What have been your worst predictions and projections for United/players these last 5 years?

[Smithy89]

Sancho is actually pretty good.
The problem is that when we buy players, they join MUFC and they turn to crap.
Darmian was unbelievably good when he first joined, About 2 months in, he turned to crap.
Wan Bissakka was great when he joined. 8 months later, he began to fall off and now is crap.
Miki was fantastic when he joined us. Player of the year in Germany. A few months later, he turned to crap.
Bruno is the latest player who turned to crap. He was arguably our best player for 18 months from the time we bought him, but now many fans want him sold.
I can continue, but you get the point.

The other issue I have is players bought from Dortmund. I've noticed that they have a 100% failure rate when we bring them to MUFC. Kagawa. Miki. Sancho is still in progress.

I thought we had a hell of a player in Darmian after his first few games, same with Miki. It's baffling what we do to players.

 

[Revaulx]

This. The kind of football were were playing in pre season was so good, pass and move kind of.
Then we got a few results against big teams in the league under LvG and I thought that's it, in Neville's words, "the penny has dropped"

Yup - very much so. I still reckon he’d have done a lot better if the recruitment had been half decent, and I don’t blame him alone for its having been so poor.

When we signed Jose I thought, it's going to be ugly but this is it, we're going to compete for trophies.

I really didn’t want Jose partly because once again I expected the recruitment to be bad, but especially because of his Chelsea meltdown. It was really sad to see many on here convinced that he’d be “different this time”, and even that he’d deliberately engineered the meltdown in order to fulfil his “destiny” to manage United.

The first 18 months of his reign, though far from perfect, was actually a lot more enjoyable than I had been expecting.

Ole I was never confident about. Knew it was going to be a disaster sooner or later.

Yeah. My problem with Ole from the start wasn’t that he lacked the potential to be a good manager, but that he’d clearly been appointed for nostalgic and sentimental reasons rather than footballing ones.

I actually felt pretty hopeful at the end of his first full season that he was capable of learning on the job and getting us to go places. Bruno was an inspired signing and he’d got Martial firing once again. The awful start to the following season and the drop off in quality of the football, despite finishing a place higher in the league and actually getting to a final, completely destroyed my faith and while I wasn’t expecting this season’s meltdown, I did think people were getting ridiculously giddy about winning the league.

 

[Revaulx]

This issue of players becoming too heavy has been repeated many times and our fitness coaches have to take the blame here. I would absolutely fire every single fitness coach and replace them (and I don't like firing staff, but they are so woefully bad that they simply can't be re-trained to do their job to good standard).
Lukaku was the worst. He was fat in MUFC. He went to Inter. Inter identified that he was too fat and told him to lose weight...which he did and he became athletic and a top striker. This allowed Inter to sell him to Chelsea for a big fee.

Rooney also suffered. He got too fat, became unfit and his performance fell off a cliff.

Very much this. It’s been going on for years (Anderson ).

In Lukaku’s case I’d also blame Jose, who seemed perfectly happy with his bulk. If I were manager and a player turned up like that for pre-season I’d invent a spurious injury for the benefit of the press and ship him off to a health farm for a few weeks.

Are health farms still a thing? They were big in the 60s and 70s.

 

[kthanksbye]

I thought Pogba would be the new Man United icon after Rooney.

Well, he was an icon indeed, an icon of us being shit.

He was just a con.

 

[pawanraj]

• Thought AWB will finally come good this season... after getting some help on the right flank from Sancho....
• Thought we will have a good season after signing Varane, Sancho and Ronaldo (Still didn't think we'll be challenging for the title, but I hoped for "not out of it by January")
• Genuinely thought Ralf Rangnick will at least steady the ship after coming in...

 

[Neil_Buchanan]

I bet fifty quid that we would win the league at the start of this season and twenty on the day that ole signed as caretaker manager that we would win the champions league.

Was sat in Old Trafford before the Liverpool game this season, I turned to the guy next to me and said ‘we will win this, mark my words’. It was the worst performance I have ever seen.

Used to think Dean Ashton was going to be a brilliant player.

 

[ilrm]

I thought that after you guys signed Ronaldo, Varane and Sancho in one window, you'd win at least one out of the League Cup or FA Cup.

