Remove OGSs affiliations with the club and people will look at tenure and say “Why did Utd hire a permanent manager whose primary experience is a decade in the Norwegian league?”
And that 25 points in total... Just over half of that total is made up of wins against Chelsea, Leicester, City, Spurs and draws against Liverpool and Arsenal. The rest of that was garnered from the other 13 teams we’ve played. 11 points from those 13 other teams. It’s alarming.
Any manager should be getting absolutely slaughtered. LVG and Moyes certainly would have been and rightfully so, but some people will defend OGS to the death and point fingers at individual player mistakes in games as the main reason we lost, and not the 90 minutes of looking completely clueless and not creating chances.
You're right, of course, but generally speaking, this argument is as daft as the "we've tried proven managers already" nonsense the other side often resorts to. It's not needed when more solid arguments can be made, that's my take on it. Football management is a closed occupation with a very limited pool of newcomers into the job to choose from. In this sense, the lure of giving an ex-player of the club a try and see how he performs isn't exactly a crime that warrants the death penalty. Especially at a club like United which has enjoyed two large periods of great success under two managers who both put a lot of emphasis on making Manchester a primary destination for the best British/Irish talent and who both based the foundations of their success around a family atmosphere within the club. Most clubs do it, sometimes it works and some others it doesn't. Leaving the most prolific examples aside (discussed to death at this point), a good example is the Inzaghi brothers: Both appointed at around the same time at the clubs they had spent their best years at with very limited (or nonexistent) previous managerial experience. Philippo was sacked after a season at Milan while Simone is slowly but steadily building something in Rome with Lazio. Philippo was all about talks of aggressive football while Simone, without much fanfare, started working on his 352 which suited Lazio and it was a good fit for the Serie A.
At the time of his appointment as a caretaker manager, Solskjaer was worth the punt. The club was in disarray, Mourinho had decided to sabotage the whole season and he was just waiting for his compensation and the dressing room was as toxic as it could possibly have been. Solskjaer enters and lifts up the spirits and he attempts to turn United into a proper organization again by instilling the same principles that had previously made him decide to spend his entire career with us as a super-sub (when he could have got more playing time elsewhere). The impact he achieves is immediate and it justifies the appointment as a caretaker.
Then, the problems started to pop up. The drop of form was so meteoric that it started raising legitimate questions. Excuses could be made at this point (not his squad, not his pre-season to implement tactics, not a chance to sign his own players) and some (or even most) of them were valid up to a certain degree. But besides all that, the truth of the matter was that the performances he got from his players by being a bringer of change and of a new ethos quickly vaporized into thin air when the dust settled and the feelgood factor eventually started to become less important on a game to game basis. Why? Because that's when tactics become important. The ability to win games more often than losing/drawing them through your gameplan. When it came to that, Solskjaer was found lacking many good ideas. That's why our deteriorating form last season was a major warning bell. We should have waited and he should have never got the permanent job.
But, by that time, Woodward had already made up his mind. As a non-footballing person, he needs to be sold a story. LvG came with a promise of a modern football philosophy while Mourinho walked in with his swagger, proclaiming that it's going to be easy-peasy with "four specialists". And make no mistake about it, they were both heavily backed in the transfer market. Moreso, they were allowed to do their thing. After their failures, Solskjaer presented Woodward his project of "looking toward the past to secure the future". And it's no surprise that Ed was all for it because it's a sound plan as well as a convenient one. I mean, when you admit that you can't land difficult transfer targets what's better than a manager who advocates for youth players to be tried until you can get some of the deals over the line? Especially when you have wasted a small country's GDP on dross to support the previous managers. Think about it: Maguire on 60 million is surplus for "the specialist" Mourinho but it's ok to splash 80 million on him when he becomes a part of the "new core of players at the right age who get the club". For a player who both Mourinho and Solskjaer wanted for the same tactical reasons. But who cares about tactics, right?
And this is exactly where things get fecked up. Solskjaer, despite his good intentions, is not a good manager at this level. He can't make the first team look more than the sum of its parts and he's constantly dropping points left, right and centre. In an age when the game with the ball has become prominent, his best performances come when his team sees as little of the ball as possible. His first three signings and his decision to give both Rashford and Martial the leading roles in the attack and to make McT a mainstay in the midfield attest that counter-attacking football is his game.
Does he need better players because the state of the squad is terrible? He most certainly does but he's not going to get them. One of the main reasons he got the job was because he told Woodward that no immediate spending spree was necessary. No pressure on Ed to provide the goods, he's doing a perfect job and it's just the internet fans who are spoilt that make a lot of noise (that was Solskjaer last summer). If he backs down now and holds Ed responsible for not signing players, the vision of a "slow, gradual cultural rebuild" goes out of the window and Ed will pull the trigger. Instead, he asks for more time and he has convinced many people that the squad will look completely different in a three-years time when he's the one who renews (or agrees to renew) the contracts of Young, Pereira, Lingard, Jones, Lindelof, Mata etc. The other day he was talking about the importance of "the Lingards" who understand what this club is all about... Yet, in three years, we're going to have a title-winning side... Dream on.
But you know something? It could still have worked. I wrote last summer that his status among the fanbase gives him the opportunity to push for things others could or can not. The fact that he's doing so poorly and so many people are still vehemently behind him is proof of that. This club doesn't need a cultural rebuild, it needs an electroshock of epic proportions. Someone who will get in with a mind that 80-90% of this squad won't be here two-three years down the line. And with the tactical nous to have us in the whereabouts of CL qualification (
this is what Klopp has done at Liverpool) in the meantime. Not someone to toe the party line. Because the people who still trust Solskajer because they don't trust Woodward are basically supporting a manager who remains in his position because he covers up for Ed's failures. Until time runs up and he becomes the scapegoat. Which will be sad no matter if you're Ole-in or out.
