Are the players not good enough or not professional enough?

I think the players are trying their best in this new system which they have not internalised yet. Everything is still being processed and is not instinctive. Something like driving a car in a country where the steering wheel is on the other side. As long as the effort is being put in, the players should be given a chance to grow into this system.
 
Jacob said:
List of players good enough;

Yoro, De Ligt, Mazroui, Ugarte, Mainoo, Amad, Bruno.

The rest ate not. Need new winbacks, attacking midfielders and strikers. People with track records of scoring.
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I'm not so sure. Most of them are mid table players.

Oh wait......
 
They are weak mentally.

Not good enough is relative as it depends what you're expecting of them. They aren't good enough to win the league but they are good enough to be higher than 13th.

But, said it in another thread, they go through the same patterns. They make a mistake in a game and instead of shaking it off, it becomes an ongoing weakness that becomes a theme in every game, and grows into something terminal.

They go a goal or two down amd start complaining about everything, acting like they feel victimised, panicking, losing their discipline. They go 2 goals up and stop concentrating and then start panicking.

There's no situation in a game where you'd trust them as a group to manage it well mentally. Teams with far worse players deal with these things better.

I guess part of it is lack of professionalism but if that isn't there it's mainly on the club and the management because anyone not at the right level professionally shouldn't be playing in games.
 
I've been a supporter since the 70's and the one thing I have heard/read/seen from past managers and players is pressure of playing for and at UTD.

I've heard Robson say big known players being physically sick before UTD home games because it was like something they hadn't seen before. I've heard other players say how really good players just bowed under the pressure and they could tell after the first couple of matches if they would succeed or fail here.

Amorim said something a few times now about players forgetting to stay calm after going a goal down and trying to score two before scoring one. How the crowd and players get nervous at certain times and during certain plays.

Pressure weighing on players makes them tired quicker, maybe it's the reason for injuries too.

Not saying it's the only thing but it's way underestimated.
 
An exampe of our mentality was Dalot after the City game going on about the team and him being more emotionally in control than before.

It annoyed me as soon as I saw it becuase firstly, what a load of bollocks. We conceded a set piece goal and then won because of a combination of one person's individual performance and the opposition completely cocking up. Blining yourself to that instead of thinking "we need to do better than this" is not a good sign.

Also, to even come out and basically say "yeah we're really shite at managing games emotionally but we were ok in this one"...yeah just tell every single one of your opponents what a panicking fool you and your team mates usually are. Bravo.

The mentality of this team gets eaten for breakfast by any serious opponent, and that's before you factor in if they're more disciplined, fitter, more professional etc...but I think generally serious players are those things, because they are motivated to be. I don't have a clue if our players try or want to be but too many sink as soon as the first pressure wave hits. Whether that's down to how they're managed or them as individuals, it is what happens.
 
I just saw that we also lost to Bournemouth 0:3 last year. What an absolute spineless group of players. No excuses, they are just crap.
 
Not good enough. They can't come up with a useful corner or free kick routine. Can't even deliver the ball
 
Both.

And I’d add that this team is mentally broken. They’re crushed by the pressure and malaise surrounding Manchester United. When teams are organised and get in their faces pressing every blade or grass, they feel that familiar feeling of failure and crumble.

So yeah, the team isn’t good enough, a few here and there aren’t professional enough and they’re also a very fragile and broken bunch.
 
Which of these guys walk into Liverpool or Arsenal starting 11?
Garnacho
Mainoo
Eriksen
Casemiro
Rashford
Antony
Dalot

Then we have the perma sick notes:
Mount
Shaw

We have an average squad with maybe a handful you can build a team around. Also terribly coached for the last few years and the media pressure adds to it all.

People speak of a cultural reset but that only starts by bringing in new players who are driven to succeed at this club.
The recruitment now more than ever needs to be on point. Look at the energy, skill and sheer determination of Amad. We need a bunch of those in the next few windows and only then (with a good pre-season under their belts) will we see any meaningful change.
 
Mentality and professionalism is part of being good. Poor attitude equals poor player.
 
Skills said:
The whole thing around attributing everything to players professionalism is specific to the Man Utd fanbase. Manchester United's fanbase hate footballers - it's a weird thing, but the collective fanbase just doesn't like footballers.

I don't believe other clubs have more or less professional players than us, but as a club we fester a terrible environment around them. We've seldom made any effort whatsoever in the last 10 years since Fergies' retired to protect our players - we've thrown them to the wolves at any given opportunity.
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Look, everyone. Skills is here to explain why we're all, once again, a big bunch of bastards.
 
