It's only the new norm because we're somehow accepting it becoming the new norm. Before ETH arrived finishing outside top 4 wasn't "the norm", it was a sackable offence. We're forever in the middle of a restructuring process or a "rebuild", it's like a universal excuse at this point. ETH is for sure building "something". We never finished 7th and that season was considered our worst in modern history... until ETH came along. It took him two years but he managed to beat it for sure.
Our worst ever season was under Moyes. We went from a title winning squad to 7th while being utterly humiliated by all our rivals home and away. The only reason we even finished 7th that season is because Giggs got us a couple of wins which bumped us up the table. Everything else is just mental gymnastics.
And the new norm is that we are not a title winning team and haven't been one since SAF retired.
No. We finished 6th the season before he took over. In a season where we had 3 managers. We finished 2nd and 3rd the prior two seasons so clearly 2nd/3rd was the average state of the squad relative to the rest of the league when ETH took over.
You dont go from 3rd to 8th in a restructuring/rebuilding process. Ever. There's no valid excuse for it. The only new norm is the fan base now eagerly lap up mediocrity and will feast on whatever platitudes are given out by the club, the manager or Ineos.
It's funny how you pick a small sample of 2 years just to prove a point while disregarding the previous 3 were we finished 6th, 2nd and 6th again. Mind you, that 2nd place Mourinho said at the time was the biggest achievement of his career. A lot of people(myself included) thought he was bigging himself up to look good. Now I realize with all the disfunction behind the scenes, he actually meant it.
While we are at it let's ignore the fact that the season before our 2nd and 3rd place finish we also finished 6th and that was inspite of Ole's winning run of 10 wins in a row or something crazy like that.
The fact that the season before ETH took over we were playing some of the most horrendous football somehow also gets disregarded. Or the fact that the players completely downed tools and refused to listen to Ragnick's pressing tactics. Let's ignore that as well. Or the fact that oppo teams would bypass our midfield as if it wasn't there and score 4 or more goals on multiple ocasions somehow gets memory holed. This season was a repeat of that season compounded by injuries. The only thing that made our season even worse is Casemiro's legs giving out completely. Hence we got way more exposed in the middle than normally.
Last season when we finished 3rd, was a honeymoon season with a manager bounce and Casemiro being in top form. Towards the end we already could see that the wheels were coming off simply because we were going back to our normal performance aka other teams bypassing us through the middle and scoring for fun. Yet only ETH gets blamed for a problem that we've been having since the early Ole days.
Now Ole did play a more robust double pivot of McFred to avoid this, but once we moved to a more controlling style of play, we got fully exposed. This cost him his United job. And it almost did ETH's as well. With the emergence of Mainoo, it looks like we have 1 piece in a 2 piece jigsaw puzzle. However we are in need of another top class midfield to shore up our midfield without losing the creativity. Rice would have been a very good option, but alas we went with Casemiro.
But yeah, sure let's ignore all these issues because we are a top class club that never finishes below 3rd. So anyone that does should be automatically sacked and then wonder why we haven't fixed our issues that we had since the Mourinho days. Maybe because we need to give the managers time to actually fix them?
Granted, now that we supposedly have a football structure and a potentially competent DoF, this issue shouldn't even be on the manager's radar. A DoF should take care of it. But of course having clowns like Woodward and Arnold run things, and lackeys like Murtough run the footballing department got us were we are. ETH clearly identified our midfield woes from day 1 when he tried signing De Jong/Rice with Casemiro for that extra robustness/creativity from the middle. So the man clearly knows what's the issue.
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