Manchester United Thread 25/26 - Teamtalk/Transfers/Gossip Mod Note in OP 12.02.26

The league has certainly become stronger since Oles time, and for sure since Ten Hags to a lesser extent, Ten Hag finished 8th in his second season, regressed and got sacked. Should have been sacked in the summer but wasted last year also by hanging on with him. Things don't happen in a vacuum anyway.

I don't think there is a sense the team are not good enough to qualify for European football? I don't think it's unreasonable to say there will be a building process when completing tearing something apart and going from scratch where you will see some incredibly frustrating moments. Having to be so reliant on the likes of Casemiro, Dalot, Shaw etc still is hardly an ideal situation but the drop off from them to the next level in terms of quality we have all seen

Champions league is possible this year and the team are in contention for it factually. If we don't improve consistency in the second half of the season it will fall away if course right now? United are 1/2 points from a champions league place at the half way point.

If you want to dismiss underlying data we will have to wait until the end of the season to see whether he has outperformed Ten Hag in simple terms of where the team finishes. Would you have taken being within a win of champions league spots half way through the campaign? If Amorim fails to finish in the top 6, maybe 7 - I don't think 8 saves his job - he will have failed and will lose his job. The target for the year as given to him by his employers was European football. They are bought in to him, there have been no rumblings of any discontent or patience under pressure behind the scenes, so as much as it may upset anyone I don't think there will be any change any time soon.

If he does achieve European football next year, he will be backed to ship out and bring in more players and the expectations will increase. I have faith in Amorim, but I'm not married to him. He gets a pass from me at the moment, that we have lost so many points from winning positions and turned down chance after chance to be an outside title contender let alone cementing champions league ambitions and the risk averse tendancy opposed to a risk seeking one being my biggest gripes.

The positives are there to see, I wouldn't try to lay them out and convince others of them as if they don't see them with their own eyes a randomer on the internet is hardly gonna be persuasive. The important thing is that at the half way point, he is getting a pass but there is plenty of scope to improve. The consistency and ability to see out games when we do get ahead for one, but also to take more risk when we are the team trying to break down a low block opponent. The squad is obviously extremely thin right now, this month will be a tough one but it is what it is. The first half of the season has had ups and downs, the second will surely have more but needs to have some more ups if this manager is to survive.

Quickly get this sent to Amorim and his scouting team!! Why has no one thought of this in the last 13 years??

🙄

People keep saying “just get the right manager” but we’ve been here before.

Look at the recruitment. Pogba for a world-record fee with no structure around him. Maguire made the most expensive defender ever, then dropped into systems that exposed his weaknesses. Sancho bought years too late, for huge money, with no clear role. Antony as a panic buy at an inflated fee. Alexis Sánchez signed on massive wages for optics, not need.

Then more of the same. Onana brought in to play out from the back, only to spend a season shot-stopping behind a team that still can’t control midfield. Højlund bought for huge money as a raw project striker and immediately asked to carry the attack. Zirkzee signed without a clear idea of where he fits or who he complements.

Add Lukaku, Di María, Fred, Casemiro, all expensive, all misprofiled, all part of the same cycle: buy high, no plan, sell low or stagnate.

This isn’t about bad players. It’s about bad recruitment, wrong profiles, wrong timing, inflated fees, no long-term squad build. You can change the manager all you want, but if this is how the squad is built, the result doesn’t change.

This is absolutely spot on . And it’s the fairest and most accurate assessment of the job Amorim has done or is doing so far that I’ve read on here.

I understand your reasons for being reluctant to “present anything that looks like mitigation “…. but yet you did, why ? because they are simply the facts. But unlike a few on here , to see those completely unambiguous or mitigating facts you have to be fair enough to want to see them.

As you alluded to ,naming four or five players any manager would be delighted to have in their team is just a ridiculous argument for obvious reasons. Of course we have some good players but everyone knows it’s not as simple as that.

I understand fans are angry and it’s easier to just say “he hasn’t a clue” and “sack him tonight “..
I’m just as frustrated with how things are going as any other United fan ( his stubbornness/arrogance with how he set us up versus Wolves was a new low for me) but I do think the work he has done to date on and off the field deserves patience and time to see at least where we are at the end of the season.

I’ve said it here before but for me there’s absolutely no doubt the enormity and difficulty of the job this man took on is being massively underestimated by a lot of fans and the media.

Of course it suits the media to jump on his back and Manchester United and their struggles always give you headlines but for me , while I understand fans frustrations , I believe he deserves more patience from us Manchester United supporters. I also know this won’t be a popular opinion with his detractors on here but this is not an easy job lads, any manager we appoint is going to need more than a little over twelve months to solve all of our problems.

