Is this the poorest squad post SAF?

VivaRonaldo85

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I can’t think of a United squad in the past decade or so less devoured of ideas, skill, creativity, charisma, flair, hard work, intelligence, leadership, goals etc etc. And this is not knee jerk by any means.

It’s less than three years ago, our squad included players such as De Gea, Pogba, Mata, Ronaldo, Martial, Greenwood, Pereira, Varane, Fred, Cavani, Sancho, Matic, Henderson, McTominay, Elanga, Garner. No angels I know, but compared to what we have available now?

Collectively as a squad, I believe it’s deteriorating and this is the worst group I can recall.
 
Some players are massively underperforming (eg Martinez, Mainoo) but overall it’s dross

The options for our attack are so unbelievably low level for a club of our supposed calibre and our midfield is mainly old fellas or inexperienced, plus our keeper is a liability. Oh and we don’t have a left back.
 
Yes.

Just look at the attacking options the other coaches had and compare them to our current ones. I would take Lukaku ahead of our current strikers.
 
We peaked with the Mourinho squad, and yes this is by far the worst iteration we've had, especially in attack. We've had some half decent forwards in the last decade or so - Zlatan, Cavani, CR7 (the washed version but still capable of grabbing a goal), Greenwood, heck even Lukaku and and an in form Martial were considerable upgrades over ...erm Rasmus, Zirkzee, Rashford and Antony.
 
It's not even a question at this point. It's absolutely miles off even top 4 standard.
 
I like our keeper, we have some very good CB options and Maz is a cracking player, but then it gets bad, real bad.
We have no left back of note, I’d argue Casemiro is still our best CM by far, and Bruno and Amad are good players.

There’s not quite a good 4-4-2 or 4-3-3 there but Ruud’s idea was closest to what is best to get a decent side out there. This 5-2-2-1 looks absolutely horrendous considering the personnel available, no wonder Ashworth fecked right off.
 
Its pretty bad. I still kind of think having Smalling at RB, Jonny Evans and Phil Jones as centre halves, and a central midfield pairing of Anderson and Cleverley was a pretty poor team. Even that team however still had world class talent sprinkled in - Nani, Rooney, Evra, de Gea etc. All in all this must be the worst squad.
 
VivaRonaldo85 said:
I can’t think of a United squad in the past decade or so less devoured of ideas, skill, creativity, charisma, flair, hard work, intelligence, leadership, goals etc etc. And this is not knee jerk by any means.

It’s less than three years ago, our squad included players such as De Gea, Pogba, Mata, Ronaldo, Martial, Greenwood, Pereira, Varane, Fred, Cavani, Sancho, Matic, Henderson, McTominay, Elanga, Garner. No angels I know, but compared to what we have available now?

Collectively as a squad, I believe it’s deteriorating and this is the worst group I can recall.
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You might get some posts claiming how Pogba was a virus etc but I agree with you. The guy had more talent in his left foot than our entire squad.
Cavani was aging but still twice the striker than any of the options we have. Same goes for Ronaldo of course.

Anyway you are correct. This is an incredibly shit squad assembled by overwhelmed managers, shit scouts and an incompetent board.
 
It's poor in that it doesn't have the balance required and the good players we have just don't have enough to carry a non scoring striker, a petulant captain or a right back moonlighting at LWB. Those imbalances have taken the whole team down.
 
In order to stay sane we have to have hope that the future looks better than it did in 2021 with the kids Yoro, Mainoo, Amad and Garnacho hopefully coming good eventually. Then there’s some steady very good players in Maz and Ugarte. Just need to get rid of the old toxic guard, stop signing useless average dross like Zirkzee, promote few promising players from the academy and get in a few quality additions.
 
We’ve genuinely sold better players than we’ve bought to replace. For example, I miss Fred’s enthusiasm and work rate, he lost the ball a bit but everyone does that now anyway. We’ve spent £600-800m over the last few years and for what? If this club wasn’t propped up by its loyal fan base, like other clubs, it would have gone out of existence a long time ago.

