If the choices are signing one superstar/strengthening the squad - what do you do?

You dont really see teams like Bayern buying players for their bench. They might buy young talent that get loaned out but never bench players.
When you improve your starting eleven you automatically improve your depth as well since your current starting players will be your new bench players.
How many players did Ferguson go for that where meant to simply be on the bench?
 
I’d take Grealish, Brooks and Upemecano as an alternative to Sancho and a Gabriel level defender. I rate sancho, but we’ll still be in the same position we are in now with a flagging team where we can’t really rest anybody. Minimal break this year and a condensed fixture list next year is going to give us massive issues with injuries.

Sancho will give us better numbers from the right than Greenwood does, but if I was to guess, not massively.

The three give us 3 solid rotation options either themselves or the players they displace.
 
RedNed77 said:
I’d take Grealish, Brooks and Upemecano as an alternative to Sancho and a Gabriel level defender. I rate sancho, but we’ll still be in the same position we are in now with a flagging team where we can’t really rest anybody. Minimal break this year and a condensed fixture list next year is going to give us massive issues with injuries.

Sancho will give us better numbers from the right than Greenwood does, but if I was to guess, not massively.

The three give us 3 solid rotation options either themselves or the players they displace.
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Except brooks and grealish aren’t challenging there replacements.
 
Sunny Jim said:
For me its easy- choice and focus. Get one wc player (Sancho?) and focus on the league and CL. Take domestic cups as a chance for 2nd choice players
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+1 but Ole is too old school to do that. He wants to win something next season and we probably won't win either league / cl.
 
Strengthen the squad everytime. I would not sign players who demand more than £10m sign-on fee; especially not a 20 year old. Given we have so many squad weaknesses I can't understand lack of activity in transfer market. IMHO all 25 members of the squad should be 'trusted to start'. We should be paying £20m - £30m for squad players (about 1 or 2 years experience), £40m - £50m at most (3 years of good experience). Buying superstars broke Barcelona.
 
I would take squad depth over Sancho right now. If we had the team already in place, and signing Sancho would have pushed us over the top, then absolutely. But we are short of quality on the bench, plus the first team can be improved in other areas for us to challenge in the league and Europe. Liverpool sold their only 2 stars in Suarez and Coutinho, used that cash to build the team, and then waited for Van Djik to become available and put them over the top.

For all the money that City has spent, did they really sign a star apart from Aguero maybe? The other players were expensive, above average, but not really stars or superstars.

Coaching, tactics, and sound managerial decisions will also play a huge factor in how the squad plays.
 
I think I’ll go with signing Sancho only. We have seen what one top player can do with the team (Bruno). Our current squad is good enough to challenge for top 4 and still slightly more favourite than Spurs & Arsenal. Signing Sancho will put us into comfortable position to secure top 4. We can strengthen the other areas for challenging the league next year in 2021.

Right now what we need is winger to provide width quality because we don’t have natural winger apart from James and it’s best to spend the money on the right players and let’s don’t mess with it. The player would like to join us this year and we are in the best position to get him now so let’s not trying to delay it to next year where we will have more competition.
 
I would strengthen the squad no doubt. We already have a objectively good attack and sure adding Sancho will improve the variety of our attack, but adding 2-3 in the midfield and defense would will improve the balance of the team. And it doesn't mean signing obvious bench players but potential challengers to first XI that will help, but at a lower cost than Sancho.
 
We simply have to be signing players that improve the first XI because that in turn will make our bench stronger
 
Sunny Jim said:
For me its easy- choice and focus. Get one wc player (Sancho?) and focus on the league and CL. Take domestic cups as a chance for 2nd choice players
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We already know what our "2nd choice" players give us, no?

Lingard, Periera, Mata - they're simply not good enough, we might as well not enter any domestic cups if we are not going to try and win them.

When did our mentality become so small? We should be challenging for trophies, cups too. We cant do that with this squad.

