Have we ever had such a scattergun summer - and will this be the last?

altodevil

Odds winner of 'Odds or Evens 2023/2024'
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This last month it seems there is a new target every day. Could be the media manufacturing clicks, but assuming they do that every year it does still feel like the sheer number of links being made is abnormal. I don't think I remember a summer quite like this.

Transfer failures we've come to expect over the last decade. However under Woodward it felt like a go big or go home mentality. Now it is as if anyone will do. Is this an improvement?

Surely we aspire to having clear-cut targets to fill pre-determined holes, with back-ups for each of them. That's not happened this summer, and is there any reason to believe this will be rectified come January, or even next summer?
 
I feel like this gets asked every summer, so I'd say it's about par for the course. It probably won't be the last, unless things change dramatically at the club.
 
To be fair, up until the Brighton game Chelsea were the laughing stock with their scattergun approach (despite their much better signings). We have managed to go full scattergun in the space of two weeks which is even more mental. Deadline day is going to be fun at least.
 
It definitely won't be the last cause we won't sign anyone significant this summer. So this process will continue until we sign the next batch of shit players and it will calm down for a couple of years before the cycle starts again.
 
There was no planning done prior to the window so this was bound to happen. Most of us saw this two months ago when our rivals were strengthening left right and center whereas we were sitting back on our arses twerking for FDJ who wants to play for only for Barcelona.

These amateurs in charge will continue to screw up most of the windows. They are clueless, incompetent and inexperienced for the roles they are in.
 
Our recruitment is utter shit. Most championship teams are doing better business than us, let alone anybody in EPL. And it has been this way for years.

That said - we don't need to sign new players to do better than fecking 4:0 with Brentford. EtH has players that would allow him to bench the entitled a-holes he is playing. Maybe not enough to beat City, Liverpool, Spurs, or even Arsenal, but he has players he can coach and give chance to, so we can be competitive at least with goddamned Brighton and Brentford.

We do not have to play Rashford, Maguire, McT, Fred, and we can bench Bruno so he can do some reflection.

Sure our club and recruiement are in deep crisis, but also EtH needs to grow some balls, and start accepting the reality that his starting 11 are horrible players who will throw him under the bus
 
The scatter gun approach and leaking it to media is just to get fan engagements in social media. This is by design and our club has never been interested in rebuild.Every year we are 2 or 3 players short. Whenever we feel the team is ready and require the final push, the manager is not backed and sacked at the end of the season.Rinse and repeat year after year.

Only a miracle can save our club and till that time fingers crossed. Also, hoping Ten hag is made of thicker skin and does not cave in to the pressure put on him by the media and our fans.
 
It's a combination of a few things.
Our lack of planning and targets to pursue. I have no idea how we're in a situation where we haven't scouted Central midfielders when we knew a long time back that Matic will be leaving and Pog was not signing the contract.
How do we not have wingers scouted when we knew Greenwood is going to be out indefinitely. Same with Cavani, we knew he's leaving. I'm not even talking about the players out of form, the above 4 are bodies we knew we'd be without next season, we've tried to sign FdJ, Rabiot and Casemero now. How do the scouts even have a job after this? who are they reporting to and how does that person have a job?

The other reason is clicks, manutd is clickbait, players, agents and journos are having a field day with us, they could link us to anyone under the sun and it'll sound legit because we've got no plan and we could do with a player in almost every position.

And finally, think some people are just on an extended vacation flying to exotic locations in business class on the club's expense.
Barcelona for FdJ, Turin for Rabiot, Rome for SMS, now Madrid for Felix and Casemero.

It's just madness all around, we don't have a method, the people responsible for scouting and transfers are incompetent fraudsters, the journos use their shortcomings for clickbait, the agents to get new contracts for their players, the players to get contracts for themselves. Complete mess.
 
The first Van Gaal summer was pretty scatter gun, go the feeling Woodward was trying to show he did know how to sign players so went out and bought every one.

Do i think it will be the last mess of a summer? No chance with Murtough as DOF, clearly has not even the beginnings of a clue how to do his job.
 
Several clubs have had moments like this where they have moved for a number of players in short notice. I think there is nothing peculiar about it, and if it were say, Southampton, nobody would care. The club would have a file on every player we have approached and probably held varying levels of interest in them for a while. This is why hundreds of players are scouted every year. Acting upon this interest depends on your circumstances, and we've found ourselves in a position where we need to bring in quite a few players at once, so we're looking to put things in motion.

Of course, the narrative will be with us that these names are pulled out of a hat, but press and fans often forget that firstly, they know far less than they like to think they do about how things ACTUALLY work at a football club, and secondly, that a club is not obligated to explain and keep them in the loop as to their rationale behind everything they do.
 
I’m of the firm opinion our leadership team don’t know what the feck they’re doing but it’s worth bearing in mind that most of the links in the press are flimsy at best, normally just agents trying to boost their players profile - which right now is easy, as United have so many holes in their squad you can link almost anyone to us.
 
You surely aren't suggesting that we don't know what we are doing. There's a clear strategy to hook some mediocre and/or declining players into high wage three year contracts so we'll be stuck with them and unable to rebuild properly in the future.
 
We’re starting to hear murmurings of Murtough being under pressure. This summer has been such a shambles that he will walk or be fired in a couple of weeks theres no coming back from this mess.

We’ve been a complete embarrassment both on and off the pitch, I thought the only was was up after Ed but Jesus he’s managed to do the impossible and sink us even further.
 
I thought we did pretty well last summer so it definitely seems like we are worse now. We lost a lot of transfer expertise due to Ed leaving
 
I don't seem to recall there being so many wide, varied and frequent links to players... but then we as a club have never looked as clueless and disorganised before, so it's either for the press to create whatever links they want now.
 
