It’s pretty hard to believe they’ve been in the QFs of the CL twice in the last decade
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They could easily finish 16th in this league and even potentially 17th if Wolves have a run. 16th considering those teams below is awful and 17th would be comedic.
All well and good saying throw your eggs into one basket but it rarely works like that. Klopp sort of did it in his first half season but even then he was going on the league cup front and also in a much harder Europa League.
And he still finished 8th.
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They also won two League Cups, two FA Cups and Europa League in that period, which makes me green with envy as Liverpool once went with one League Cup in twelve seasons - and I’m convinced that some of those Liverpool sides that went trophyless would have wiped the floor with their cup winners.
I half expected them to win FA Cup this season, too, seeing how a lot of big guns went out early, so now I fully expect them to stumble their way to Europa League, the devil’s club.
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I think you give them too much credit. This Utd is utter shite. They are demonstrably an absolute car crash of a team.
They may actually have, on balance, better individual talents than the other sides (even that is incredibly contested), but the other teams are just that, actual teams.
Every week Utd look like they just met in the local Spoons’ carpark, and for some fucking insane albeit truly wonderful reason, it’s actually getting worse.
GGMU
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Around this time last year, I thought “this is the worst Man United side I’ve seen in my life”. Now, I think that side would somehow find a way to beat their current iteration - Liverpool have exactly one win in five games against those two sides and that truly grinds my gears and makes me tear my hair out.
Make no mistake, I’m thankful for every bit of success that Liverpool can deliver and for every bit of schadenfreude I can feel due to Man United’s plight. It’s just that I never feel confident that lot would self-implode when I expect them to.
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18th would be priceless and produce a baby boom around Merseyside.
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Looking at the dire straits of the bottom 3, that’s not going to happen, at least this season.
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How beautiful would it be if one day Rashford scores the goal that sends them down?
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A latter day Denis Law?
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Not going to happen anytime soon. Some clubs are too big to fail.
circa Leeds United, Newcastle, West Ham
Not big enough.
Leeds were Champions League semi finalists i think 1 or 2 seasons before their relegation. They were at the time a lot bigger than many people remember
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Not big enough now.
United are too big a club to be allowed to be relegated.
Yes, but they imploded financially because they spent more than they could afford. Utd aren’t going broke, they are just restricted temporarily in what more they can spend because of FFP.
Their growth was built on a model of spending money that was borrowed against future earnings with financial models that did not consider the potential of missing out on the CL. This was not a case where in people only realized in retrospect that it was a house of cards, their strategy was pretty well known even before it blew it up and the entire football world gave it a
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But they had got to that level by borrowing against their own future revenues, creating a financial timebomb for themselves. It was no surprise when they collapsed.
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And Spurs made a final. Knock out football/favourable draws can churn out some anomalies
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Years ago I read Peter Ridsdale’s book. Absolutely fascinating, both as a book and as a situation. To his credit, he attempted to put out an unvarnished version of what happened so there was some great hindsight, but at the same time despite the utter collapse he was unable to identify some of the fallacies that had governed that board’s thinking. There was sort of a layer of candour sitting atop a foundation of narcissistic self-deception.
The fallacy that was most powerful was the one that Leeds was just too big of a club not to be in the Premier League.
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Problem with relegation is you have to be quite poor to be caught up in it. If one of the promoted clubs had a decent season (Perhaps Leeds or Sheffield Utd who have yo-yo’ed for a period) then one of the big sides having an awful season could be dragged in.
The seasons when Newcastle and Villa went down wouldn’t currently happen.
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