Why do players tend to be worse when they come here?

Eli Zee

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It is quite common for the last decade to have good players come here and play shitty/never improve. It's been a while, from what I can remember, since Real Madrid or other top clubs have tried poaching our best players because our players just aren't good enough anymore.

is it down to:
  1. Different league posing different challenges for new players
  2. Poor training facilities and/or coaching staff
  3. Manager
  4. Pressure / expectations of the club
  5. Players just not being good enough
  6. Poor transfers destined to fail
  7. No constant direction / always changing managers and having a mix of players that aren't good enough together
  8. other​
What do you think?
 
Last edited:
Eli Zee said:
It is quite common for the last decade to have good players come here and play shitty/never improve. It's been a while, from what I can remember, since Real Madrid or other top clubs have tried poaching our best players because our players just aren't good enough anymore.

is it down to:
  1. Different league posing different challenges for new players
  2. Poor training facilities and/or coaching staff
  3. Manager
  4. Pressure / expectations of the club
  5. Players just not being good enough
  6. Poor transfers destined to fail
  7. No constant direction / always changing managers and having a mix of players that aren't good enough together
  8. other​
What do you think?
Click to expand...

All of the above.
 
Because we're shite. We haven't had a good core since Ferguson.
 
Most of the answers will be shitting on the club. There may be something in that, but the media (especially social ones) play a huge role. There’s immense pressure on United; any slight mistake, bad run of form, a couple of games without a goal and you become a meme these days. The treatment of Maguire is an obvious example - the same couple of mistakes are repeated in different “comedy” videos over and over again. Onana has played 10 games and he’s already an online comedy figure. Any player who gets to 2 games without a goal or assist and the countdown to “007” begins.

This not only knocks players’ confidence, but must also impact how they play.
 
Well we have never been a really technical club, and we have always played a very British style of football and those 2 things don't suit some players.
 
"I've made it" mentality coupled with "lol 2 weeks in and I have half million on my account, too easy" attitude.
 
They’ve hit the £ackpot, riches beyond their wildest dreams ….and relax
 
"Only do enough to achieve financial objective (CL football)" culture/owner/upper management
 
It can't just be down to money. Players at Real Madrid and City make millions and they are still ambitious and hard working. Successful United teams in the past were also amongst the most highly paid relative to the average wage during the time and they remained motivated to win trophies.

There is some deep rooted problem at the club and all managers seem unable to fix whatever it is. Whether it's the nice guy approach that Solskjaer brought, or an authoritarian approach the players don't respond to any of it. At least not for any significant length of time.
 
Eli Zee said:
It is quite common for the last decade to have good players come here and play shitty/never improve. It's been a while, from what I can remember, since Real Madrid or other top clubs have tried poaching our best players because our players just aren't good enough anymore.

is it down to:
  1. Different league posing different challenges for new players
  2. Poor training facilities and/or coaching staff
  3. Manager
  4. Pressure / expectations of the club
  5. Players just not being good enough
  6. Poor transfers destined to fail
  7. No constant direction / always changing managers and having a mix of players that aren't good enough together
  8. other​
What do you think?
Click to expand...
Of course it will never be a single reason, but I guess it is interesting to think a bit about the points you mention.

1) is something I believe to be rarely a big factor. Some players might be affected by that, but as we regularly see players from the same league moving to other PL clubs and doing fine as well as some players from different leagues coming to United and performing well (like Bruno or Martinez) I tend to think that this is only a factor for very few players. Honestly I often feel like this explanation is a bit like a scapegoat - by attributing the failure of a player to a different league, you don't have to go into detail about the reasons but can act like it was always going to happen.

2) definitely could be a factor that makes it more difficult to perform well. I'm not the most familiar with the situation but even I know quite a lot of reports about the state of the infrastructure that makes match preparations more difficult. It is a bit more difficult to judge the staff I guess, so I won't make a judgement on that.

3) I don't think that any manager in itself was an issue, considering for how many years (and managers) the issues exist, and considering that United never signed an unreasonable manager. You might argue against Moyes, Solskjaer and Rangnick, but Moyes was believed to be able to step up at the time, Solksjaer deserved it based on his caretaker results and Rangnick was a bit of a weird choice, but I fully believe that he wasn't really a bad manager for United, but ultimately became a lame duck when it was clear that he wouldn't be allowed to set new directions for the club in winter by making first transfers.