It is just complete panic mode , a lot of targets we are going for now such as Rabiot etc are players we could have sounded out in the first week of the window and moved on if a deal could not be done.

But that assumes there was any coordinated plan like a proper club would have had , putting all the eggs in the De Jong basket was just amateur hour stuff.

The whole thing is just shambolic now , just as the club has been for years.
 
I remember Moyes season being like this, just being linked with different randos every day of the week by the end. After chasing Fabregas and Kroos, suddenly we were after Modric, Bale, De Rossi, just a different name every day. We got Fellaini. Doesn't bode well, given the next few seasons.
 
Glazers are too scared to bring in a proper DOF because they want the final say in transfers.
 
Based on pure rumours and links from the media, I think a lot of clubs are guilty of being scattergun because a good amount of the time, they’re just guessing or possibly be thrown a smokescreen.

Time will tell if it’s scattergun when the window closes and we look at who else has signed.

At the moment with Martinez, Malacia and Eriksen, it’s not.
 
Nah, the 2020 summer was way worse. We got rid of too few players and the incoming transfers were extremely underwhelming: VDB, Cavani, Telles, Amad and Pellistri. I nearly puked just writing that. Even though some of these might turn out good eventually, this is just an objectively a shit transfer summer for a struggling team. And if I'm not mistaken 3 or 4 of these incoming transfers happened on the last day of the transfer window, which is just a peak example of panic buying.

Don't get me wrong, the current summer looks pretty bad given the quality of our squad. But at least Martinez is a starter, and so might Eriksen turn out to be. Malacia is genuinely an exciting prospect and is probably not that far away from the starting XI either. The 2020 summer is a joke in comparison.
 
Summer of 2014. Summer of 2020. Both were as close to as bad as this. The good news is that we got some key deals over the line on deadline day in both cases. The bad news is I'm not convinced that will happen this time...
 
Rajappar said:
The scatter gun approach and leaking it to media is just to get fan engagements in social media. This is by design and our club has never been interested in rebuild.Every year we are 2 or 3 players short. Whenever we feel the team is ready and require the final push, the manager is not backed and sacked at the end of the season.Rinse and repeat year after year.

Only a miracle can save our club and till that time fingers crossed. Also, hoping Ten hag is made of thicker skin and does not cave in to the pressure put on him by the media and our fans.
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This part is utter tripe. You really think the club generates less social media engagements if they win the league and we have actual pull to sign the top players?
 
It feels like the club is involved in the worst property search ever - just running around the whole of the region, wasting time visiting any "4 Bedroom 2 Bathroom" house on Right move without reading the actual house details to see if it is the right house for them.

Then when they make an "offer" on the property they try and do a lowball first offer, offending the property owner and making negotiations tense.

Even when, miracle of miracles, we agree a purchase price it turns out we haven't got a mortgage offer in place or have an idea of who to use as a conveyancer.

As time runs out we make even more desperate bids on unsuitable properties until we are left either massively overpaying for a showy property that doesn't meet our needs, or settling for a run down old property with it's best days behind it.

Heads need to roll!
 
Huh? Why would this be the last? No reason to think that at all.
 
But but But.....Murtough has his army of data analysts at his disposal so everything must be perfect now.
 
BigDycheEnergy said:
Nah, the 2020 summer was way worse. We got rid of too few players and the incoming transfers were extremely underwhelming: VDB, Cavani, Telles, Amad and Pellistri. I nearly puked just writing that. Even though some of these might turn out good eventually, this is just an objectively a shit transfer summer for a struggling team. And if I'm not mistaken 3 or 4 of these incoming transfers happened on the last day of the transfer window, which is just a peak example of panic buying.

Don't get me wrong, the current summer looks pretty bad given the quality of our squad. But at least Martinez is a starter, and so might Eriksen turn out to be. Malacia is genuinely an exciting prospect and is probably not that far away from the starting XI either. The 2020 summer is a joke in comparison.
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I agree about 2020, the moves we made were equivalent to a team that just needed to fine tune and add young players as opposed to a team that was trying to close 20+ point gaps on their rivals. That window really let us down when we should have went heavy into recruiting. I guess the combination of a poor scouting department / board and the pandemic hindered us from making good transfers that year.
 
altodevil said:
This last month it seems there is a new target every day. Could be the media manufacturing clicks, but assuming they do that every year it does still feel like the sheer number of links being made is abnormal. I don't think I remember a summer quite like this.

Transfer failures we've come to expect over the last decade. However under Woodward it felt like a go big or go home mentality. Now it is as if anyone will do. Is this an improvement?

Surely we aspire to having clear-cut targets to fill pre-determined holes, with back-ups for each of them. That's not happened this summer, and is there any reason to believe this will be rectified come January, or even next summer?
Click to expand...

The window after Ferguson with Moyes was like this.
 
Two years ago. We ended up getting Cavani, Telles, Pellistri, and Amad signed on the final day.
 
I doubt it’s as scattergun as the media reports would suggest. It’s open season on United at the moment and it’s generating clicks. Regardless it is absolutely criminal that we have gone into this season without addressing the midfield. While the whole De Jong saga isn’t solely on United, he should’ve been in addition to another midfield signing.
 
Mate we just had a decade of woody floundering in the market and as soon as we give the reigns to his cronies they deliver our worst window since 2013. Keep in mind Murtough and co completely ignored the January window and writing off the season to 'plan' this travesty.

Hopefully heads will roll and we bring experienced people in to head recruitment, until then I don't think we could be in worse hands.
 
Not sure how much of the media links are true, I suspect most aren’t, but without doubt we’ve left things far too late due to our assumption we’d get De Jong and we look pretty amateurish.
 
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