - we're not competent enough to get there.

We're already 7 years without a title, and don't look like we're going to win one in the next couple of seasons at least. That's a pretty long tunnel we've been through already. Your temporal attention must be way longer than mine, especially since you use use Liverpool to prove your point about eventual success when they've gone 29 years without a title. Reminder.

 

[BusterGonads]

As unpalatable as it might be, I am also thinking that the only way to break this cycle is for the Saudis to buy out the Glazers, and sweep out the current regime, and restructure the whole club with 'best of class' appointments....Very much like City have done...

Saudi's ain't coming in for Utd. I'll work in $ as Utd's share price is in $. Upwards of $5B is required if 'best in class' is to be achieved. $3-4B for outright purchase (at current prices), more if the Glazers demand it and at least $2B for investment in staff, team and ground

They've just sold a very small piece of their crown jewel (ARAMCO) to fund the CP's Vision 2030 project to diversify the Saudi economy. They were looking for $25B and couldn't get anywhere near that. Whatever they do get isn't going on Utd. Now that Amazon have entered the PL market I reckon Jeff B might be your best bet. He is one of the very few that could squander a few billion without a second thought, especially if it drives his Amazon product