As I watch our rivals win comfortably, I suppose any kind of comforting feeling I can get from that is those teams haven’t really had the squad turnover and board turnover that we’ve had the past few months. We’ve had a right load of junk at the club thanks to Glazer incompetence and seeing a load of them leave feels liberating. Williams and Martial are still without clubs and we were paying them a combined sum of just over £300k a week recently. Arnold and Murtough axed and then the footballing executive team essentially trebled in size with not only much more suitable people, but people with impressive CVs.
Our front line options are young and inexperienced, with the most experienced attacker in Rashford being extremely flaky this past 18 months. The second most experienced attacker in Sancho clearly not wanting to be here and us not wanting him here.
Our midfield is still imbalanced. We need more players who can actually sit in midfield and try to enforce control and less attacking midfielders.
I don’t get the feeling INEOS are particularly besotted with ETH, and think they will dump him if we start looking like last season again by November time.
On the plus side, I think our first team defensive options are looking much better with the players bought as well as the youth players who aren’t far away from reaching the first team. Maguire and Lindelof will more than likely be gone this time next year which will free up another £300k a week or so. I like the youth transfers we’ve been making as well. God knows whether they’ll be good enough for our aspired level but hopefully we can manage them with the right loans and career movements in a way that if they weren’t good enough, we ultimately haven’t exposed them too much and we can sell them for a good price to help future recruitment. Under Glazer management, it felt like any youth player who can just about hang in there in the first team for a few games got an £80k a week 5 year contract from Woodward and then we’re stuck with them because the honeymoon period was over and that player actually wasn’t that good.