He started this season playing an 18 year old instead of caving into the pressure to replace Gini
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Not to mention our title winning team had Gomez in CB before he got injured on England duty and Curtis Jones
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Mind the 18 year old was putting in some mighty impressive performances…
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And to follow up on the overall discussion…
Jones is growing into the side, Elliot will return, Konate looks VERY promising, Gomez is still a lad, Jota is under 25 - how old are Robbo and Tsimikas? I’ve lost count of the talented young keepers behind Alison and Kelleher so there will be option there.
That being said, the side will need more youth injected over the next few years, but it is not creaking and aging out the way Barca and Real have.
I would add that I think Klopp and Edwards greatest strength in the transfer market is their willingness to pass on B and C options that are too risky or not good fits. They understand that spending money on the wrong player is far worse for the club than not spending money. That strength is what allows them to hit on signing again and again with really unheard of consistency.
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If my memory serves me right, all Fergie left from his tenure to the incoming manager was hand written notes with no cohesion, obviously after a night on the regular Red.
In comparison, I am sure Benitez when leaving Chelsea left a dossier on the current team, etc.
What Fergie failed to address in his final years was the 2x CM players, he left the club on its way out, almost as if to secure his own legacy. This issue still hasn’t addressed, most football fans know Man. Utd. Need to buy 2 decent CM and yet they continue to sign attacking players and try and shoe horn them in.
Look at their bad signings - excusing the first 11. Donny Van de Bek, Dalot, Telles, James (sold purely because of favouritism), Sancho at present, Sanchez, Rojo, etc. Then consider the high wage signing or Ronaldo, Cavani, schweinsteiger, etc on free’s.
Its amazing that a percentage of fans criticise our ownership…if I was a United fan I would be praying the direction we have as a club.
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Like Carra often says, it’s not only about signing the right players, but also about how you use them. The ones you takeover and the ones you’re involved in the club’s decision to buy them. I think among fans there’s often an exaggeration about par example Liverpool signing good pros and United signing all the wrong ones, bad apples or whatever. Before all that, they’re not a very well constructed side. I think Klopp would achieve similar results with a good number of those that failed elsewhere. Or that a few of our players would struggle to do the same somewhere else, where it’s not all so well organized like it is here. Of course, there is precise and detailed selection, we did well at picking our targets. But it’s impossible to get it all right. Same with us, we’ll have our own flops and not great successes who will do well elsewhere (be it at a similar top level or below).
Sometimes you have positive starts and then there are no real solutions to take it forward and evolve. Maybe a bit like under Rodgers, who needed to go elsewhere and complete his idea and not only that but do it with someone. Klopp, Pep, Tuchel (and those are the best or the most promising ones today, there are others too) are all coaches who made me think from the start that there’s a clear idea and the excecution of the idea is right. You can have million ideas in todays game and football itself is a game about which you can talk shit for days and still not be able to coach a team properly. I’m sure Lampard had very good ideas, you could see that also. But the whole excecution wasn’t good enough, what does his team do in all phases of the game. But you see it sometimes already in the first training session (like a lot of Chelsea players said about Tuchel) or the first game. Or Klopp. Or Pep. And then it commands higher respect from some maybe more problematic individuals. Not always. But if most of them are normal, then that’s the first step.
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Ferguson left Man Utd as Champions after two decades with a lot of success. As champions, it stands to reason that they had some decent players. Yes, any new manager will want to refresh and shape it, but Ferguson also left them as a financial giant, with a lot of pulling power, so the new manager would be able to go shopping.
I think it is overplayed to say Ferguson left them a shambles.
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I remember them basically going on about how they were going buy about five players and they didn’t. Like every summer mind.
I think the point is that Ferguson wrung one final title from a squad that really had no right to win it, and should have begun the process of renewal a few years earlier. It was clear that what was driving Ferguson at that point was going out on a high.
There were a few decisions that Ferguson made that were surely based around having his last crack at the title and then getting off. Giving in to Rooney’s wage demands. Signing Van Persie.
