No. We tend to focus on issues at the back and in midfield, but the only constant in ten years of relative struggle has been the annual inability to score more than seventy goals a season.
Do we have enough goals in the squad?
- Thread starter ManUnitedCanuck
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There you go, that is it.
That's not exactly true though. Garnacho is now a senior player in 3rd season, Amad has been almost a revelation since he came back to the squad, we have Zirksee (I have no idea how he plays though) and it's unlikely Mount will again be injured most of the season. So, we have cover on both wings, at striker, and #10. I think we're actually pretty good now.
That's a good point. Liverpool tends to set up more as a transition team against the big dogs, but they tend to have 60-70% possession against majority in the league. They still ended up above 60% average possession.
Do we now?
You can have any forwards you want but in the end you if you can't get them the ball through midfield, they will have it rather difficult to do much on their own. We have some good forwards, we just can't make it easy for them like top teams to score goals.
Good point. I don't think our play style helps but you're right, we need more goals.
We have to hope they can all make the step up rather than knowing they can do it. Amad's scored 1 PL goal so far.
The question should be, do we have enough playmakers?
If Shaw stays fit we'll have Bruno, Amad, Shaw and more of an involvement from Mainoo offensively, so there should be a big improvement on last season, where a lot of the responsibility lied solely on Bruno. Mount will replace McTominay as a back up 10, which will lead to more chances created too. We could really do with a strong 6/8 midfielder with DLP abilities coming in, to compliment Mainoo in the double pivot and also cover for him.
If Shaw stays fit we'll have Bruno, Amad, Shaw and more of an involvement from Mainoo offensively, so there should be a big improvement on last season, where a lot of the responsibility lied solely on Bruno. Mount will replace McTominay as a back up 10, which will lead to more chances created too. We could really do with a strong 6/8 midfielder with DLP abilities coming in, to compliment Mainoo in the double pivot and also cover for him.
I think it's more of a problem of the team playing as a collective rather than a bunch of individuals. Taking Rashford as an example, he gets into that left half space, he's going to shoot, even if the shot isnt really on. He won't pass or try to setup a colleague. He isn't alone in this. Watch City or Arsenal and you see how well drilled they are in setting up assists.
We have Bruno as good as he is, trying to force the play at times and we give the ball away. Thas just two examples.
Hopefully though Ugarte will force transitions higher up the pitch. Hopefully zirkzee will be that firmino role for us that is so vital in getting the forward line to function. Mazraoui will help improve the attack from fullback. Yoro will allow us to push up higher, as one of his best attributes is sweeping up as the deepest defender.
De ligt, Ugarte will both demand more from their teammates on the pitch and in training. Hopefully this and lots of other stuff coming together will result in us being tighter at the back and better at creating and scoring chances.
We have Bruno as good as he is, trying to force the play at times and we give the ball away. Thas just two examples.
Hopefully though Ugarte will force transitions higher up the pitch. Hopefully zirkzee will be that firmino role for us that is so vital in getting the forward line to function. Mazraoui will help improve the attack from fullback. Yoro will allow us to push up higher, as one of his best attributes is sweeping up as the deepest defender.
De ligt, Ugarte will both demand more from their teammates on the pitch and in training. Hopefully this and lots of other stuff coming together will result in us being tighter at the back and better at creating and scoring chances.
Players can only do so much in dysfunctional setup like the one we used last season though. It's not only about the players. I would argue it's not even MOSTLY about the individuals now.
I think there’s enough players in the squad who can score, it’s just whether we find form for long enough to let that happen. Confidence and injuries will play the biggest part for me not the quality of player.
Amad has 10 in him, Garnacho too. Bruno, Mount and Mctominay if he stays can get between 5 and 8 each. And between the 3 main threats I’m looking between 15 to 20 each. If one finds real form even better. The rest of the squad can also chip in. I hope the changes in leadership has helped the culture and environment enough to make this happen.
Amad has 10 in him, Garnacho too. Bruno, Mount and Mctominay if he stays can get between 5 and 8 each. And between the 3 main threats I’m looking between 15 to 20 each. If one finds real form even better. The rest of the squad can also chip in. I hope the changes in leadership has helped the culture and environment enough to make this happen.