The majority of them are players who have experienced the bad of the club. So when new ones arrived, instead of them changing the environment, the environment change them. If it was to me I'd implement the 69 rule. When you want to change the overall culture and loser mentality, you need at least 69% new players. Therefore they make up the majority of the squad and the "broken" players are the ones who have to adapt to the group majority, even if they're old they no longer own the house.
 
tenpoless said:
Therefore they make up the majority of the squad and the "broken" players are the ones who have to adapt to the group majority, even if they're old they no longer own the house.
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This is just a fancy way of saying 'we need a cultural reset'.
Damn straight we do.
At my workplace, we once had an awfully lazy (and a bit incompetent) worker in my team.
I work in a small team but his attitude got the best of me and others in the team as it allowed standards to fall massively.
He got fired, then our productivity as a team tripled.

The cultural malaise has been embedded for a long time here.
That means out with the old (Shaw, Rashford, Lindelof, Dalot and even Bruno, because of his weak mentality).
That also means out with the wasters and sicknotes (Mount, Antony, Malacia and Zirkzee).

I'd keep Casemiro around because he's not a bottler.

Of course this can't be all done in one window.

This will take time.

And if the re-build fails, we are probably doomed to mediocrity for another 5 years, but we have to seriously ditch the 'losers'.
 
Those that are good enough are not professional enough, and those that are professional are not good enough.
 
Actually, most of squads need rebuild due to bad recruitment and retention. Even young stars like Mainoo and Garnacho, they don't perform good enough to be starting XI almost every matches. To be honest, I'm not sure none of Mainoo, Garnacho, Hojlund and even Yoro will be really great enough long term. Each of them lack something that may or maynot be improved.
Garnacho & Hojlund are easy to loose ball, lack technical competency at highest level and lack aggressive fighting.
Mainoo is slow, can't control tempo and lack intensity, aggressive fighting.
Yoro is like Mainoo in term of lacking intensity and aggressive fighting .
 
I think it is a combination of lack of talent, bad decision making, bad finishing and failure to perform under pressure.
How do their agents manage to get them such lucrative contracts?
 
What bothers me the most is that seems like none of our players are good at crossing.

Crossing is a simply skill that requires little talent but just repeated practices. Our Class of 92 (Beckham, Giggs, scholes, nevills, butt) and the academy players afterwards (Oshea, brown, fletcher, cleverley) were ALL good crossers despite some of them may not be the most talented player.

The fact that most of our players (including bruno!) being poor crossers show that our players have been unpracticed in crossing the ball, which in turn is related to laziness.
 
elmo said:
Professionalism is lacking.

I don’t understand how we’re so unfit compared to every team we play against.
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Not just fitness but it feels like technically our squad is one of the worst in the league. So many of our players have such erratic first touches, they are really poor at keeping the ball in tight spaces and they can’t ever seem to get the weight of basic passes correct either.

Bruno is one of our biggest culprits in all those aspects yet he is supposed to be our best player.
 
Skills said:
The whole thing around attributing everything to players professionalism is specific to the Man Utd fanbase. Manchester United's fanbase hate footballers - it's a weird thing, but the collective fanbase just doesn't like footballers.

I don't believe other clubs have more or less professional players than us, but as a club we fester a terrible environment around them. We've seldom made any effort whatsoever in the last 10 years since Fergies' retired to protect our players - we've thrown them to the wolves at any given opportunity.
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Some of them do themselves absolutely no favours on social media though. That said, social media and the sheer amount of channels/users claiming to be journalists, often just make things up for views, with no consequence, is a big problem in todays game.
 
They are unprofessional and weak minded.

Their quality wouldn't matter because many of them lack the focus and determination that a pro should have.

If you look at City or Liverpool or Arsenal players, no one will question their professionalism because they come in and give it 100%, what you will question is their actual quality, for our players it's the opposite.
 
Skills said:
The whole thing around attributing everything to players professionalism is specific to the Man Utd fanbase. Manchester United's fanbase hate footballers - it's a weird thing, but the collective fanbase just doesn't like footballers.

I don't believe other clubs have more or less professional players than us, but as a club we fester a terrible environment around them. We've seldom made any effort whatsoever in the last 10 years since Fergies' retired to protect our players - we've thrown them to the wolves at any given opportunity.
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Agreed, actually. We've allowed the media to do whatever they want with us, the referees to just randomly send our players off when no other club would sit and accept it (Casemiro, Dalot) and give ridiculous penalties in huge games - for Ten Hag to get sacked on the worst VAR decision of the season to a referee who's on video snorting lines nowadays and have said nothing about it is mental to me.

We need our old siege mentality back.

