a- he understands the EPL and what Manchester United is all about. I know that such a thing is a bit cringy but we had too many managers who spent hundreds of millions on players from some shit league and on tiny CBs only to notice later on that such things do not work in the EPL. They ended up with them leaving and us footing the bill for their mistakes. The next manager must know what the EPL is all about and the constant media attention United gets.
Going forward, our managers shouldn't have these sort of extraordinary recruitment capabilities anyway. Contemporary football is so granulated and data driven that you shouldn't be relying on the personal connections, market expertise and eccentricities of a transitionary figure like the head coach of the first team (who have an average shelf life of 2-3 years at major clubs, unless you luck into someone worthwhile like Guardiola or Klopp). The director of football, specialists like the head scout, and the scouting and analytics teams at large — they should form the backbone of our footballing operations, the brans behind the organization so to speak, and meticulously coordinate to drive the club's recruitment with the medium and long term in mind, in accordance with a well defined and rigorous “game model”, which is something we are looking to implement thankfully. This game model should also be used to identify head coaches (and recommend them to the chief executive and ownership), on a side note — the head coach should be in alignment with the club, its principles and strategies, and its core organization, not the other way around.
Sure, you can indulge the head coach from time to time by signing specific individuals with the right profile, you should be respectful of their areas of expertise (i.e., coaching, tactical know-how, match day decision-making, man management of the first team and public relations) and not treat them as disposable, interchangeable objects whose opinions don't carry much weight in the halls of power, and you probably shouldn't sign players they are fundamentally opposed to (as long as the reasons for these oppositions are reasonable and pass the litmus test), but they shouldn't be the prime movers or arbiters with regard to player recruitment by any means.
Recruitment shouldn't be that hard for a club like Manchester United. Real Madrid go out there and sign the best players or talents. The talent of Vinícius, Endrick, Bellingham, Güler, Camavinga and company was obvious. They aren't reinventing the wheel by any means. They just have a streamlined operation where Juni Calafat, among others, plays a big role in terms of profiling elite players and talents and laying the groundwork for these transfers, making things easier for Florentino Pérez and José Ángel Sánchez. The manager is mostly instructed to get the best out of the collective at his disposal (Ancelotti is great, with this is mind, as he's adaptable and not fixated on signing specific individuals for a dogmatic, rigidly defined approach). We should do something similar, and to our credit we have already done something similar with the acquisition of Yoro. We may not always be able to sign the very, very best players or talents, but the club should always be there or thereabouts to construct a qualitatively sound and well-balanced squad given the resources at its disposal (this will be fortified if we get our house in order and re-stablish ourselves from a competitive standpoint, which would make us much more appealing).