Why didn't we sign [insert players name], [insert a time before he had his breakout move]

[R0nald0]

Does this only annoy me? Like really really annoy me? Like it's the most moronic thing that fans say?

The reason we didn't sign him, take Enzo before he joined Benfica, was because we didn't know he was good enough. Nobody did. A lot of clubs, like Ajax, Benfica etc act as a proving ground for promising young players - some make it and lot's don't. When they are signed for Benfica, they are often not ready for such a huge leap to a Manchester United so need a stepping stone. It's easy to look at the Enzo Fernandez' of the world and wonder why we didn't sign him but Benfica are in the taking risks transfer business and for every Enzo, there is a João Victor.

We're not clairvoyants, and suggesting we just pick up every young promising player that is making a step up to a mid-tier European team is very lazy.

 

[Ajr]

It's because Ole out

 

[Champ]

Because everything United do is crap, we are the worst club in the world and people on the Caf know best.

Just look at the player threads in here, some of them created for players who are still embryonic and claiming we should sign them, based on nothing but a game in football manager.

 

[bringbackbebe]

Two things:
1) There's a lot of hindsight bias in here. It's easy to place too much emphasis at players purchased for 20m by clubs like Benfica who go on to have a value of 100m in 2-3 years while discounting players who go on to have a value of 0 at the end of 2-3 years.
2) (Continuing that hindsight bias) our scouting started to fall apart towards the end of SAF's tenure, and our recruitment has been terrible since at least 2008. Yes, from 2008:

2008: Berbatov, Fabio, Rafael, Tosic, De Laet
2009: Owen, Mame Biram Diouf, Obertan, Valencia
2010: Bebe, Smalling, Hernandez, Lindegaard
2011: Phil Jones, Young, De Gea,
2012: RVP, Kagawa, Nick Powell, Zaha, Buttner, Henriquez

That's a success ratio of possibly 2 who had influential careers (RVP, De Gea), 6 squad/rotational players (Rafael, Valencia, Young, Berbatov, Smalling, Hernandez) and 14 outright flops. Just look at the flops there: Tosic, Diouf, Lindegaard, De Laet, Obertan, Bebe, Nick Powell, Buttner - these players should have never made it anywhere near a premier league team, let alone Manchester United. That's a success ratio of 9% & a failure rate of 64%.

We still had SAF & the core of the pre-2008 team to guide us through. That core subsequently left and bad recruitment stayed on, this time with Woody power to compound it.

TBH, 2022-23 is the first window post 2008 where we can say we signed a bunch of players who've immediately started to have an impact.