United’s Worst Decisions of the Last 12 Years

The summer 2023 transfer business done by ETH and Utd will go down in infamy.

Onana
Mount
Hojlund
Amrabat

I mean that's what? like £180m outlay?

And all on utter shit.
 
Not signing a recognised prime striker since Lukaku

Was obvious where we were headed and we just went along and did it

A positive - get one this summer and I think we’ll move up 6-8 places next season. Think it’ll make that big a difference
 
LawCharltonBest said:
Not signing a recognised prime striker since Lukaku

Was obvious where we were headed and we just went along and did it

A positive - get one this summer and I think we’ll move up 6-8 places next season. Think it’ll make that big a difference
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A truly top class striker is very hard to get. Arsenal would have won some titles recently if they had managed to get one.
Although at times it seems like a decent Championship level striker would have improved us greatly this year.
 
The worst decision, is that we have only made 1 correct decision in the past decade - Bruno. Even Bruno is controversial in eyes of some fans, but at least he can play consistently throughout his career, suit to his position, and contribute to the game. WHO else can stand beside Bruno?
 
Woodward is almost certainly the biggest mistake, but I think the most interesting sliding doors moment is going from LVG to Jose. While LVG was not the answer to our problems, under him we did at least turn into a possession hogging team at a time when the big teams were all heading in that direction.

We should have gone from LVG to another possession based manager who added more risk taking up front with a high press. Instead we went to Jose, who went completely against the popular tide in terms of tactics and set us on another 6 or 7 years of reactive football. The playing style and squad composition stuck on through Ole, and to a lesser extent ETH, and we're still trying to sort it out all these years later.

Obviously there's more to it than that alone, but it definitely feels like that was one of the biggest lost opportunities.
 
Hands down it has to be the Glazers and their utter incompetance, in letting a banker run the club. This overarches anything else.
 
HackeyC said:
Allowing Moyes to clear out the Fergie coaching team.
Ten Haag extension was obviously wrong
Dan Ashworth
Ineos?


Buying/Contracting, in no order:

Schweinsteiger
Falcao
Pogba
Antony
Casemiro
Sancho
Van De Beek
Onana
Lukaku
Sanchez
Mkhitaryan
Depay
Di Maria

There's £1bn of money thrown away
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Schweinsteiger p35 g2 a2
Falcao p29 g4 a5
Antony p96 g12 a5
Sancho p83 g12 a3
Van De Beek p62 g2 a2
Sanchez p45 g5 a9
Mkhitaryan p63 g13 a10
Depay p53 g7 a4
Di Maria p32 g4 a11


In no world these four belong in list with those above or classed as money thrown away.

Pogba p233 g39 a48
Lukaku p96 g42 a12
Casemiro P116 g15 a9
Onana g92 cs22
 
United have never really been a well run club.

The biggest mistakes that we made in the immediate few years after Fergie leaving was assuming that "modern day" managers could manage the team and club like Fergie did. So much of the shit off the pitch was hidden by the fact that Fergie could always a build a good to great squad that would challenge.

The second we brought in a manager that couldn't manage the team/club like Fergie did, those off the pitch issues became more apparent.

I'd always argue that Gill wasn't a particularly great CEO. He just let Fergie get on with his job and didn't really put a proper footballing structure in place that would have allowed us to continue some degree of success.

Woodward was essentially on a hiding to nothing when he got the top job as there wasn't really any plans/strategy anywhere.
 
I'm still mad that we let Welbeck go to bring Falcao in. Not our worst decision by any means but it was stupid in hindsight. He'd still be our best striker now, but that probably says more about our recruitment than it does about him.
LawCharltonBest said:
Not signing a recognised prime striker since Lukaku

Was obvious where we were headed and we just went along and did it
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It's because we invested too much time in Rashford and Martial while wasting money on other areas of the team.
 
Ten hag freezing out every other wide player to favour Antony is a huge mistake which will keep costing us like it did with Elanga
 
LeonDion said:
Schweinsteiger p35 g2 a2
Falcao p29 g4 a5
Antony p96 g12 a5
Sancho p83 g12 a3
Van De Beek p62 g2 a2
Sanchez p45 g5 a9
Mkhitaryan p63 g13 a10
Depay p53 g7 a4
Di Maria p32 g4 a11


In no world these four belong in list with those above or classed as money thrown away.

Pogba p233 g39 a48
Lukaku p96 g42 a12
Casemiro P116 g15 a9
Onana g92 cs22
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Lukaku we recovered money so can accept. Pogba walked on a free, again after £75m purchase. You're defending Onana? Casemiro has been average.
 
It's hard to point to a decision that wasn't made, but potentially when Woodward succeeded gill, and then the many points afterwards that they could have appointed a football person.

In my opinion they still haven't really fixed this issue, although berrada is obviously a football person, the structure still looks so unclear from the outside.
 
Crashoutcassius said:
It's hard to point to a decision that wasn't made, but potentially when Woodward succeeded gill, and then the many points afterwards that they could have appointed a football person.