We need to sell 6 and sign 3 or 4 and improve the whole squad, not just the first x11
 
UNITED ACADEMY said:
I think I’ll go with signing Sancho only. We have seen what one top player can do with the team (Bruno). Our current squad is good enough to challenge for top 4 and still slightly more favourite than Spurs & Arsenal. Signing Sancho will put us into comfortable position to secure top 4. We can strengthen the other areas for challenging the league next year in 2021.

Right now what we need is winger to provide width quality because we don’t have natural winger apart from James and it’s best to spend the money on the right players and let’s don’t mess with it. The player would like to join us this year and we are in the best position to get him now so let’s not trying to delay it to next year where we will have more competition.
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Bruno cannot play to such a high standard every game though, no chance. And currently we drop Bruno for Lingard/Periera? No way in hell thats good enough.

If we only sign Sancho - same issue. He cannot play every game either and we'd still need additional signings to improve the squad

Our current squad hit top 4, yes. But we cant reply on that same squad to maintain top 4 while other teams do improve. Chelsea are making a hell of a statement in the market and surely Arsenal will improve. Spurs, Wolves, Leicester will be there or thereabouts too so it's absolutely vital we make progress in the transfer window or we could be looking at another dire season regarding the league.

We have a long season and we are desperate for a trophy.

We currently aren't good enough to reply on top 4 being a give when your bench includes Mata, Periera and Lingard to name some.

This thread shouldn't exist anyway. We should be able to sign sancho and 3 other players in this window. Just highlights how absolutely inept Woodward and Judge are. We are a shambles and our transfer dealing are the only stumbling block to us improving.

If you consider the below players are all attainable:
Sancho
Grealish
Brooks
Van Der Beek
Gabriel

We scout thousands of players and the above are just examples of course, but there are so many top players out there who we could sign with no issue who instantly improve our squad. It's mental to think we havent done any business whatsoever bar sending Chong on loan. And to be fair, if we aren't signing anyone we could have probably done with him around the squad. Mental state of affairs at our club
 
I have been thinking about this alot and have come to the conclusion that Sancho alot would be better than having 3 players for the same price.

Sancho would mean we have Rahford, Sancho, Martial, Greenwood, Bruno in our front line.

The other players attainable are Grealish, VDB, Brooks who are squad players, when we need starters.

Lets say we want to rotate, I am confident that playing Bruno, Sancho, Martial, Lingard in some games is good enough to win a game.

I am also confident in some away games playing Greenwood, Rashford, Pogba, Bruno, Lingard is good enough too.

We can also some games push Pogba CAM and start with Fred and Mctominay giving Bruno a rest.

Some games we can start Sancho as CAM or a 2 up top with Martial and Greenwood.

We have not seen Lingard, Mata, Ighalo play with out first 11 much, when they do, I think they can do a job.

Fred we saw in the Europa league can do a job as a DM as well.
 
Craig Ward said:
Bruno cannot play to such a high standard every game though, no chance. And currently we drop Bruno for Lingard/Periera? No way in hell thats good enough.

If we only sign Sancho - same issue. He cannot play every game either and we'd still need additional signings to improve the squad

Our current squad hit top 4, yes. But we cant reply on that same squad to maintain top 4 while other teams do improve. Chelsea are making a hell of a statement in the market and surely Arsenal will improve. Spurs, Wolves, Leicester will be there or thereabouts too so it's absolutely vital we make progress in the transfer window or we could be looking at another dire season regarding the league.

We have a long season and we are desperate for a trophy.

We currently aren't good enough to reply on top 4 being a give when your bench includes Mata, Periera and Lingard to name some.

This thread shouldn't exist anyway. We should be able to sign sancho and 3 other players in this window. Just highlights how absolutely inept Woodward and Judge are. We are a shambles and our transfer dealing are the only stumbling block to us improving.

