I believe that his 2019 summer transfer window might genuinely be the worst, most damaging one in our history. We managed to make a profit on Dan James, who was the best signing at £15m. Other than that, we signed Maguire at £80m and AWB for £60m, two players he certainly requested for and wanted as part of his culture revolution. That is serious ineptitude on every level, because these two will never be title winning players, but we also can’t sell them unless we accept a massive loss, and even benching them is difficult due to their price and wage.
A portion of the blame even has to go to him for these players’ collective attitude. This is what happens when the previous manager continually panders to particular players no matter their performance levels and even captains one of them despite said player being nothing more than a mid table CB who had just been at the club for 6 months, while totally ostracising the rest, like Dalot, Bailly, Donny and Lingard. You get a dressing room who are blatantly not together, and also one who clearly cannot take criticism. There is a clear correlation between how harsh Rangnick has progressively been in the press, and our worsening results. There have even been reports that a select group of players are unhappy with Rio’s vehement criticism. Maybe play well rather than complain then…
However, I wouldn’t blame him for our insipid football. To be honest, we played much better stuff under him last season and after lockdown in 2020 than what we are seeing now. Even his biggest critic cannot say that the period in 2020 where we won four games in a row by theee goals or the 6-2 wins against Leeds and Roma weren’t exhilarating, not least beating Southampton by nine. Under Ralf, we’ve only had two truly comfortable wins, the 3-1s at home to Burnley and away to Brentford. We’ve had to scramble and score deceiving late goals in our only other two goal victories over Brighton and Leeds. Ole’s football this season was garbage, but so is Ralf’s. I wouldn’t fully blame Ralf either though, because this dressing room are a bunch of nothing players bar a few.