We have signed a RW in two of the last three summers, we have signed a striker in two consecutive summers and they were both to complement a very talented and mostly expensive lye assembled forward line. The issue is that our big investment calls in those positions haven't worked out (Martial, Sancho, Antony and Lukaku) to enable growth in the front line and Rashford being so streaky.
That is definitely true for the last few years, some of it was just being unlucky (Martial, Sancho to an extent) and some plain stupid (Antony). Lukaku probably gave us what was expected.
Anyway, this isn't that relevant now as neither of those are really part of the important picture for next season. I'd say on paper we have a decent front line options now. My feeling is it won't be the attackers to blame if we don't reach top 4.
Yep a lot of the fancy tactical issues can be papered over as long as you put the ball in the net. It has always been a problem.
So what is the actual idea here? Get better goalscorers/finishers in the team, rather than focusing on tactics? Not sure if I got your point.
So true.
It's worth noting that because United are so bad at keeping possession of the ball, by default we're considered a transition based side, but we're not even particularly good in transition. We're not some lethal counter attacking side. We were 12th in xG last season - in terms of converting potentially dangerous transitions into actual goalscoring chances, we're absolutely nowhere near good enough.
How good your players are at keeping possession of the ball effects massively how good you are in transition also. The amount of times we have a dangerous transition that is ruined by our players taking a bad touch, a bad pass, making a bad decision, dribbling into the opposition - the exact same factors that lead to us being bad in possession overall also lead to us messing up counter attacks.
You don't need a perfect side comprising of a DLP like Rodri, two ball playing CBs who are comfortable in a highline, a sweeper keeper, technical ability all across the squad etc. etc. if you just have a competent front 3.
Sure you might lose to Pep and Klopp but it's enough to blow away most sides.
No it isn't, that's the whole point. If you can't progress the ball effectively from defense to attackers, you will make it very very hard for the attackers, because they will still find themselves 1 vs 2/3 players all the time. You would need Mbappe level players to make this strategy work. Even if that was possible, do you see candidates for it on the market?
On the flip side, even decent attackers will get you good numbers if put in a well-oiled machine. Which we are not.
At the moment we have a decent number of "goalscorers" in the team, we just don't know how to put this all together into a team that is more than the sum of it's parts - at least that was the case the whole last season.
This, I am a firm believer of the theory that attacks rarely move the dial if the midfield and defense aren't up to scratch. If you dominate the ball, not Van Gaal's sterile possession mind you, chances naturally come and the more chances you create the more you score. I think our generally poor technical base as a team is what holds us back more than the quality of our attack.
The thing is, in theory we have enough technical ability between Casemiro, Mainoo, Eriksen, Mount, maybe even Bruno if you look a bit more further in front. The problem is how the team is set up with two separate formations very far away from each other and one guy in between with no role to play in the buildup, as under ETH this is executed fully by back 5. That + the fact we have 0 players in the frontline who are effective at dropping deeper to progress the ball makes it a deadly combination resulting in football like last season - Martinez/Shaw out and we are as bad as it gets in playing out from the back.
There was an interesting thread recently on what ETH expects from midfield btw.
Bingo. It’s like people think goals are just a simple addition problem: “If we add X player that scores 25 goals a year then we’ll have 25 more goals than last year” instead of realizing it’s just part of a bigger equation. Sterling put up huge numbers at City and any decent watcher of football would tell you he’s always been quite wasteful in the final third. Likewise you could have had RVN himself leading the line last season and he would have struggled to get 15+ league goals.
That's a brilliant way to describe a compliacted problem with a simple analogy.
I've done a quick excercise to check on xG vs goalscoring ("conversion") metrics.
Baseline: last season we scored 57 goals from xG=56.5. That put us 9th in terms of goals scored.
1. If we have been scoring at the rate of Man City last season (overperforming as they scored 94 goals from xG=80.5), we would've scored 66 goals from our xG=56,6, that places us... 8th - we only leap over West Ham who scored 57.
2. If we created same xG as Man City and kept our "conversion rate" (to make it simple), we would've scored roughly 81 goals - that puts us 4th, just behind Newcastle (83) and in front of Liverpool (80).