He announced his retirement very late in the season when the league was already pretty much done. I think he’d have gone the previous season had United won it.
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I get it, he might have had a better eye on the future, but on the other hand, loads of managers have been guilty of emphasizing the future and not taking care of today. Had Ferguson left a young team, not champions, but with some clear potential, a new man might not have fancied them, and perhaps he would have ripped it up for his own team anyway?
Ferguson left them as champions. They obviously had some good players for the new man to inherit. But the biggest thing he did to set up his successor was to hand over a financial behemoth with a lot of pulling power.
It has been a joy to see bad decision after bad decision, as their advantage has been squandered!
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Fergussion had been running Manure into the ground long before he left, he had become incompetent. In fact I put the problems Manure have had totally at the feet of Fergusson.
Klopp has a universe or 10 to leave LFC in that sort of state, it’s a ridiculous proposition!
It was probably the worst set of players to have won the PL. Absolute fluke that they won it, helped by others being unusually turd.
Ferguson had basically postponed retirement every year for 3 years just so he could go out as a winner, fuck what he then left for his successor.
United’s first team by minutes played (subject to providing a 4-4-2 formation) 12/13:
De Gea (21)
Rafael (21) Ferdinand (33) Evans (24) Evra (31)
Valencia (26) Carrick (30) Cleverley (22) Kagawa (23)
Rooney (26) Van Persie (28)
Back ups that also got game time in the league:
Lindegaard (28), Vidic (30), Young (26), Jones (20), Anderson (24), Giggs, (38), Smalling (22), Scholes (37), Welbeck (21), Chicharito (24), Nani (25), Fletcher (28), Buttner (23), Powell (18)
Ages in brackets.
Van Persie had an unbelievable season and that’s basically what won it for them. Apart from him they were dogshit
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Thanks for the deeper analysis. Yes he wanted to leave on a high note. And yes, definitely that’s a poor team for champions. Still, there were some good players in there for the new man to take on, as well as some players he would want to discard, obviously, but confident that he would have a hefty budget to build his own team, such was the financial juggernaut left behind.
Two decades with lots of success and a culture of winning or competing at the top. Left them as Champions. Some good players for the new man. Some dross too. And a hefty budget to rebuild in your own image and style.
Not sure what he should have done different. Maybe invested more in youth at the end? But what’s to say the new man would fancy them? So he took care of the business in hand, won the league, and retired.
Since then it has been a sequence of bad decisions, on and off the pitch, against the backdrop of leveraged owners who are hollowing them out from within. They have largely been able to disguise the danger they are in as a club, but unless they start getting it right, and quickly, I think it could get very ugly for them.
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The thing is, the core of that squad aged 26 or under was awful.
De Gea, Rafael, Evans, Smalling, Jones, Buttner, Valencia, Cleverley, Anderson, Young, Welbeck, Chicharito, Nani, Powell.
Rooney was 26 and already on the decline. Despite that his regular flirtations with City had earned him a ridiculous contract at a stage when his on-field contributions were only going to diminish. It meant Van Persie came in, 2 years older, on similarly inflated terms, only for him to decline even faster. Giggs, Scholes, Carrick, Ferdinand, Vidic, Evra, Fletcher, Kagawa, Welbeck, Anderson, Zaha, Buttner…they’d all be gone within two years.
In 13/14 United finished 7th, out of Europe, with 25 fewer points and only Giggs having left, and Fellaini and Mata brought in. Van Persie, who had scored 26 league goals the previous year, scored 12.
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All the more reason to make sure we make a couple of big signings this summer ( midfield and forward) so we are ultimately prepared for life after Hendo, Millie, Bobby and Mo.
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Someone at The Athletic might have to look for a new job now.
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Well IMHO thought Ronaldo should have been send-off. I was shouting it on the top of my longs in my local O’Casyes and something about Taylor no-ball too, perhaps they have picked that up. 
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This guy was and is a joke of a player!!! 