In my opinion they still haven't really fixed this issue, although berrada is obviously a football person, the structure still looks so unclear from the outside.
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Disagree, think the structure is pretty clear now with Berrada being the head man overseeing it all, and Vivell/Wilcox being the main concentrated recruiting heads. The only person who I'm not sure what the feck he does is Brailsford, but I'm pretty sure he's just SJR's buddy
 
KStandBarmyArmy1993 said:
United have never really been a well run club.

The biggest mistakes that we made in the immediate few years after Fergie leaving was assuming that "modern day" managers could manage the team and club like Fergie did. So much of the shit off the pitch was hidden by the fact that Fergie could always a build a good to great squad that would challenge.

The second we brought in a manager that couldn't manage the team/club like Fergie did, those off the pitch issues became more apparent.

I'd always argue that Gill wasn't a particularly great CEO. He just let Fergie get on with his job and didn't really put a proper footballing structure in place that would have allowed us to continue some degree of success.

Woodward was essentially on a hiding to nothing when he got the top job as there wasn't really any plans/strategy anywhere.
Click to expand...


Spot on.

The biggest mistake we/Sir Alex made was picking Moyes to take over. He'd not shown anything even close to say he had the skills to manage a club this size.

Moyes is a really good mid table club manager, but simply not cut out for the very top. I saw a stat last night that said he'd never won at Anfield at any point in his career which is staggering considering he's had 22 attempts and Liverpool weren't particularly good for much of his Everton career!
 
This is a tough question to answer because in reality I'm not sure if there's a single "worst decision" as opposed to a series of bad decisions that over time led to the crumbling of anything positive at the club. We stagnated any sort of development as a club with the appointing of Woodward, where after that we didn't modernize any part of the club and really just papered over the cracks repeatedly enough to make UCL money. We never tried to actively build a base or have any sort of long term strategy, and both our wage structure and transfer strategy (along with manager hirings) reflected that as a whole. We've mostly let managers run the club themselves with very little competent footballing structure around them, and the infrastructure of the club as a whole became outdated and bloated.

I think the straw that ultimately broke the camels back was the last few windows pre-INEOS though along with the Greenwood incident. Those windows stopped the sort of lucky cycle of hitting on short term signings with enough quality to save results, and there were monstrous outlays for players that mostly all were terrible and difficult to move on. At the same time, we lost possibly the best English forward of his age group (100m or so in value) for nothing at a position that we were already hurting for depth in. Combine those all together and you get a team that basically relied on Rashford and inshallah for the past 3 years for any sort of attacking quality (and Rashford only gave us one year of that).
 
I don't think giving Rooney a big contract extension was a mistake because in the summer of 2013 he was still a fine player.

The mistake there was to spend the entire summer chasing the signings of Fabregas and Bale. In the last week they had nothing and rushed to get Fellaini.
 
LawCharltonBest said:
Not signing a recognised prime striker since Lukaku

Was obvious where we were headed and we just went along and did it

A positive - get one this summer and I think we’ll move up 6-8 places next season. Think it’ll make that big a difference
Click to expand...

Ehhh... Not to piss on your chips but we will definitely be having Hojlund, Zirkzee and Obi next season. So fingers crossed they train well over the summer!
 
LordSpud said:
Ehhh... Not to piss on your chips but we will definitely be having Hojlund, Zirkzee and Obi next season. So fingers crossed they train well over the summer!
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United make some fecking rotten decisions but not even they will go into this summer not aiming to sign a striker. Nobody can score. It’s quite an obvious problem
 
MaMa given red said:
Spot on.

The biggest mistake we/Sir Alex made was picking Moyes to take over. He'd not shown anything even close to say he had the skills to manage a club this size.

Moyes is a really good mid table club manager, but simply not cut out for the very top. I saw a stat last night that said he'd never won at Anfield at any point in his career which is staggering considering he's had 22 attempts and Liverpool weren't particularly good for much of his Everton career!
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He didn't register a win away at the traditional big 4 in his first 71 attempts. And his Everton team were decent a lot of that time
 
Mount takes the biscuit. We always had a knack in keeping injury prone players way past their expiry date but in this case we literally paid 50m to Chelsea so they could get rid of theirs. If I was SJR then I would investigate that deal to see what went wrong
 
LordSpud said:
Ehhh... Not to piss on your chips but we will definitely be having Hojlund, Zirkzee and Obi next season. So fingers crossed they train well over the summer!
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We will definitely be signing a striker it isn’t even a discussion , we are 13th because our 2 strikers have less than 10 PL goals between them
 
Red00012 said:
We will definitely be signing a striker it isn’t even a discussion , we are 13th because our 2 strikers have less than 10 PL goals between them
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What strikers will we be able to get when the club is skint and cant even offer European football?
 
RedRocket9908 said:
What strikers will we be able to get when the club is skint and cant even offer European football?
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It may not be an expensive top striker, and as such there's a higher risk of him failing, but I'd say there's about a 1% chance we don't sign a striker at all. In a team that has a lot of problems, striker clearly stands out as the biggest issue.
 
