Manchester United Thread 25/26 - Teamtalk/Transfers/Gossip Mod Note in OP 26.09.24

The situation he's in still doesn't help though. There's a lot being asked of him in this current squad but I accept he hasn't done himself any favours either. He came in to this team with 15/20 games under his belt at Atlanta and is expected to lead the line for us.

He's been let down by the structure of the club while also having poor performances since.

Like I said, he shouldn't be the 1 leading the line especially in the state we are in.

No serious club spends £70million on an unproven 20 year old striker with 9 goals in his previous season to lead the line at one of the biggest clubs in the world where there is massive pressure week in, week out to perform.

There is no doubt he has been underwhelming but as @AidoEirE alluded to, the environment does not and will not help his development, hence why so many fail at United but do decent elsewhere. At a serious club, he's brought in as an understudy to a more senior, experienced player to learn off. We don't even have the depth for him to share minutes, he's sharing mins with Zirkzee, 14 goals in his previous 2 seasons at Bologna so there is more and more pressure on Hojlund.

It was lunacy to gamble on him at the time, it hasn't worked out but it's not entirely his fault. It's a sympton of everything wrong in the club.

If you look at the top PL goalscorers and where they were at Hojlund's age:

Haaland (freak, no comparision)

Salah - Fiorentina

Wood - Leicester (Championship)

Isak - Real Sociedad (another freak)

Cunha - Atletico (Struggling)

Watkins - Brentford (championship)

Mateta (Mainz)

Wissa (Lorient)

Mbuemo (decent at Brentford)

One thing I would like to see is less crying from the manager about how hard things are and how bad the squad is, and start pumping up the players like Hojlund a little bit.

He is stuck with them now so he needs to start using them, so put Hojlund in the team and tell him he is number one choice, coach him and help him understand what he needs to do, and stick with him until it starts working. All the while telling everybody how great he is and how good he can be.

Its doesn't matter if Amorim believes it or not, management is supposed to be about getting the maximum from your players so stop telling them they are crap and start telling them they are great.

The transfer window is past, there are no messages to send to the board, so this negativity from the manager to the press is nothing but self-serving, repeating how bad things are is just deflecting attention away from the managers own performance.

Start motivating the players, its supposed to be a big part of the job.

No no INEOS are as bad as the Glazers and we'd have been better off with the fake sheikh that had no money

He gets this reaction because he regularly makes these mistakes. The pattern is a few solid games and then another clanger, everybody knows it so when the next clanger comes it is a case of "FFS not again". Win that game and people would absolutely be discussing Onana, because that was far from the first mistake, it is no isolated incident.

Goalkeepers that regularly make mistakes are not top class goalkeepers.

So why were we 8th or higher under Ten Hag and Solskjaer?

People keep saying this but throwing completely untested kids into the team because the seniors are under performing is a serious oversimplification and never going to happen at any professional club for a myriad of reasons.

A lot of player's we're relying on now (Garnacho, Hojlund, Zirkzee, Amad, Mainoo, Yoro to a lesser extent) would ideally be squad players rotating with experienced PL players 5-8 years older and more experienced than they are. But those players dont exist in the United squad because our recruitment has been shocking persistently over multiple managers.

Pogba - 105m Euro in 16/17

Lukaku & Sanchez - 120m Euro in 17/18

Fred - 60m Euro in 18/19

Maguire and AWB - 142m Euro in 19/20

Donny VDB - 39m Euro in 20/21

Sancho, Varane and Ronaldo - 142m Euro in 21/22

Antony & Casemiro - 166m Euro in 22/23

Mount - 65m Euro in 23/24

That's 839 million Euro spent on 13 players over the past 9 season - not counting wages, add a hundred plus million more on top - who were either not good enough, had awful character, are always injured, aren't at the club anymore or all of the above. Ideally you'd have at least half those players still at the club as key players in the first team. We've got just Maguire and that is just down to injuries. So the players we bought to win titles and qualify for Europe aren't even playing for us anymore.

On top of that, a few years ago when OGS was manager the future was going to be an attack of Rashford, Martial and Greenwood. All three players are no longer at the club due to either a collapse in form, character flaws, or both. Shaw is a crock. Martinez seems to be going down that route too.

The club has spent a lot of money, but its been awfully spent (95% fail rate on transfers shouldn't even be possible) and over time you end up where we are. Relying on young players to play like they have 5-10 seasons of PL experience when they don't because despite all the money spent we have nobody else better.

Any and all mistakes are highlighted in defeats and bad results. Defeats and bad results happen when you can't score goals. Entirely predictable really.

As bad as Onana has been at times, and as bad as we have been defensively at times... Our total goals conceded sits pretty much in the middle of the pack when you look at 4th place to 10th place in the table.

We're 15th because only the bottom three and Everton have scored less goals than us. And I wouldn't be surprised if Leicester and Everton overtake us by the end of the season.

We over performed our expected points last year.

This year we're significantly under performing them.

The lack of goals is killing us.

Potter came in during the summer and signed 8 players, yeah exactly the same.

In the unlikely event that it came down to the last game of the season and we needed a win to stay up, I couldn’t see this lot having the bottle for the fight!