If there's one thing the new owners need to do is ignore the fans. The Ole years showed our fans are clueless.
Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24
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If there's one thing the new owners need to do is ignore the fans. The Ole years showed our fans are clueless.
When did he say it though? If it's from an interview from the last few weeks - would you really want him to say now that United strive to be champions this season? That wouldn't make any sense at this point. What would be the purpose of that?
I found the article in Dutch and I will translate the quote to the best of my ability. This is the title Ten Hag stelt ultiem doel voor dit jaar: ‘*** zou voelen als de landstitel’
Which means: Ten Hag poses ultimate goal for this year: “this would feel like winning the championship”
When I open the article it states he wants CL qualification. So he directly compares getting qualified with winning the premier league. In the article he also states that arsenal and city are uncatchable ( remember we are just 15 games in) and he also expects liverpool to grow in the league and finish 3rd. So he is happy with 4th place In a battle with Spurs and Chelsea.
PS I don’t know why one word is replaced by a couple of stars
The interview was posted 24 December and was published in Dutch magazine “ voetbal international”
Didnt he say earlier in the year we are in to win every competition? With any media unless you hear TH say it, then take it with a pinch of salt. The so called elite reporters, whitwell, romano etc get a lot wrong
I speak Dutch, and yeah, that's a good translation. Comparing getting CL qualification to the title sounds a little silly, yeah, it's not quite the same. But otherwise, I think it's the realistic goal for this year. It's just unrealistic to expect United's form to get significantly better while both City and Arsenal fall off a cliff. Stating that as a goal is just setting yourself up for failure and disappointment, it's useless. I'd assume he'd talk differently in the summer when stating his goal for next season though.
(Yes, 'd.at' is censured. No idea why. It makes writing in Dutch an absolute pain!)
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Because the whole forum used to call Welbeck “d.at guy”.
When new owners come in they will have with them one or two football people as consultants or advisors and its impossible for anyone who knows football not to see how highly rated Ten Hag was before he came into the job and the job he has done turning this team around. They would be desperate to keep him cause he is the sort of manager to get us challenging with a season or two.
Arnold, like Woodward before him, has his uses on the commercial side and has travelled with the Glazers to the ME before which means he could be familiar with potential new owners. He could be safe for a while but Murtough, as a Woodward remnant could be in trouble because his job is easily upgradeable and if Edwards isn't hired by the time the club is sold then he is history.
Any new owner with a brain will quickly realize that ETH needs support not replacing. Get him the Striker, CM, GK and RB that the team needs and we could start next season as genuine challengers.
Arnold, like Woodward before him, has his uses on the commercial side and has travelled with the Glazers to the ME before which means he could be familiar with potential new owners. He could be safe for a while but Murtough, as a Woodward remnant could be in trouble because his job is easily upgradeable and if Edwards isn't hired by the time the club is sold then he is history.
Any new owner with a brain will quickly realize that ETH needs support not replacing. Get him the Striker, CM, GK and RB that the team needs and we could start next season as genuine challengers.
Keep it open, you never know what happens. Don’t say 4th place is a wonderful achievement when it is not. The fans may be pessimistic but don’t put it into the players heads that they are only as good as 4th place.
Nobody expected liverpool to be below utd after 15 games. Keep some fighting spirit and don’t tell the journalist to expect liverpool to finish above utd. Just aim high, the sky is the limit, our squad is as expensive as any other squad. Our midfield is very experienced, same goes for out defence and we have options up front. Why should we just bow down and let liverpool get passed us.
I would think the progress made by arsenal and especially newcastle would inspire Ten Hag.
It is such a difference with Van Gaal who literally said Holland would win the world cup. He almost made the players believe they could do it.
Goals gave to be realistic at the time they’re stated. On this day, 25 December 2022, a realistic goal is a top four finish. It’s not realistic at this point to believe we’ll lift the PL trophy in May. At the beginning of next season, when we’re presumably at full quiver and our core players have a season of experience under ETH, a PL trophy is a realistic and properly stated goal.
I think it's more than plausible to suggest a potential new owner would bring their own people in. But if it's a choice between Richard Arnold and John Murtough, then it's John Murtough who should stay imo, and he would provide a stability on the football side of the club which Richard Arnold can't provide. Murtough is a football man and has a long history of developing and modernising football clubs on the structural side of the football club. And he's not a remnant of Woodward but was brought to the club by David Moyes to revamp and develop the scouting and youth development side of the club which had fallen behind the competition. And whatever anyone says about David Moyes, he was the most clued on manager we've had as far as understanding the structural side of a football club in the modern game. And he was attempting to modernise the structure throughout the club but unfortunately he wasn't good enough to keep his job.