This new Rashford thing has been really -weird- too. Like I get it he underperforms, but he's been one of our best players and I think he's even our top scorer this season right now? And yet everybody seems to hate the guy. Maybe it's social media, maybe it's something else, maybe he has -some- degree of responsibility, but we used to have George Best playing for us and going out in London and shagging models, and nobody cared, and we had Cantona two footing people in games and the stands and we loved him because he loved us - It's a strange double standard. Like all the other stuff is fine as long as you play well and score goals.

Oppo fans hate our players.

So if we don't back them, nobody will.
 
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Marcus said:
I think the players are trying their best in this new system which they have not internalised yet.
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If this is the player's 'best', then we are well and truly finished.

Terrible. From front to back.
 
These players aren't good enough however you wrap it up.

Sometimes these things are just obvious.

We spent £200m in the summer with no significant upgrades to the starting XI of a side that was fortunate to finish 8th.

It's no surprise we're struggling to get back to even that lofty position.
 
The players are not that good, they also don’t compliment each other and a lot lack the intensity, pace, athleticism to be really good players in the Premier League.

Throw in a lack of confidence and a manager who is trying to make the players adapt to his style and system rather than resort to low blocks and counter attacking to try and cover the limitations of the players and you have the recipe for a very difficult rest of the season.
 
They're not good enough to do what is being asked of them, which is different from the general "not good enough"

I often see posters compare our squad unfavourably with the likes of Bournemouth and Forest, and this is rubbish.

The difference is, those sides are built to work hard, press hard and score goals in transition. They're also perfectly happy to sit deep for prolonged periods, surrender the ball and hit teams on the break.

Some time ago, it was decided by football evangelists that top teams weren't allowed to be counter attacking sides. Now you have to play high, control the ball, control territory etc...which is very, very difficult to do. Ask the Forest or Bournemouth players to play as we (attempt to) do and they'd get relegated.

The main problems we have are that we have relatively slow defenders (Martinez, De Ligt, Maguire) and our attackers are poor in possession.

A setup of Martinez, De Ligt and Maguire, screened by Ugarte and Casemiro in a low block would be very difficult to break down. Likewise, Fernandes, Garnacho, Amad and Hojlund playing on the break would be a real threat.

Unfortunately, as we know, this is not allowed and supposed "top teams" cannot play this way, even if they'd be 30 points a season better off.
 
Kostov said:
I just saw that we also lost to Bournemouth 0:3 last year. What an absolute spineless group of players. No excuses, they are just crap.
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I’m sorry but this squad is worth over half a billion. It’s absolutely shocking. Bournemouths whole squad probably cost what Maguire did. Madness
 
Prime SAF's Manchester United operated on these values

a- spend decent money only on young players. These players have something to prove, their are more moldable to the manager's system and their stamina/athletic is usually higher then older players
b- successful football clubs have balance. Ronaldo was magnificent going forward but he didn't backtrack. Thus SAF had to compensate to that with Park, Rooney and Teveth. When Scholes and Carrick were growing old, he left Pogba on the bench and he played Cleverley instead because the latter could provide the leg work.
c- avoid buying players from other top clubs. There's a very valid reason why they are getting rid of them. There's also the issue that since they have nothing to prove , they barely have any reason to go the extra mile either.
d- squads go through cycles (that's also Sacchi's mentality) and its very rare for a player to play 11 years into a club and he still remains motivated. Hence why so many players left under SAF's regime, often in their prime
e- Whatever happens you can't lose control over the dressing room. SAF loved his players as his kids but would push them out of the door the moment he felt that his authority is threatened.
f- keep the wage structure under control. If a player whose 200k a week is playing worse then 7 players on 80k a week then its only a matter of time before either the latter comes knocking at the door for a pay rise or they stoop to the level of the former.
g- United need to be at the forefront of everything in terms of fitness, training and technology.
h - protect kids. Whatever happens they can't start believing their own hype

This squad breaks every single rule

a- we spent money on the likes of Casemiro, Onana, De Ligt, Mazraoui and co
b- we kept the likes of Rashy for too long.
c- our squad is ridiculously unbalanced. We lack athleticism, work rate and we expect the two smurfs in defence (Malacia and Martinez) to win headers against 6ft3 players
d- we also lost control over the wage structure which makes it near impossible to get rid of players.
e- our squad look sluggish, lazy and lethargic with players losing form months after we signed them
f- the likes of Rashy, Garnacho and even Mainoo are starting to believe their own hype
 
The fact that they give each other high fives and chest bumps every time they give away a corner...case closed.
 