Valencia Shin Crosses said:
Disagree, think the structure is pretty clear now with Berrada being the head man overseeing it all, and Vivell/Wilcox being the main concentrated recruiting heads. The only person who I'm not sure what the feck he does is Brailsford, but I'm pretty sure he's just SJR's buddy
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Is berrada qualified to be over all of that? Why don't we have someone that has done the job before at a high level?
 
Not an actual decision perhaps, but definitely the worst mistake.

Failing to implement an effective 'succession planning' strategy for a top level football club* going forward, prior to SAF's departure.

All that followed was a consequence of this one singular aberration

(* 20 Div/PL titles, and at the time the only 'top' treble winner in the UK)
 
I remember being really upset with Rooney at the time for questioning the clubs ambition, but he obviously had the inside view that things weren’t looking good. and it was probably a lot worse than any of us realised.
The Glazers killed United on the same day that they took over, they were never really interested in always being the best.. they only ever cared about being profitable.
 
Crashoutcassius said:
Is berrada qualified to be over all of that? Why don't we have someone that has done the job before at a high level?
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I mean he literally had essentially the same job at City, where he was Chief Football Officer and Txiki's right hand man there.

There's a reason it was considered a huge coup at the time that we managed to hire him.
 
MadDogg said:
It may not be an expensive top striker, and as such there's a higher risk of him failing, but I'd say there's about a 1% chance we don't sign a striker at all. In a team that has a lot of problems, striker clearly stands out as the biggest issue.
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Price isn't an issue Hojlund was 80m+ and he's failed spectacularly.

We will get defenders and midfielders.
 
RedRocket9908 said:
What strikers will we be able to get when the club is skint and cant even offer European football?
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There’s ever chance we can hit 100million in outgoings and it’s always said we will have no money for incomings yet we always manage it .
No european football isn’t confirmed yet also
 
David Moyes. He destroyed the legacy, the winning mentality and turned the club into a joke. He has never shown one ounce of accountability or humility since - and seems to believe that the struggles after him justify his appalling tenure. He was the one who knocked this club down. Let’s be clear he was enabled by the club - as we should never have appointed someone so woefully qualified as him, so out of his depth, so overawed and so incompetent.

There have been many bad decisions since then - but that man took us from winning the league by 12 points to 7th. All other appalling decisions have just cemented us in oblivion - Moyes is the one who took us there.
 
MaMa given red said:
Spot on.

The biggest mistake we/Sir Alex made was picking Moyes to take over. He'd not shown anything even close to say he had the skills to manage a club this size.

Moyes is a really good mid table club manager, but simply not cut out for the very top. I saw a stat last night that said he'd never won at Anfield at any point in his career which is staggering considering he's had 22 attempts and Liverpool weren't particularly good for much of his Everton career!
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I think he wanted to get in Guardiola and Klopp but they didn't want to come for different reasons, Ancelotti maybe too? Moyes was third or fourth choice if I remember.

Moyes had Everton in the top 6 or 7 regularly with no budget, the fact they were rarely ever mid-table was a testament to his management. It was reasonable to think at the time he might be able to make the step up to a winning team. He didn't, the rest is history, but it was a reasonable expectation at the time. I think David Gill leaving at the same time and leaving Moyes with a clueless Ed Woodward was the double whammy, if United had some experienced there and made sensible signings then Moyes might have had a better chance. Moyes did shoot himself in the foot though by getting rid of all the staff for his own, and not playing Zaha at all.
 
Valencia Shin Crosses said:
I mean he literally had essentially the same job at City, where he was Chief Football Officer and Txiki's right hand man there.

There's a reason it was considered a huge coup at the time that we managed to hire him.
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I think he was third in command at city and for the majority of his time was on marketing or something, then later over the full city group maybe? There's no way he should be picking managers anyway. He is the right man for CEO but we don't have a football person to run the football side - Wilcox and academy director being the closest thing, briefly in the top job at Southampton.
 
By far, the worst decision of the post-Ferguson era was the appointment of Moyes...and yes, I realize that the decision was made while Ferguson was still manager -- so let's call it the worst decision by United management during the PL era.

The utter lack of seriousness of purpose exemplified by that decision set the template for the stupidity of nearly every big decision the Glazers made thereafter. We all know the story of the Moyes era, starting with the sacking of the existing management staff, going after Fellaini, 81 crosses, and so on, but there was nothing in his resume to suggest that he was cut out for a massive club like United. There was no tactical innovation, no special man management skills...just nothing about him except hanging around the top ten.
 
Hindsight is brilliant but not going after Vardy after Leicester winning the league and spending big money on the forwards not playing in the premiership was a mistake, if memory serves me right, only really Arsenal had any interest in him,
 
devilish said:
Mount takes the biscuit. We always had a knack in keeping injury prone players way past their expiry date but in this case we literally paid 50m to Chelsea so they could get rid of theirs. If I was SJR then I would investigate that deal to see what went wrong
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His injury record wasn’t the issue, the issue was paying that much for a backup to Bruno who basically never misses a game.

Apart from one major injury, I don’t think Mount was injured that often at Chelsea.
 
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