Is winning everything?

birdy2121 said:
Birthday cake gate and 3 manufactured pay rises. For the record I would have sold Rooney when he bent the club over a couple of seasons ago.

As for young being a mercenary player, that's a silly comment. I am not sure what you definition of mercenary is but mine is; A player that is willing to join a club the are ambivalent about in a league they don't favour as the money is just too good to refuse.

Young has never expressed a desire to play in Spain, he is at the biggest club in his chosen league. Falco on the other hand courts Real Madrid publicly on twitter and in the press.

Also we have PSG today making revelations Di Maria wanted to join PSG, I am not sure of their validity but again not great to hear from a UTD perspective.

All I crave is a team that gives their all until the 94th min and longer if required and I am not sure on a wet Tuesday night in a lower profile game players like Di Maria will stand up and be counted the way Utd legends of the past like Keane, vidic etc have.
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We bought keane and vidic. Lol

Mind you keane was record signing back then
 
Andrew~ said:
So some of you are seriously asking whether, in a professional sport, winning is everything?

Of course it fecking is. This isn't your kick-about in the park where you only invite your friends. The only objective in professional sports is winning. Every thing else is post hoc rationalising.
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Exactly! :wenger:

Boo fecking hoo, no one except England bleat on about the method of Argentina's win in 1986, history remembers them as World Cup winners.

If winning the league meant Falcao slipping on his arse, his boot flying off and nipping the ball past a Joe Hart who'd just been taken out by a Fellaini special I'd fecking take it! Feck it if Welbeck wasn't there to sky it over the bar! (And I guarantee that all the moaners round here lately would be up out of their arm chairs screaming "get the feck in!" and creating tons of pictures aka. John Terry afterwards.)
 
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For me, I feel we should at the very least be playing attractive, attacking football and also be in the Champions League. The rest is a bonus. I'm not going to go gagging for trophies, I just want to be thoroughly entertained by a team I can support. If United didn't play attractive football I probably would never have begun supporting them when I started watching football.
 
Sky1981 said:
We bought keane and vidic. Lol

Mind you keane was record signing back then
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I know we brought them but they were not pining to play elsewhere - that is my point!!
If you are comparing the personal attributes and demands of Keane to Di Maria, I give up.
 
birdy2121 said:
I know we brought them but they were not pining to play elsewhere - that is my point!!
If you are comparing the personal attributes and demands of Keane to Di Maria, I give up.
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Keane is all that years after, when he first sets his foot in old Trafford he's just another highly paid mercenaries.

Well. Legens have to start somewhere
 
birdy2121 said:
I know we brought them but they were not pining to play elsewhere - that is my point!!
If you are comparing the personal attributes and demands of Keane to Di Maria, I give up.
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Keane flirted with the likes of Bayern, Juventus and Real Madrid when he was having that contract squabble in 99
 
Getsme said:
How is it?
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Because the dad taking his 5 year old son to a football match for the first time would probably disagree. Winning is great, it's fun, but like I said above, if there is no point to the game other than winning then you might as well just not watch the games and then rock up to the victory parade in May.
 
Kag said:
Because the dad taking his 5 year old son to a football match for the first time would probably disagree. Winning is great, it's fun, but like I said above, if there is no point to the game other than winning then you might as well just not watch the games and then rock up to the victory parade in May.
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I understand where you're coming from, I just think we are viewing it from a different angle. Of course you can’t always win, but the desire to win has to be there or else there would be no passion or point in the game, no chanting in the terraces to edge the team on, no highs or lows, no meltdowns or tears of joy, no banter between mates. Football would become meaningless and non competitive. Every team goes out to win, no matter if its a team in the Premiership or a Sunday league team.
Yes, you always support the team, win, lose or draw but your main aim be it as a player, manager or a fan has to be to win, to me its that simple.
Take the desire to win away from football and you may as well take away football.
 
birdy2121 said:
Birthday cake gate and 3 manufactured pay rises. For the record I would have sold Rooney when he bent the club over a couple of seasons ago.

As for young being a mercenary player, that's a silly comment. I am not sure what you definition of mercenary is but mine is; A player that is willing to join a club the are ambivalent about in a league they don't favour as the money is just too good to refuse.