And yes, almost all teams that ended up last season in better league position outperformed their xG, but the extreme gap is in non-penalty xG - meaning all the top clubs create far more chances than us. This is mostly down to how the whole team plays football rather than having extremely good players in front 3/4.
We do. At various points in the past decade we’ve had good defensive structures and records. We’ve even had something that resembles a midfield. Other than a few months of Rashford, Martial and Greenwood clicking, the one constant has been crap forwards.
Which ones from the list of: Hojlund, Zirksee, Bruno, Rashford, Garnacho, Mount you consider crap? I am obviously leaving Antony out of the discussion as he's now 3rd choice RW at best.
I think we're in rather good situation in terms of attacking formation so just curious.
Hope we can do a swap/loan deal with Barca with Antony going there and in return Raphinha coming to us (Barca were keen on Antony before he moved to us)
Last season we got to November and this was the situation... Our attack has not changed dramatically albeit Rashford looks sharper and Amad and Zirkzee will add another dimension.
We’ve literally neglected our midfield for the last 11 years…
And it’s the same except zirkzee who isn’t an out and out goal scorer… will be an interesting one this.Last season we got to November and this was the situation... Our attack has not changed dramatically albeit Rashford looks sharper and Amad and Zirkzee will add another dimension.
Poor finishing has butchered our attacks over the last decade. Against most sides we do create the chances, but then we squander them. That’s the story, amigos.
We don’t create anywhere near enough chances, which made the missed chances stood out. The conversion rate of our forwards were actually pretty good by and large for the last decade (except obvious outliers like Weghorst)
Every set of fans seems to think their team's finishing is poor as they hate seeing chances missed, but that's part of football.
We absolutely do not create enough chances, actually the complete opposite. We're absolutely miles behind in xG compared to the top sides like City, Arsenal, Liverpool. But even worse than that, we're miles behind the likes of Newcastle, Chelsea, Spurs.
Spot on.
I was thinking back to Fergie's days and it was fairly regularly we'd have a poor game, less possession, less chances and generally not have the run of a game but still win through sheer ruthlessness and clinical decision making at the other end. Every time we break forward now, selfishness, bad decisions and simply poor finishing kill us. And it's not like we can shore up at the back or play keep ball either, so that's led to where we are now.
But even in the biggest matches we've usually had 1-2 massive chances that could win us a game, and Hojlund or whoever has snatched at it and we've lost/drawn.
Even if that was true, we've lost/drawn because the opposition had more of those "massive chances". We did not fail because of bad finishing last season.
This is simply a myth.
We actually score very close to our xG.
The chances we create are often from high tempo turnovers, with players running at full speed whilst being isolated from the rest of the team (e.g. Bruno pumping through balls at Rashford who then tries to do everything on his own, and mostly fails). That decreases the chance of controlling the ball and scoring, which reflects our poor xG numbers.
We score little, because we don't create enough high value controlled chances. And we are pretty much spot on matching our xG when it comes to conversion.
So no, this is simply not true. Our main problem is not poor finishing. Our main problem by far is that we fail to keep control and possession, which leads to poor and low-value chance creation.
This is also the very same reason why we concede so many chances and goals.
Meanwhile, teams like City, Arsenal and Liverpool are creating loads of chances by effectively passing the ball into the net. These are chances that on average are way easier to control and convert.
We are just trying to counterattack our way to 80+ league goals, and that is simply not happening. It's statistically pretty much impossible. So we end up with 50-60 goals instead, which is spot on for our counterattacking xG.
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Exactly. That is spot on.
The stats just don't support this narrative.
Let's look at xG for last season
Liverpool - 95
City - 90
Newcastle - 84
Arsenal - 84
Chelsea - 81
Tottenham - 73
....
United - 60
And we're meant to believe our finishing is what's holding us back?
@Dominos
I do know what you mean - and yes we finished where we "deserved" to - but what I was sort of getting at was that there are games when your shots, xG, whatever are irrelevant because you've scored a goal out of nothing or your strikers have been ultra clinical. What would have been the xG on some of the goals Beckham scored in 1998/1999? I'm going to say pretty low or even close to zero in many cases
A good modern example would be Kane and Son at Spurs when they regularly beat or drew with Man City despite being battered all game. Our players don't seem to make a lot out of the very little we have.