4) is a mixed bag. For a club of its size United seems to be happy with relative little success as a club, so I don't believe that there is that much pressure internally. But of course the media circus loves to focus on United and the failures there, so I guess as long as you can manage to ignore the media you should be fine in that regard. Probably more difficult for British players than for foreigners? But this isn't any different to any other big club, so it might be a factor for certain players, why they are struggling, but it doesn't explain why the club as a whole has this high rate of unconvincing players/transfers. So in the end I don't think this explains the crisis.

5) Is something I believe (at least partially) to be true...

6) ... plays a big role in 5). Simply put, United seems to be terrible at negotiating. Which ends in United paying "superstar" money for good players, that aren't on the level their fee (or contract) suggests. Someone like Antony should be a world beater for the kind of money, he just is a good player. Side note, I don't believe that the often criticised scouting is the biggest problem right now. It surely was poor for quite some time and might not be fixed completely, but I fully expect them to be baffled sometimes at the kind of deals that the negotiators ultimately make.

7) Definitely a factor and a common theme of the post-SAF years. United signing managers with wildly different expectations what their players should do, mixed with the "signing the biggest social media star" approach leads to a heavily unbalanced squad and makes it hard to create one working team out of it (we see players not optimal for their position under EtH, we saw a "broken team" approach under Solsjkaer - both can work, but is difficult to pull off constantly and explains several crisis)

8) Self fulfilling prophecy. Building a winning culture is hard and United simply lost that. Lots of fans are not satisfied and dismiss when United win something small (like the League Cup last season), while it feels like some players are already satisfied when they win such a little title. There seems to be little desire to put everything into winning what can be won (the EL final was a dire affair...) and instead of dreaming about the big ones (PL, CL) which is not gonna happen soon. This does come back to 4) - in theory it is clear what United want to win, but at the same time people realize that the distance is big, so they don't care at all because they don't think they can close the gap soon.
 
Wilt said:
They’ve hit the £ackpot, riches beyond their wildest dreams ….and relax
Click to expand...
Every other big club pays players well but they don't start being shit. Haaland is on about 600k a week and doesn't play like he's already made it
 
Astronomical wages with zero accountability and zero expectations. What could possibly go wrong?
 
We sign bad characters and bluffers. Yes they're worse when they come here because it's like a magnifying glass, but they don't magically get better when they leave.
 
horsechoker said:
Every other big club pays players well but they don't start being shit. Haaland is on about 600k a week and doesn't play like he's already made it
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Players who sign for City/Pep want to win trophies.
 
No defined style of play to adopt.

At other clubs, players have to fit into a system.

At United, we sign players and say "Go on then, show us what you can do."

This is why some people call us 'Moments FC.' Because we rely on individual moments to win games.
 
AndySmith1990 said:
It can't just be down to money. Players at Real Madrid and City make millions and they are still ambitious and hard working. Successful United teams in the past were also amongst the most highly paid relative to the average wage during the time and they remained motivated to win trophies.

There is some deep rooted problem at the club and all managers seem unable to fix whatever it is. Whether it's the nice guy approach that Solskjaer brought, or an authoritarian approach the players don't respond to any of it. At least not for any significant length of time.
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But players who go to Madrid and City are going there to challenge for trophies as well as the money whereas ones who come to United are coming primarily for the money.
 
The vast majority of elite clubs have a very clear identity where a specific way of playing is implemented. In the case of Real Madrid or us under Fergie, that identity is based more on ethos and spirit but it's still an overemcompassing culture where the players coming in find themselves as another piece of the puzzle. Their role and what they're expected to do is clearly defined as part of a whole. This and the fact that those players have been carefully selected to fit that culture makes the fit much easier to achieve, it's symbiotic.

The culture in the modern game is getting more and more tactical making academies also produce more and more players for specific purposes that require more micro coaching. It's why some players can shine for Arsenal or Spurs but look distinctly average elsewhere. It's why the majority of City players don't look as good outside their setup. We are asking something very different from the players we recruit. We are asking to build the culture almost single handedly without much care or attention to how they fit together, let alone providing them with said playing culture.