So if a potential new ownership group brings their own people in, then fair enough. But if they do bring in football consultants to review the work of the people already at the club. Then John Murtough's work mainly at the development level and creating the strategy for the club's first data science team on the football side of the club is good imo. Murtough has spent most of his career at United developing the youth teams which were said to be in a very bad state before his arrival, and he's done well in that regard.
And just because Woodward and the likes of LVG, Mourinho and Ole made a mess when it came to first team recruitment, doesn't mean we should blame Murtough at youth level. Because at youth level our recruitment has been good and the players Murtough signed, like Hannibal, Garnacho, Mainoo, Gore etc will at the very least bring in a considerable amount of money via sales if they don't make it as United first teamers.
I think the football side, bar the managerial disasters which have Woodward's fingerprints all over them, has done well over the last couple of years under his stewardship. I also think that where the biggest improvement will be had is in removing the Blazer duo from the Executive Chairmanship and bringing someone more flexible , imaginative and interested in football beyond the bottom line.
To imagine that between January and the summer window we could have had Alvarez, Caicedo and Enzo Fernandez for less than what we paid for Donny and we got none really highlights the levels of incompetency we have had to endure. To succeed at top level football management you need to have that vision and a bit of gambling streak that Joel and Avram lack, see Perez agreeing to replace CR7 with Vinicious and winning the CL a few years later. We don't have that at United so we force ourselves to build a team with £40m, £60m and £80m signings which is not sustainable.
I don't want Murtough out but where I think he will suffer is that Michael Edwards is available and the former carries the stain of being associated with the disastrous Woodward reign that it will take an extraordinarily objective owner not to see him as easily upgradeable. I think he has done well as evidenced by our early but failed pursuits of Bellingham, Haaland, Caicedo etc. What we need to do more of is shop in that type of market and make sure we bring the players in unlike what happened before.
He's doing a great job so far and he's really likeable.
Like you've just mentioned, it ultimately comes down to who the owners are and what their ambition for the club is. I'm pretty confident if we have a owner who is ambition, then we'll start to see the people on the football side of the club flourish. The likes of City and Chelsea are empowering their football structures at all levels, and that empowerment is coming from the owners.
I agree we could've had the likes of Caicedo, Alvarez and Fernandez for paltry sums. But there'll be players like that available again for us to sign that the casual fan has not heard of. It's about stabilizing the setup at first team level and then making a move on a player or players that look to be on the cusp of making their breakthrough in a major European league.
i would welcome Michael Edwards at United but we have to understand that the players Liverpool signed under him in a Sporting Director capacity, were identified by their scouts who were led by Barry Hunter and Dave Fallows. Edwards job was to empower the football departments and then those football departments did the work of identifying which players to sign. The role of the DoF is very simple, and without capable recruiters a football structure can't function to a optimal level.
Laurie Whitwell has just dropped a article where he gives some detail on how we're going to put much more emphasis on data with Dominic Jordan taking the lead. But he also mentions that if we do sign Gakpo, then the money will come out of the summer budget. So it's important we see the back of the Glazers or else it's going to be a miserable summer in 2023.
I'd say top 4 is an achievement if you look at the state we were in last season and our lack of depth, it is definitely something to build upon but comparing it to a title is nonsensical of course.
Probably just meant to light a fire in the players to get that CL football secured though. Saying we can win the league is unrealistic and not in line with everything Ten Hag was preaching this year.
Probably just meant to light a fire in the players to get that CL football secured though. Saying we can win the league is unrealistic and not in line with everything Ten Hag was preaching this year.
Top 4 will be a big achievement, remember how dire we were last season. Wont be easy. Newcastle are flying, 6 wins on the bounce and up to 2nd. Arsenal, city, Newcastle, Spurs and Liverpool all in the race with us.
I really like ETH, he will get us there but its not an instant fix. kloop took 5 years at Liverpool, i hope are rejuvenation is quicker.. sale of the club will be a big factor
I really like ETH, he will get us there but its not an instant fix. kloop took 5 years at Liverpool, i hope are rejuvenation is quicker.. sale of the club will be a big factor
That's key, the takeover is more important than anything else right now but it won't be disastrous if its not done by summer though having the rats gone will be ideal. Why do I say so? Gapko will bring our spending to 260m and if he works out it means that we will need at most one or two players in the summer.