I think there were players who were capable of better than ETH was getting from them, but the change of system has negated a lot of that potential upside. And our weak mentality where a setback ruins us again, is inescapable. I knew that Bournemouth result was huge because I knew it would kill any belief or anything positive, such is the vulnerability of these players.

With regards to my comment about the system, I think it’s outcast players with potential like Garnacho. But I don’t think he should change the system just to fit what we have. We’ve been down that road and there’s no quick fix there. Unfortunately some of the more promising players simply might have to be moved on for players that suit what we are trying to do. But this season is going to be grim, whether he sticks with this system or changes it. Is going to be really bad for a while now I think.
 
By some distance, we don't have a single world class player in our club at the moment. Our starters in attack wouldn't start for any of the big clubs and their bench players would easily start for us. There is no wow factor at all. Even when we were making bad signings in the past we were getting the odd one like Bruno right but this current set of players is just utter utter dross. We have spent insane money on Hojlund, Zirkzee, Antony, Mount etc and there is zero output or hope from any of them.
 
I think we have some very good players just the time to coach new ideas will take time
 
Table doesn't lie, more than a blip and a culmination of past it players and a group of too young players and chances are many not good enough or years away. Very little strength or physicality.

We're decrepit FC and have lost our players that papered over the cracks in Bruno and Rashford. The heady days of a fit Rashford, Martial, Cavani and Greenwood with prime Bruno are long gone.

Unbelievable spending on Mount, Case, Antony, Onana, Sancho, Hojlund.
 
Yes it is because we’ve seen the best days of likes of Rashford, Shaw and Bruno. Our younger players are all a long way from the required level and we’ve recruited terribly for too long. The quality of the squad is worse than it looks on paper.

In another thread someone posted our top 10 earners and 7 of them don’t start for one reason or another, it’s an untenable situation. I think the final nail in the coffin was the 330m give or take spent on Onana, Hojlund, Casemiro, Mount and Antony.

I think that finally tipped us over the edge in terms of having such a poor but expensive squad with a PSR legacy of fees and wages that will take another three years to correct.

This only gets turned round quickly by unearthing some cheap gems and signing one or two really exceptional players. Too many of these players are unsellable and will only leave when their co tracts expire.
 
This squad obviously is poor, but the root cause of the rock bottom form is that many of them are wrong players for the new formation.

Case in point: we need at least 4 wingbacks for 3-4-3 and the only player we have that can play it properly is Amad. Similarly, we need 3-4 good #10s and all we have is Bruno with all his faults, unless you want to count always-injured Mount or Eriksen who doesn't have ability for 90 minutes anymore. We also only have Ugarte in holding role and we need couple more.

Anorim is a great coach but changing the system may have been INEOS's gravest mistake. Not only we don't have players who can even be coached in this system (neither Garnacho nor Rashy can imo) it is not clear if this system can even be successful in EPL

Why did we make such dramatic turn?
 
VivaRonaldo85 said:
I can’t think of a United squad in the past decade or so less devoured of ideas, skill, creativity, charisma, flair, hard work, intelligence, leadership, goals etc etc. And this is not knee jerk by any means.

It’s less than three years ago, our squad included players such as De Gea, Pogba, Mata, Ronaldo, Martial, Greenwood, Pereira, Varane, Fred, Cavani, Sancho, Matic, Henderson, McTominay, Elanga, Garner. No angels I know, but compared to what we have available now?

Collectively as a squad, I believe it’s deteriorating and this is the worst group I can recall.
Click to expand...
100% it is, I can only think of 5 players I would keep:

Yoro, Ugarte, Mainoo, Mazraoui and Diallo.

That's doesn't even make a first team, let alone a squad, rest are miles away from United quality or top old (Eriksen and Casimero)
 
We spent 200 million on Mount, Antony and Hojlund. These 3 last season scored 12 goals in the Premier league combined. Someone running the club thought that the next attacker we needed was a guy from Bologna who had a shaky scoring record. We are so badly run it's hard to believe that this level of inefficiency can even be possible
 
VivaRonaldo85 said:
I can’t think of a United squad in the past decade or so less devoured of ideas, skill, creativity, charisma, flair, hard work, intelligence, leadership, goals etc etc. And this is not knee jerk by any means.