EtH was brought in with the brief to implement that and for me, I am still willing to give him time to see how his vision will materialize as I think there are signes already. Martinez and Shaw would not be part of a defence that boasted our record last season under just any other coach. That's the result of clear definition or roles and quality coaching. EtH's job is to build on those promising signs and show us a clear culture on the pitch, only then we will see players showing what they can do because instead of being asked to build the whole, they will be asked to contribute their own part to a whole.
 
Wheato said:
No defined style of play to adopt.

At other clubs, players have to fit into a system.

At United, we sign players and say "Go on then, show us what you can do."

This is why some people call us 'Moments FC.' Because we rely on individual moments to win games.
Click to expand...
Pretty much this in more concise words than my post. We still rely on a culture from yesteryear that was elevated and given clear ethos by the uniquely strong personality of SAF. We need a new source of leadership, either personality like SAF or more realistically, stylistic which is more commonly found in the modern top clubs.
 
Ownership, the buck stops at the top. The club has no vision or strategy. It’s that meme: “nothing will kill a great employee faster than watching you tolerate a bad one”.

Players like Casemiro and Varane are (or were) world class when they came here and now look very poor. There’s lots of examples of players showing a steep decline and it’s happened too many times and under too many different managers for it to be simply down to the coaching staff.
 
Eli Zee said:
It is quite common for the last decade to have good players come here and play shitty/never improve. It's been a while, from what I can remember, since Real Madrid or other top clubs have tried poaching our best players because our players just aren't good enough anymore.

is it down to:
  1. Different league posing different challenges for new players
  2. Poor training facilities and/or coaching staff
  3. Manager
  4. Pressure / expectations of the club
  5. Players just not being good enough
  6. Poor transfers destined to fail
  7. No constant direction / always changing managers and having a mix of players that aren't good enough together
  8. other​
What do you think?
Click to expand...

7 is the strongest answer. Two key issues.

Firstly, instead of recruiting the right profile of player into a defined system, we try to shoehorn a good individual into a collective of good individuals that might not necessarily have the best chemistry.

For example, in the Sir Alex years, players would come right into a 4-2-3-1/ 4-3-3 hybrid. Every position had a defined role. But since then:
  • Di Maria was recruited into a team that initially played without wingers, and when it eventually did, he was already unsettled and wanted out.
  • Pogba shone for Juve in the left-half space with two water-carriers and a 10 ahead of him. He played here mostly pivot.
  • Sancho, despite not being a direct winger reliant on his speed, was signed for a team that was at its best playing on the transition with speedy and direct wingers.
  • Hojlund was signed and Rashford’s form took a nose dive as their styles are too similar (both like to run in behind and work best with someone who can hold it up or be more involved in the build-up).
  • It’s no suprise that our best signing post-SAF has been Bruno. Surely this was by accident. It was good for us because Bruno’s style is suited towards off-the-cuff chaos ball where intricacy is not needed. No surprise that Bruno’s form and numbers have tailed off since Ten Hag has reigned him in somewhat.

Secondly, we tend to recruit players on a decline perhaps based off their reputation. Notable examples include: Falcao, Schweinsteiger and Alexis. We got good seasons out of Zlatan and Cavani. Varane and Casemiro are headed that way too. I don’t know if it is our scouting system or the Glazers pushing for these marquee signings, but we are no longer a club where reputations are earned and made. With the exception of SAF signing De Gea, every world-class player we have had at United since 2013 came to us already over-the-hill.
 
Lack of a system. Hard to form a team when there isn’t a distinctive style of play. Having a lot of mentally fragile core players doesn’t help either
 
First post in years but the thread caught my eye while lurking.

Firstly, the athletic did an interesting piece a while ago about transfer success rates. Long story short no matter who it is, it’s about 50% chance a transfer will work out. If you add in even a generous assumption that United’s scouting, medical, footballing director’s team is just slightly below par for a top side, that rate is going to drop below 50%. It’s not a surprise that we have spent a lot of money and the success rate has been poor, some of it will be luck of the draw others will be self inflicted due to club structure behind the scenes.