Suppose we spend part of the budget on Gapko and his goals propel us to a CL qualification, next summer the only player we'd need would be Enzo Fernandez or De Jong so I'd be fine with that.
However if the Glazers do leave and we get a wealthy and ambitious owner then yes we can spend on three or four players.
What I'd like to see us do more of is to compete for the under the radar players. We should always 30m or so lying around for such opportunities. This is one facet of the business that the Glazer incompetence has killed - our ability to generate money off players from the youth system or from punts taken on players from the lower leagues. Today's United wouldn't notice or sign today's Solskjear, for example!
Agree completely with this. Obviously ETH wasn’t sitting there saying he’d be happy just scraping top 4 at the beginning of the season. But as of now, I think everyone here would be perfectly happy with that given how much shit we’ve dealt with so far along with the tight competition behind City
If the new owners decide to bin ETH off immediately I will be incredibly depressed. We really lucked out that he decided to join us in the state we're in.
He's probably more desperate than us for new owners at this point.
What’s the excuse for finishing behind Newcastle? Worse squad, less investment, started from a lower base. Not beating them is a failure whichever way we spin it. Personally I think we will beat them out though anyway.
Can see a tough day for him with Gakpo going to scousers,hopefully can end it by pulling four points away from said team
Well clarification on the situation at least
You know shits cooking when Klopp`s name being dropped as example.
Seen Arsenal mentioned a few times. That wasn’t overnight. Arteta has been manager since December 2019. He’s had 2 and half seasons before this one.
Agreed with Newcastle, considering where they were and that they’ve not spent huge sums it’s pretty remarkable where they are, maybe even frightening. I think it far exceeds City’s first year post take over. But maybe they learnt from City’s early mistakes.
He will be raging and don't blame him
No CL or one more mauling (6-3,0-4) he is gone. You do not spend 5B to get embarrassed like that. It is all about ego with billionaire's.
Like the optimism but I still think, even if we added another 3 top quality players to our squad next summer, we’re still short of bringing the quality of subs on / squad rotation for the smaller matches that city can, which will be the difference maker. I’m more for two summer windows needed I think
im talking about us having to play the the likes of McT / Fred / elanga / awb/ maguire / martial when city can rest players and play with ake / Laporte / gundogan / grealish / Alvarez etc and also still manage to rotate foden and silva
He gave an interview this week saying we need to sign players we actually need. Yesterdays news on Gapko is probably something he’s known about for weeks . We weren’t interested in him .
Ridiculous take.
Also the fact that he was a low hanging fruit throughout the summer but we never pulled the trigger. Safe to say, he was never a priority.
A goal can be realistic even if it’s not a nailed on guarantee or even an odds on bet. Going into this season it was a realistic goal for Arsenal to compete for the PL trophy and look at them now. I wouldn’t have bet on Arsenal, and it still might slip through their fingers, but Arteta set a goal and they’re on track to attain it.
Even if we loaded the squad with everyone ETH wants, it’s still going to be very hard for us to lift the PL trophy next season. City will still have Pep and billions to spend on players and operations, of course. Liverpool will reload. Even Newcastle could be on. But isn’t that the point, that United strive toward attaining hard goals? As for the specific point at hand, we’re learning to beat smaller clubs comfortably and I’m pretty confident we’ll build on that. Even though we’ve beaten Arsenal and Liverpool this season, it could be argued we caught them napping. We still have some distance to travel before we can be confident we can beat bigger clubs like City and the massive clubs in Europe.
Only one person seems to be raging and it’s you. We didn’t blow a load of money on a player we don’t need, it’s a positive sign.
Admittedly that I’m only assuming, but his reaction to the Gakpo question indicated that he might be joining us, I wonder how he feels now if that was actually the case. I’m sure we only know a very little fraction of what’s going on behind the scenes, I just thought his reaction was interesting.
I am relatively calm about this one,however would feel much differently if he was that number 9 we need desperately
Yeah that's why he will be fuming
He’s going to be totally fecking screwed over if a striker is not bought/loaned in January.
Lack of goals will likely see us finish outside the top 4 again this season. I just hope that fans stick by ETH and lay the blame squarely at the feet of the incompetent board.
Lack of goals will likely see us finish outside the top 4 again this season. I just hope that fans stick by ETH and lay the blame squarely at the feet of the incompetent board.
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