It’s less than three years ago, our squad included players such as De Gea, Pogba, Mata, Ronaldo, Martial, Greenwood, Pereira, Varane, Fred, Cavani, Sancho, Matic, Henderson, McTominay, Elanga, Garner. No angels I know, but compared to what we have available now?

Collectively as a squad, I believe it’s deteriorating and this is the worst group I can recall.
Click to expand...
It’s not even close. “Bruno” is our best player. Amad is probably our most effective attacker and he’s played about 6 months of PL football. We have exactly one midfielder that can hang both athletically and technique wise. Defensively our best combination of technique and athleticism is a 19 year old we just signed still trying to acclimate. Our fullbacks are all mostly complete 0’s as final third threats.
 
People are up in arms about results or our place in the league but they still don’t realize that this squad, especially in attack, is absolute dogshit compared to many others in the top half. Combine that with still trying to shoehorn in our captain who gets utterly exposed when asked to do anything other then freely roam around the pitch with full license to do whatever he wants, and it’s a bad combination.
 
ForeverRed1 said:
We’ve said this for the last 12 years, it just always feels bad in the here and now :( we’ve had crap squads for a long long time.
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Goals wins games and we've never had a squad so devoid of attacking quality in the PL.

There's at least 15 teams in the PL that have at least one forward that would start for us over what we have.
 
sugar_kane said:
Some players are massively underperforming (eg Martinez, Mainoo) but overall it’s dross

The options for our attack are so unbelievably low level for a club of our supposed calibre and our midfield is mainly old fellas or inexperienced, plus our keeper is a liability. Oh and we don’t have a left back.
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Yeah it’s a real shame seeing the performance of these two
 
Its certainly the lazist and least committed, all being treated with kids gloves. A few hairdryers would do no harm.
 
VivaRonaldo85 said:
I can’t think of a United squad in the past decade or so less devoured of ideas, skill, creativity, charisma, flair, hard work, intelligence, leadership, goals etc etc. And this is not knee jerk by any means.

It’s less than three years ago, our squad included players such as De Gea, Pogba, Mata, Ronaldo, Martial, Greenwood, Pereira, Varane, Fred, Cavani, Sancho, Matic, Henderson, McTominay, Elanga, Garner. No angels I know, but compared to what we have available now?

Collectively as a squad, I believe it’s deteriorating and this is the worst group I can recall.
Click to expand...
We keep replacing average or good players with bad players and people are surprised?

The thing is that like - Rashford might be underperforming but he's still -our top scorer-. Scored more goals than Hojlund, Garnacho, Anthony, Amad, etc etc.

And we want to replace him. But this is the problem. We replaced McTominay and got worse. We got rid of Fred and Elanga and got worse. We replaced an underperforming goalkeeper on big wages with a bad one on big wages. We keep making mind blowingly capricious and IDIOTIC decisions, and it's so tiring.

Cavani was absolute class. McTominay was decent. Mata was class. Pogba was good.

But these players we have now? Onana is worse than de Gea, Hojlund is just not the answer, Antony - enough said. We've spent BILLIONS of pounds on players that aren't able to stand up to Wolves or Bournemouth. I don't know how you run a club this badly, but we have.
 
Easily the poorest I've seen in the 40 years I have been a supporter. Never has our attack been this poor...
 
By a country mile, yes. We have bought more and more talentless players over the years and particularly recently.

Most of this squad are not good enough for the Premier League, let alone United. We have so many perma-crocks, over the hill players on huge wages, weak mentality players, and ones who are just massively lacking in basic footballing skills for the position they actually play!

It's absolutely crazy to me, that our most highly rated, up and coming superstar can't put in a decent pass or cross, can't defend at all, and has no footballing intelligence to speak of. That sums up the current United. No standards really at all anymore, and that's what Amorim is up against.

We need a full rebuild. If I'm completely honest, looking at both the United sides of the past, and top teams of today, we have maybe 5-6 players who should even be in a Manchester United squad, let alone first team.
 
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