Aaron Wan-Bissaka | Signs a 7-year contract with West Ham

He’s has some good games recently but I’m sure after a few bad ones it will all change again.

The simple fact is he wasn’t good enough to be given a new contract, if we didn’t sell him we’d have either lost him for nothing or had to renew his contract and then we’d have stuck with him.

There’s nothing wrong with selling likes of AWB and Mctominay the issue is not being able to get rid of the likes of Casemiro to significantly invest in new players.
 
Ekeke said:
A reminder that he came in and replaced Ashley Young as our rightback, the same summer that Maguire came in to improve on the Smalling and Lindelof CB partnership...

In 18/19 with Lindelof and Smalling at CB with Jones as cover and Bailly mostly injured and Ashley Young as our rightback we had the 11th best defensive record in the league

In 19/20 we had the 3rd best defensive record conceding 1 more goal than City in 2nd... We went from 54 to 36 in 38 games

The following season we came 3rd in the premier league

The season after that we came 2nd in the premier league

2 seasons later we came 3rd in the premier league again

You may never have liked him, but those are the facts. We were much better after he signed and was playing weekly and we were miles better than we are now. The only player who is playing well enough this season that he'd have fit into those 2nd and 3rd place finishing Utd teams is Amad. Not our defenders.
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We played differently though. I like AWB, I always did and I think, he got treated a bit harshly at times, same as Maguire. But at the end of the day, he wasn't the right player for how we aspired to play. And I respect the decision to let him. The shameful part is aspiring this way of playing yet being able to get closer to that for such a long time.
 
We did right selling him, just too low, which has been a problem for us.

He is a quality player, just doesn't fit on what we expect from a fullback. Maybe playing with less pressure also helps.
 
NZT-One said:
We played differently though. I like AWB, I always did and I think, he got treated a bit harshly at times, same as Maguire. But at the end of the day, he wasn't the right player for how we aspired to play. And I respect the decision to let him. The shameful part is aspiring this way of playing yet being able to get closer to that for such a long time.
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He wasnt the right player for pushing on from 2nd and 3rd place finishes. Thats a mile from any aspirations we have now
 
Think of the players we have signed in the last five years, for the fees we signed them for, and then look at some of the alternatives in that period and what they went for:

Maguire: 80m
Wan-Bissaka: 50m
Antony: 82m
Sancho: 73m
Casemiro: 60m
Fernandes: 47m
van de Beek: 35m
Amad: 19m
Varane: 34m
Ronaldo: 12m
Malacia: 13m
Martinez: 46m
Mount: 55m
Onana: 43m
Hojlund: 64m
Zirkzee: 36m
Yoro: 52m
De Ligt: 38m
Mazxroui: 12m
Ugarte: 42m

Total: 893m, and this doesn't include lots of little transfers. Of that I would categorise, Bruno, Amad, Varane, Martinez, Yoro, De Ligt, Ugarte, and Mazroui as transfers that I wouldn't really question, or would consider a success. Which is 290m of the 893. Hence the other 603m are on transfers that were either an outright failure, only a very limited success in the short term, or in a hazy TBD status. That equates to 121 per season for the last five seasons. Shocking, absolutely shocking.

Meanwhile, off the top of my head, all these players have moved for reasonable fees in the last five years and done very well....they were also all players that everyone were aware of: Bruno Guimaraes (40m), Matheus Cunha (44m), Gordon (60m), Palmer (42m), Caicedo (5m to Brighton), Haaland (51m), Jota (45m), Gakpo (42m), Gravenberch (33m), Konate (36m), Nunes (42m), Isak (63m), Rogers (8m), Luiz (42m), Onana (49m), Mac Allister (35m), Kluivert (10m), Pedro (30m), Wharton (22m), Murillo (15m), Porro (34m), Kudus (32m), Vicario (17m), van de Ven (34.5m), Lavia (10.5m to Southampton), Pope (10m), Palhinha (20m), Alvarez (14m), Akanji (15m), Estupinan (15m)
 
Ekeke said:
He wasnt the right player for pushing on from 2nd and 3rd place finishes. Thats a mile from any aspirations we have now
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I agree. But I think, there are two important factors in play here.

We knew that the style of play we had wasn't sustainable, even back then. The finishes you listed, when you looked at underlying numbers they all indicate that our opponents were quite a bit more productive than we were. So a style update was undoubtedly necessary, probably even with the ambition of not getting left behind. AWB had some obvious limitations, we had opponents regularly targetting him or his weakness on the ball and while I am the first one for noting that he actually did improve that aspect, he never looked like he would find a level that was beyond decent-to-good. In such a situation, I can totally understand from a squad building perspective to look to replace that player with one who fits the skillset better.