Young has never expressed a desire to play in Spain, he is at the biggest club in his chosen league. Falco on the other hand courts Real Madrid publicly on twitter and in the press.

Also we have PSG today making revelations Di Maria wanted to join PSG, I am not sure of their validity but again not great to hear from a UTD perspective.

All I crave is a team that gives their all until the 94th min and longer if required and I am not sure on a wet Tuesday night in a lower profile game players like Di Maria will stand up and be counted the way Utd legends of the past like Keane, vidic etc have.
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So... Young wasn't a Mercenarie? I got lost at what you're trying to say? City aren't ambivalent, they're the reigning champion and the best bet for a trophy. So any teams that chooses Manchester United is a mercenary?

Falcao wants to play at one of the best club in the world, isn't that what winners do? Wanted to play for the best? Since when does wanting to play for a bigger club an act of mercenary?

And again, your second statement I bolded is an insult to Di Maria, you're saying he only comes here for Money and doesn't care about winning and not even bothering. Furthermore, you give stupid examples of Vidic, Keane, and etc (I Assume it'll be Evra, Rio in the past, Carrick, Rooney). These are all players we bought at premium price (Rio, Keane, Rooney).

PS : Di Maria plays for Real Madrid, and I'm sure his wage there isn't much less than whatever number we gave him.
 
Raoul said:
Its obviously not everything.....as evidenced by the time we hired David Moyes.
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We hired Moyes because there was a criminal lack of Succession Planning, which was down to the Glazers and David Gill. A business the size of Utd, were it a FTSE100 company, would be slayed by its shareholders for an omission like that. Appalling mismanagement.
 
Sir A1ex said:
I reckon the split we are seeing in various threads over stuff like Welbeck leaving, Falcao coming in, the club's traditions, etc all comes down to one thing - Is winning everything?
While a sizeable minority appear to think it's more complicated than that, it seems that the majority would say yes, winning is everything. In fact, from what I've read, a lot of people are absolutely baffled and slightly amused by any other suggestion. "Why could it possibly matter that we've lost a home-grown player, when his replacement is clearly better?" is the general refrain. The logic is so obvious and any other opinion so crazy that people descend into condescension and mockery.

But I think you need to look a bit further. I'm sure we've all come across non-football fans who just can't see the point of supporting a football team... "how can you get excited about 22 men kicking a piece of leather around a field?" they ask, and they are essentially right. How you can become upset, proud, angry, obsessed and a million other emotions about it is absolutely beyond them, and again it's hard to argue against. Why on earth are you walking on air on a Monday morning after United have beaten Liverpool at the weekend... what the feck difference to your life does it make if one bunch of millionaires you don't know kicked a football a bit better than another bunch?

So, no, there is no sneeringly obvious logic in putting success above all else. If you're going to be totally irrational, don't try and claim that your way of being totally irrational is more logical than other people's. If some people take their joy not just from success but from other less straightforward measures of the club, then they have every right to.

That isn't to say that you don't have the right to purely be interested in trophies - I'm sure we all take different things from football. One of my main joys (not that I get to experience it much anymore) is the whole camaraderie of the crowd... when I used to get to matches I'd often hardly take in the details of what was happening on the pitch, but I was on cloud 9 singing, clapping and jumping with thousands of other reds. Others like to study the match in intricate detail and analyse every move - each to their own.

So if some of us would maybe even sacrifice the odd trophy for the chance to be able to take pride in how we've gone about winning those we do win, that's just how it is, I'm afraid.
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I agree completely, it has been discussed at length in a thread called On the importance of British players, where I highlighted the difference between ambition and goal.

If the goal is to win, and the ambition is to do so in a traditional 'United way', then I get less joy out of achieving goals that are not attained in line with the ambition.

But then there is the commercial side of it that has ruined modern football, we simply cannot afford not to win with the wage bill and competition we're facing.
Given the way football is heading, I get less and less confident in our ability to generate youth prospects that are good enough for this arena.
 
Yes, winning is the whole point. But the parameters for winning can be objective. For us, this season, considering where we are and where we were, I would consider top 3 (top 4 at a push) winning.

Next season, hopefully, anything short of Champions should be considered losing.

#winning
 
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