Now to say "then we need to make a lot more!" goes without saying. But the pre season game Vs Liverpool shows that even then that's not always enough. Being clinical is about more than numbers.
I get what you meant, it's just a wrong strategy. Look at Haaland, he outperformed his xG in first season with City, and was at the bottom (underperformed) of the same metric last season. He still had by far the most goals scored because City create so many chances for him that missing some of them makes little difference.
Over time players tend to score their average xG, therefore the right thing to do is to maximise xG and minimise xGA. This is what all top teams aim for.
The bolded part is not true, we're hitting average on goals scored vs expected.
I'm not saying it should be our "strategy", I think that much is obvious. But it's also clear that some players are more clinical than others, and one of the myths that xG belies is that you can work under the assumption that it's always a teams problem when they don't make enough shots, but there's some players that make their own chances and make them work, and there's some players who never do. I guess I'm arguing a point I wouldn't like to make - that players who CAN score goals -always- score more goals, and they're the players you should look to sign, as opposed to every other metric. So top scorers of various leagues are a pretty good indicator - and unfortunately very few of our players are prolific in that regard. We've signed a lot of players that haven't scored a lot of goals to replace players who don't score a lot of goals.
I think you lost me on this to be honest, I am just arguing the fact converting chances isn't our main problem - creating them is.
I understand your point is we need to bring in players who score more goals, that's fair enough, my point is our players (Rashford, Garnacho, Hojlund, Amad, Bruno, Mount) put in a functional side would score more goals as well.
Not enough to compete for the title yet but in my opinion we'll have to see a big improvement from last year.
-We've signed Zirkzee
-Amad and Mount barely played last season
-Rashford will have a good season if he's once again gonna be deployed as an inside forward like he used to be
-Hojlund should score more with better service
-We'll see if Sancho stays, but if he does, that's another attacker we didn't have last season.
-We're not done on the market yet despite it currently looking unlikely we'll sign another forward/attacking midfielder/winger
-We've signed Zirkzee
-Amad and Mount barely played last season
-Rashford will have a good season if he's once again gonna be deployed as an inside forward like he used to be
-Hojlund should score more with better service
-We'll see if Sancho stays, but if he does, that's another attacker we didn't have last season.
-We're not done on the market yet despite it currently looking unlikely we'll sign another forward/attacking midfielder/winger
Don't agree at all. I don't think any of those names other than Rashford or Bruno have ever proven likely to score more than 10 goals a season in the Premier League. If they did that would be -amazing-, but my strong belief is quite simply that their decision making and finishing is just not at that level and there is no proof it will ever be.
I will add a qualifier though - with new coaching methods (RUUD) and more cohesion and experience - and Mainoo being around and getting more experienced - they should all improve. I hope I'm wrong and they're going to get to another level. So as a team there could be improvement all around. But there's been absolutely no sign of any of our forwards getting better even in this pre season.
How many chances do we need to score a goal…5, 10, 20?
I’m not arguing that we’re a chance creation machine but it is clear to anyone with open eyes that we’re very poor at finishing on the chances we do create.
Speaking of last season only, who were our brilliant finishers? No one. No Hojlund, not Rashford, Garnacho, Sancho, Martial, Antony or Amad. And the season before that not Weghorst.
We can explain away Hojlund as young and new to the PL. I have no explanation for Rashford other than to suggest (without proof, of course) that he was in a mental funk. Garnacho is still young and did well for us, but he’s no clinical finisher. Sancho and Antony were a mess less season and Amad only came on strong at the end of last season.
No one can argue that we’re sorted as far as finishers is concerned. We have problems all over the pitch, all the way back to the keeper, but we are not sorted as far as accomplished finishers is concerned. Match after match we wasted good chances, not tap ins but chances we would expect to result in goals, and we dropped points. And of course our defending was a shambles and we dropped points to the likes of Bournemouth and Palace, but no one disputes that.
We have to see the game with our eyes open. Our finishing last season was abysmal, though to be fair the parade of excuses for that is persuasive.