If you consider the below players are all attainable:
Sancho
Grealish
Brooks
Van Der Beek
Gabriel

We scout thousands of players and the above are just examples of course, but there are so many top players out there who we could sign with no issue who instantly improve our squad. It's mental to think we havent done any business whatsoever bar sending Chong on loan. And to be fair, if we aren't signing anyone we could have probably done with him around the squad. Mental state of affairs at our club
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Quality over quantity to me. I was never expecting our budget in covid year to be above 120m pounds. There are many clubs out there are not capable to spend more than 100m pounds except for Chelsea who got 140m-150m pounds from selling Hazard, Luiz & Morata.

I would rather us spending 108m pounds on Sancho only than spending 108m pounds on 3 players (35m Brooks, 45m VDB, 27m Gabriel) that are below Sancho's quality, Sancho's quality should be what we are aiming for. It's like how people wanted us to sign DM & CB in 2017 when we could actually use the money on top class centre back and postpone the DM to 2018 (Lindelof 31m plus 7m adds on & Matic 40m instead of Van Dijk 75m). We've tried the method of choosing quantity over quality before and it didn't work.

We need a winger to provide width quality and let's not waste our time & money on someone cheaper so we can share the budget on other position like before. IMO signing Sancho alone will be enough to secure our top 4 spot comfortably. We were never gonna be favourite to challenge the league based on only 2 years transfer window anyway.

Sancho, Rashford, Martial, Greenwood will be rotated in CL & League games. While Fred and Matic or Scott can always play together with Pogba being pushed in advanced role if we want to rest Bruno.
 
UNITED ACADEMY said:
I think I’ll go with signing Sancho only. We have seen what one top player can do with the team (Bruno). Our current squad is good enough to challenge for top 4 and still slightly more favourite than Spurs & Arsenal. Signing Sancho will put us into comfortable position to secure top 4. We can strengthen the other areas for challenging the league next year in 2021.

Right now what we need is winger to provide width quality because we don’t have natural winger apart from James and it’s best to spend the money on the right players and let’s don’t mess with it. The player would like to join us this year and we are in the best position to get him now so let’s not trying to delay it to next year where we will have more competition.
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Agreed. Usually I'd be all about the squad, but he could inject another attacking level - like Bruno, whilst allowing us to rotate a bit. I'd look to our reserves to help us in rotation throughout the season if we can't afford to invest in both. Mejibri could get a couple of fleeting appearances, as well as Laird.
 
Still could get a CB and AM with Sancho if only we could somehow shift that expensive deadwood cluttering up the place
 
I think our focus has to be on signing two to three first team players rather than squad backup. The result of this is that it will make the squad better because guaranteed starters now will find themselves as rotational players next season - they will still probably get 30-40 games for United next season and if they are good enough they will force their way into the starting 11 again. There's no point signing more players like James and Ighalo who aren't good enough to seriously challenge our better players week in, week out. If we got Sancho, Grealish and a decent midfielder or defender, or really any two or three of those our squad would be improved no end.
 
I'd go Sancho. He'd be a gamechanger for our right wing and means we'll have at least one good attacking option to bring off the bench.

If we end up looking at several players for the same amount of money we'll likely skimp on quality too.
 
100% I'd go all in on Sancho, players like him don't come around too often, he's happy to come here by all accounts and the pandemic means we don't have any real opposition to getting the deal done (outside our own view on how the deal should be structured). Roll the dice and a year down the line with 1 year left on his contract you might see the likes of Liverpool, Barcelona, Madrid all able to pay the reduced fee and suddenly we're not top of the queue any longer. I think we saw that the front 3 were hugely effective but we lacked any genuine competition from the bench. Imagine Greenwood being the young hungry bench striker pushing Rashford Martial and Sancho to keep their form up. I'd happily miss out on adding an extra midfielder or defender and just hope that the addition of Sancho would ease the creative load on Bruno and Pogba.

With that being said, it might not simply be a case of we have 150 mil and we either spend it on option A (Sancho and potential) or option B (3 good players who will all impact first team). The board might flat out refuse to bow to Dortmund's demand even if the funds are available and the manager is happy with the outcome.
 
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