 

[Valencia Shin Crosses]

Probably my faith in Martial after his fantastic 19-20 season. Thought way too many overlooked him because he was genuinely one of the best strikers in the league that year, but sadly he couldn't finish anything at the start of the new season and reverted back to his old self along with the team being in terrible form+ getting injured. I also had too much faith in Ole early on because it looked like at the bare minimum he knew how to set us up to counterattack (and we were brilliant in transition early on in his reign)

 

[GueRed]

I thought Pogba would be a world class player for us.

Having followed him through the youth teams. I thought he was an exceptional talent. When we signed him back from Juventus I was hyped just as much as the next guy. I thought in his prime he'd be driving force in our midfield.

He's been anything but.
Just a massive disappointment. Season after season.

I gave up on him when he downed tools in 2019. Big red flag.
A big flop of a signing.

 

[GueRed]

Used to think Dean Ashton was going to be a brilliant player.

A decent Centre forward tbf. A unit who could play. Shame about the injuries.
Forced to retire at 26.

 

[RedDevilRoshi]

I predicted Dean Henderson would become our new number 1 last season and also become England number 1 going into the Euros last summer. Especially when he was getting rave reviews at Sheffield United the season before and DDG’s form had massively dipped.

In the few games he played it’s safe to say he didn’t fill me with much confidence that this should be our long term number 1 GK going forward.

Now here I am hoping for the club to accept the £40M offer from Newcastle for him.

 

[slored1]

- McTominay was good after Ole's first season and should be our first choice CM
- Rafael should have been a key player and was shocked when LVG let him go
- We didn't need Cavani because we had Martial
- Sanchez will be the solution to our right wing problem

 

[Paul_Scholes18]

I have not had huge confidence in our signings. I thought we would win the title under Mourinho and LVG. Even this season I had optimism.

 

[fergiewherearethou]

I was convinced that with Ole at the wheel we would start winning trophies starting this season, especially with the 3 theoretically great signings that we made. I was so far off...

 

[Tap]

Sancho is actually pretty good.
The problem is that when we buy players, they join MUFC and they turn to crap.
Darmian was unbelievably good when he first joined, About 2 months in, he turned to crap.
Wan Bissakka was great when he joined. 8 months later, he began to fall off and now is crap.
Miki was fantastic when he joined us. Player of the year in Germany. A few months later, he turned to crap.
Bruno is the latest player who turned to crap. He was arguably our best player for 18 months from the time we bought him, but now many fans want him sold.
I can continue, but you get the point.

The other issue I have is players bought from Dortmund. I've noticed that they have a 100% failure rate when we bring them to MUFC. Kagawa. Miki. Sancho is still in progress.

Good observation. Highly talented players come here, have a good start and gradually turn to shit. That’s why new signings are no longer exciting. It’s only a matter of time before they start deteriorating.

If a young Ronaldo were to play for us now, there is no way he would have developed into the world class player he is now.

 

[golden_blunder]

I honestly thought we’d challenge for the league this season after adding Varane and Ronaldo. Nope

 

[Tallis]

- DVB would be a good signing for the team (still could be)

- Jonathan Spector would be a centre half for many years to come

- That’s about it I think.

 

[DeGea’sFeet]

I can't quite believe we're the predicament we're in and if you'd told the me of 5 years ago that United would be reaching a shocking nadir in 2022, I don't think I would have believed it.

My worst projection by far was thinking: Shaw, Pogba and Martial would form a super flank for us. How that tanked... boy did it tank - visions of a flank to rival Cole, Pires, Henry turned into a steaming, giant turd.

Another is probably one a lot of us share in believing the acquisitions of: Sancho, Varane and Ronaldo allied to what was already here would be the beginning of our ascendancy to a real force in football again...

Finally, Ralf... I believed he would finally get us coached and up to speed after so many years of neglect, but nope, somehow he's exposed himself as inflexible at the least, and out of touch at worst. Our disgraceful players, accepted, it's still not what I expected from Rangnick.

So what are yours? Players, concepts, systems managers, league placements or trophies, what has gone horribly, horribly awry from what you believed would happen?

Pretty much the same as you regarding Martial, Shaw and Pogba, would also add Rashford to that now. Thought Martial would become world class, hasn’t probably due to bad attitude and bad coaching.

Rangnick I’ll give a pass… he was asked to forge a razor sharp sword but instead of steel he had a squad full of damp rotten wood.