It can only be a mentality issue, morale, motivation, whatever you want to call it. There's nothing left to go at anymore. We have probably praised most of the players at some point this season or last and made a claim that they are up for it and then the next week they just don't turn up.
Perhaps the gods have it in for us. We seem doomed no matter what.
 
A squad of mentally and technically deficient man babies. It's quite impressive in some ways how we've managed to accumulate so many players with the same weak ass childish mentality.
 
If you remove the price rag,they are not good enough.
Most of them lack the basic technical skills required at a top club, our top players like bruno and rashford can't navigate in tight spaces, play accurate passes.

Football intelligence, most of our players still make school boys errors, like keeping the ball in dying minutes of games we are marginally winning, avoiding corners against teams that are good at it.
 
gaffs said:
What are you talking about? United fans love their players. We name stands after them. We build statues of them. Put their faces on murals. We wear their shirts years later. We sing their songs.

The issue is some of the players of the last ten years are so unfit to wear the shirt. There is a huge lack of effort, talent and cohesiveness within our team that it’s very hard to like very many of them.

We will love you when you show us something to love.
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And other fans don't?

Why didn't Liverpool fans turn their club into a toxic shit hole for their players through the 90s, 2000s and 2010s like ours have for the last decade?
 
dcrompton said:
If it looks like a team in 13th, and if it swims like a team in 13th place, and if it quacks like a team in 13th place it’s probably the 13th best team in the league
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This has been an issue across several managers though, so why are no one able to fix it
 
devilish said:
Prime SAF's Manchester United operated on these values

a- spend decent money only on young players. These players have something to prove, their are more moldable to the manager's system and their stamina/athletic is usually higher then older players
b- successful football clubs have balance. Ronaldo was magnificent going forward but he didn't backtrack. Thus SAF had to compensate to that with Park, Rooney and Teveth. When Scholes and Carrick were growing old, he left Pogba on the bench and he played Cleverley instead because the latter could provide the leg work.
c- avoid buying players from other top clubs. There's a very valid reason why they are getting rid of them. There's also the issue that since they have nothing to prove , they barely have any reason to go the extra mile either.
d- squads go through cycles (that's also Sacchi's mentality) and its very rare for a player to play 11 years into a club and he still remains motivated. Hence why so many players left under SAF's regime, often in their prime
e- Whatever happens you can't lose control over the dressing room. SAF loved his players as his kids but would push them out of the door the moment he felt that his authority is threatened.
f- keep the wage structure under control. If a player whose 200k a week is playing worse then 7 players on 80k a week then its only a matter of time before either the latter comes knocking at the door for a pay rise or they stoop to the level of the former.
g- United need to be at the forefront of everything in terms of fitness, training and technology.
h - protect kids. Whatever happens they can't start believing their own hype

This squad breaks every single rule

a- we spent money on the likes of Casemiro, Onana, De Ligt, Mazraoui and co
b- we kept the likes of Rashy for too long.
c- our squad is ridiculously unbalanced. We lack athleticism, work rate and we expect the two smurfs in defence (Malacia and Martinez) to win headers against 6ft3 players
d- we also lost control over the wage structure which makes it near impossible to get rid of players.
e- our squad look sluggish, lazy and lethargic with players losing form months after we signed them
f- the likes of Rashy, Garnacho and even Mainoo are starting to believe their own hype
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This and unless a drastic clear out is executed the old players will poison the new ones. You can see it with how Garnacho has become a mini Rashy before our eyes and now considers himself too good to create for others. We need to feck off all the mediocre players in one window, fill the squad with young players and sign around 6 or 8, take FFP sanctions but be radical because signing players when the likes of Bruno and Shaw are around will just expose them to their toxic characters.
 
Most just aren’t good or clever enough. A lot of the time they aren’t planning their next move or aware of their surroundings so just end up in a panic and kicking it anywhere, or hitting a very poor pass that is unacceptable for a professional footballer.
There’s also the fact a lot of the players think because they’re on high wages or at Man United then they have made it or can relax a bit more, I want to see more desire every game.
The professional bit does come into play too, things like going out a night before or flying around the world on a short break. Rashford is a big culprit in this, and he is supposed to be a poster boy for the club, other players rub off on the likes of this.
 
bigeyedfish21 said:
Bruno is not a leader, he spends more time throwing temper tantrums then he does leading by example.
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Thing with Bruno is I think it was a mistake giving him the captaincy as I think he tries to do too much and reacts badly when either he or others do the wrong thing. I am sure he is proud to be captain and off the field the players especially the young ones like him for the support he gives them. However I think we, at this moment in time, need a calm head as captain. Trouble is not sure we have signed him yet.
 
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