Secondly, anyone who has been involved in any team sports, let alone at the professional level, will tell you that team chemistry and experienced winning mentality is massive. It’s the core principle that takes the individual talent and attributes of those in a squad and cohesively binds them together in a collected purpose to perform at or above levels assumed. We had a talismanic manager, who was able to mould a young squad together with experienced world talents to create our first winning dynasty, and rebuild that team twice over the best part of 2 decades. The key to it was establishing a winning mentality at its core and adding into it young players able to be moulded in the dressing room to that mentality, who in the future become the experienced core to mould the next group. What happened almost overnight was sir Alex left and we had a squad on the edge of a rebuild and the vacuum was so large that the turnover left an exposed dressing room devoid of winners. Add in David moyes and his “adjustment” to life at the top eschelon with statements like “we hope to give city a game” etc the squad crumbled, and not even the likes of an aging Ferdinand etc could galvanise what was left when we weren’t winning games. This started the rot.

lastly putting all this together, we bring in manager after manager with differing playing styles, give them a war chest to buy players at a below 50% success rate to replace a past crop of aging players or players who don’t fit the style, the team fail to make enough progress over a 2 season window because of the reasons above and then we repeat.

we have at best 2 or 3 “winners” with the right mentality to galvanise the dressing room at any one time and before there’s any chance of creating a lasting change in mentality the manager is sacked sometimes justifiably sometimes not, the cycle has to repeat as those winners get replaced and we end up with 6/7 out of ten players living off reputation just kind of sat there going through the motions.
 
I don't think this could be chalked up to one simple answer. If you were going to do that, it would probably have to be because of a failure of leadership at the very top of the club that then filters down and creates more tangible sporting problems, because that's the common denominator. Shit rolls downhill. But clearly the Glazers don't set the tactics or training, so it becomes a little bit vague to be pinpointing that when I think the thread is looking for specifics.

I think it's a combination of factors.

Poor recruitment where we overegg the wrong talents.

A lack of alignment between managers and club strategy which creates disjointed squads and makes progression between managers nearly impossible to manage.

Several extremely poor managers that couldn't improve players if their life depended on it.

Then I think you have to throw in the pressure of the envrionment, weight of history, weight of recent failures, media fixation. These all come with the territory and we're not unique in that aspect so it would be weak to say it's a main cause, but it's a contributory cause when all the above is also in place.

But I come back to the start. Who is responsible for performance over a decade and longer? The owners. A climate of non performance creates non performing and eventually regressive players.
 
pablo__p said:
"I've made it" mentality coupled with "lol 2 weeks in and I have half million on my account, too easy" attitude.
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Yep. Most people will begin to relax if they feel that they have "made it".
The hunger just isn't there. Bruno was hungry when he arrived and did very well for us for 18 months.
 
Leylines crisscross the entire north but curiously bypass Carrington and Old Trafford. Foreign players get rubbed up the wrong way by this ancient magickal energy, and presto: they suddenly suck. Facts.
 
horsechoker said:
Every other big club pays players well but they don't start being shit. Haaland is on about 600k a week and doesn't play like he's already made it
Click to expand...

Yeah it's silly for people to say it's money or media pressure as if other clubs don't have that. I think a key reason is that at City, Pep will throw out a player like Cancelo for the slightest drop in form while here, a player like Martial can rack up hundreds of appearances and tens of millions without doing anything significant.

United should be more willing to let their underachieving players go even for free. Imagine if we'd had extended Pogbas contract? Obviously a good way to do that is to start getting decent payers for less than £80 million.

Also, our transfer choices are just bad. Its no surprise some of our best players since Ferguson have been academy players (e.g. Januzaq, Rashford, Greenwood, Garnacho). They're the players we get without involving the incompetent crowd running the transfers.
 
#7 doesn't make sense. How many managers did Chelsea have? Yes they also go up and down, but no-one complain about changing managers. Players may prefer or unlike certain tactics, but 70% of all players can adapt
 
When surrounded by a culture that rewards mediocrity, you become part of it. Motivating yourself to be the best is not easy in this environments.
 
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