Also it’s quite a reach to say he had to replace them all when half of them barely played any football for us for a couple of season prior to ETH arriving. It’s really only Pogba, Ronaldo and DDG who had a meaningful role, and he was allowed to replace them both with very expensive signings of his choice (letting Ronaldo and DDG go being his decisions too).
I would not pretend that losing Bailly, Telles, Jones and Lingard was some major inconvenience.
And VDB we didn’t even lose, he’s still with us, just not good.
Yeah depends how you look at it really.
"Bailly, Telles, Jones and Lingard are leaving, it's bad because now I need to replace them"
vs
"Bailly, Telles, Jones and Lingard are leaving, it's good because they were not good enough anyway and I can replace them with proper players".
Maybe Ten Hag is just really poor with transfers and he needs someone else to cover that part, what hopefully will happen now under INEOS. I don't think this is the only big problem, but it's certainly one that CAN be solved with the club operating in a different way. He doesn't strike me as someone who will just take players picked by someone else and build a team with those (I was hoping we could get De Zerbi for that role), but I might be totally wrong and I guess we'll see soon enough.
In the summer of 2022 we've lost Pogba, who was a regular for us, and Ronaldo, who made all the fuss about it. The rest of the players are just numbers, not any significant names. In 2023 we got rid of De Gea (100% correct decision), that was a big move, and Fred, what IMO was a mistake but apparently not rated by Ten Hag / not in his plans. Fair enough, it's Eric's team now, he can do whatever he wants, but will be judged on how this works in the end.
Compared to the money spent in the last 2 years, I don't think the "forced departures" were such an inconvenience in all honesty.