Obviously you can drill players to be in certain areas and to make certain moves. LVG did that and it was boring as hell. Football is a lot more fluid and dynamic than that. Pep drills his players to repeat set patterns over and over and over, which is fine when you can spend 100s of millions on players and can jettison half a billion worth of fullbacks because you don't need them anymore.
LVG did WHAT? What is "that"? Why is always LVG brought up when people talk about possession based football? Again and I try to be as precise as possible: Nobody wants United to become a possession based team. What we want (and what is needed to become a top team over a sustainable period of time) is that our teams gets more comfortable on the ball, able to assert more control on games by controlling the ball IN SITUATIONS OF NEED. Its not like LVGs football is the star all possession fans are striving for, his football wasn't functional as it didn't create chances whatsoever. Nobody wants that back, everybody can stop arguing against that.
Pep uses set patterns over and over and over. And they seem to work, why shouldn't we look at competitors (or teams we are aspiring to compete with) for things to copy?
Half a billion in fullbacks - Mate, I see your point, but those things aren't really recent anymore aren't they? So not sure, if it is really relevant to the discussion. I am not trying to depict Pep and City as the best thing possible, but they undoubtedly do a lot of things correctly and we would be fools thinking that we can just look into our past for recipes for past success and continue that proud tradition easily by recycling it.
Yes City is paying lots of money for players. But so are we, so is Chelsea. But City has a far bigger output I'd say so reducing all that on "money spent" is probably pretty short-sighted.
Players need to have the intelligence and ability to think for themselves on the pitch, they need to be aware of what's around them, move to the right areas and have the skills and composure required to control the ball and execute passes quickly and accurately. Too often some of these players don't even move to create space for themselves or others, you can't teach brains.
You are right, a certain amount of intelligence is needed and it is difficult to train that level. But I don't think, there are many players out there who really are too thick to understand what a manager might want from them. Your first sentence sounds like in top teams are only filled with top players who are also highly intelligent, permanently assessing every new situation and coming up with solutions on the fly. I am pretty sure, that isn't the case (at least not 100%). It is fascinating that this discussion comes up again after all the talk we had about it during Ole reign. A system or a set of instructions of a manager aren't supposed to REPLACE decision making by the players on pitch. It is supposed to support it by narrowing down the number of variables. And while there are players like Fred and Bruno, who thrive when they can act instinctively, I am pretty sure other players would thrive when given a functional structure, I'd say McTominay and Shaw are candidates for that.
ETH will create such a structure but he isn't there yet. That is fine. But some seem to state, that his part of the job isn't as relevant as long as he gets player who are "good enough" or "intelligent" and I think, a) to assemble a whole team of that is expensive and takes time and b) it might be worth the time trying to maximize output differently during the wait.
It's the speed of thought, movement and execution that is lacking, saw a good example with Elanga last night, easy first touch pass to Sabitzer, out for a throw. This happens too often with some of these players, passes are poorly weighted, played to the recievers wrong side etc.
Elanga doesn't get many minutes, is a squad option that rarely plays. Same for Sabitzer. So while your explanation is plausible, I could make a case for my argument being the main reason as well.
There will always be misplaced passes. They happen at Bayern and at City just as well. Nothing will prevent that and I'd support measures, to make sure players are fully focussed to reduce shoddy execution of stuff. But that alone isn't the reason for "our passing is garbage". The reason is, we still aren't great at adapting to opponent shape, getting rid of markers, become available to pass to, increase tempo of passing to make it more difficult to defend against.
You say other clubs with worse players are capable of it, there's many in this Utd squad that if they moved to one of those clubs they wouldn't be able to do it there either.
You might be right, but knowing that there is no way to proof that, I don't see the point of that argument being used to try to improve circumstances to maximize player output. I invite you to check my post history, I am certainly not advocating giving all players endless chances. And yes, players like AWB or Maguire shouldn't have been bought in the first place because of their deficiencies, but it is what it is - I for one don't want to spin the transfer circle over and over again until we maybe hit a combination that "improves team passing" out of nowhere. I'd try to be more proactive.