We had Dalot delivering decent performances during this time. I am not a fan of him, find some of the praise for him pretty hollow but I think we all can agree on him looking more like a modern footballer than AWB. Defensively, I think, AWB is better but only in certain aspects and in total, it probably is a close one. But on the ball Dalot looked way more comfortable and given that AND the point from before, it made sense to generate funds to invest in the team.

Again, I like AWB and prefered seeing him over Dalot more often than not but I also acknowledge his limitations and for a WB role, he'd probably even more unsuited than the other fullbacks we have. Which isn't even a dig at AWB because even the available ones all are terribly equipped for such a role. We got the check for not valueing attack contributions from these areas for years, for god knows why.

(Just a side note, I know it doesn't apply to you specifically: I think, some fans fall for a mistake in seeing players only in one dimension, with this dimension being a certain extent of quality, so a player is either good or bad. Thats not going to cut it. Players have specific skillsets and traits and they function differently on the pitch relative to their roles, their objectives, the team around them. There is most likely a certain set of condition to make every professional football player look like a really good player but creating a successful and functional team means you(the manager) has to find the right balance of not providing the ideal environment for everybody but close enough to it for as much of the available players as possible. We really shouldn't re-consider moving away from Maguire because he looks really good in games where we play compact and rather deep and reserved because thats not how we want to play. We shouldn't look at the Arsenal or City Cup game and use the performances of Bruno (or back then Amrabat) to say they can be so good in CM so they have to play there, when such games are outliers for us. Or look at "how well McTominay is doing for Napoli". To create such environments means we can't provide environments for others to flourish. This is why squad planning is so important and one of the main reasons the situation these days looks as dire as it does. With Amorim, we kind of bought into a system which won't create an environment for some of our players, now we have to find ways to add players that could flourish. But looking back to old players who do well in their new teams is a waste of time.)
 
hellhunter said:
Was absolutely correct to sell him. Still think be might have made a better RWB than Mazraoui. But it seems like his RWB days are over anyway
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Nothing at all suggested AWB would've made a good RWB, he was always caught out of position and had a nosebleed each time he took the ball over the halfway line.
 
pascell said:
Nothing at all suggested AWB would've made a good RWB, he was always caught out of position and had a nosebleed each time he took the ball over the halfway line.
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Sounds perfect for us!

He wouldn't have produced much, but he would've run a lot and provided width. Ultimately not good enough of course
 
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Solius said:
I think a lot of people forget or don’t realise how difficult it is to play for Utd. The pressure is 10x greater at all times. The spotlight is constantly on every single player.

Teams like Brighton/Brentford/Bournemouth are currently better than us but there is way less pressure playing for them. Despite those teams being above us in the table, they are still able to potentially lose 2 - 3 games in a row and have hardly anyone care or notice. If you saw West Ham lost 3 - 0 for example you’d barely bat an eye. If that happens to us with AWB in our team it’s an absolute nightmare and everything he did is analysed to the Nth degree.
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I agree
 
hellhunter said:
Sounds perfect for us!

He wouldn't have produced much, but he would've run a lot and provided width. Ultimately not good enough of course
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Does he run a lot? The lanky running style plays against him here as it looks visually unconvincing but he never was an energetic runner (like Dalot or Malacia for example). He has a good burst of pace that he usually uses in order to make a recovery tackle and he's obviously much faster than someone like Mazraoui but I'm not sure if he's suited for the role where he needs to run a lot. I also wouldn't call him hard-working even though he was nowhere near our worst offenders work-rate wise (but that says more about them than about him).
 
Ekeke said:
Well for 1 he played there. ETH used wingbacks for a few games and he surprised people by doing quite well at RWB. The main thing is he's quite fast and that allowed him to carry the ball up the line quite well

https://www.whoscored.com/matches/1...-league-2021-2022-tottenham-manchester-united
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That game was under Ole and you can see from his heatmap he barely got forward in comparison with Shaw on the left. (link). Offhand I can't think of any games we played with a back 3 under ETH.
 
Are we crying over Wan-Bissaka? I remember most were very happy when he left. So was I.
Good player, but not a good fit.

Seeing the revisionism is odd, thankfully it isn't at the delusional stage of McTominay yet.
 
quadrant said:
That game was under Ole and you can see from his heatmap he barely got forward in comparison with Shaw on the left. (link). Offhand I can't think of any games we played with a back 3 under ETH.
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We played 3 that season, 2 were defeats though. May have been ole rather than eth
 
Ekeke said:
We played 3 that season, 2 were defeats though. May have been ole rather than eth
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I know we played it vs City in the next game, but we ditched the formation at half time when we were 2-0 down. Which was the 3rd game?
 
quadrant said:
I know we played it vs City in the next game, but we ditched the formation at half time when we were 2-0 down. Which was the 3rd game?
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Think it was Liverpool or another big game where we got beat. Went through to find the one I linked and there were 2 matches against "rivals" where we had 3 at the back and wingbacks and lost
 
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