INEOS signings have been atrocious so far.

The only truly bad signings I think they've made is Zirkzee and Ugarte.

De Ligt, Mbeumo and Cunha are excellent signings. The latter needs to improve his numbers a bit though.

Yoro has mostly been excellent, but is going through a bit of a tough period. Which is always going to happen with young players. Heaven is a serious prospect. And his confidence has shot up over the last few games. Mazraaoui is struggling a bit this season with injury and form. But he has already shown last season that he was a good, solid signing and a decent price too. The jury is still out on Sesko. The team could utilise his height at lot more. I think he looks a lot more of a player than Hojlund. He's good on a ball and links up well with the other new forward signings. But he needs goals. Lammens isn't top of the range. At least, not yet. But he has very good potential and is soooo much better than what we had before him. The defenders are lot more at ease to have at least a competent keeper behind them.

I’ve found it all really hard to assess. Some of our good results recently (Newcastle, palace away) were terrible performances. And some of the good performances were poor results.

West Ham, Wolves (away), Bournemouth, Villa (plus Newcastle fiest half) is the best run of actual performances we’ve had since OGS days. Despite that the results weren’t great, but think it’s important to look beyond that.

With ETH, even when our league position was ‘ok’. I was very adamant the underlying metrics were beyond appalling and would not sustain…and that **** storm came pretty swiftly after. Not sacking him post FA Cup remains the biggest INEOS red flag for me. We were obviously awful in every facet of the game and getting worse.

On the contrary now, despite feeling really negative about things post Wolves. The underlying stats are pretty solid. Most have us around 4th best in the league with one of the best attacks around. Our quality across the back 5 is absolutely absymal, so hard to pin that on Amorim currently for me.

I think our overall squad quality is being incredibly overstated on here. We are not the 4th best squad in the league (so for me there is an argument Amorim IS getting the best out of this squad). Against Wolves we had Shaw, Dorgu, Ugarte, Dalot, Zirzkee, Sesko (on his current form before anyone goes mad) all starting and Fletcher playing 45 mins. I genuinely don’t believe many/any of those start for a team in the top 8.
Bruno is the only world class player in the squad. With Cunha, Mbuemo, Mount (when fit) and maybe Amad the only other players who would be of even remote interest to a team like Arsenal & City.

I’d probably have sacked him after the spurs game. We were beyond awful last year. But this year it feels like there might be some small green shoots appearing…but then games like Wolves & Everton come along and bash you over the head. Don’t know what to think. Could understand keeping him (and I think we’ve been wayyyyy too slow to sack every single manager since Fergie bar Moyes), but I also couldn’t really argue with sacking him.

On balance I’d personally probably keep him at this point. There’s enough progress in our attacking play to point to for me. And this squad is another 10 players (3CMs, 3CBs, 2ST, 1LB, 1RB) & €500m+ away from seriously competing for trophies. That’s multiple years. Top 4 is probably 2-4 players away and could be attainable next year. I’m hoping with our new recruitment structure that it shouldn’t really matter if Amorim oversees that spend and still goes as he won’t be allowed to decimate the club like ETH did. I also have zero idea who we should appoint. If Alonso came free and was interested, I’d probably pull the trigger on him.

I'd agree on Zirkzee and Ugarte, but not on everyone else. I'd put Dorgu, Sesko, Yoro in the highly doubtful category. Would we ever sell them for a profit for example? Would you ever see them in a title winning team?

For the transfer fee and wages involved, De Ligt and Cunha are only ok so far. City win the title with a load of 60m signings. De Ligt and Cunha might be at home in a team fighting for the top five.

Mbuemo does look like a great buy, as does Heaven especially for the money paid, Lammens looks decent, and I'd say the same about Mazraoui if we played 4-4-2

And I agree with that. What has become very frustrating on here lately though is there seems to be some sort of Amorim in camp versus Amorim out camp war going on and a lot of posts seem more about scoring points against the other side other than actually engaging properly.

It’s completely fair to have concerns about Amorim and it’s even fair to want him sacked if you believe it will benefit the club, but it’s also fair to believe in him and back him on here and have that opinion respected by posters who believe otherwise.
Some of the juvenile stuff on here after the Wolves game , it was hard to believe it was coming from grown adults.

It seems like any nuanced discussion on tactics, squad limitations, injuries or decisions being made with long term planning in mind, gets lost or filtered through whether or not it will help one “side “ win an argument or not.

As I said disagreeing on the manager is obviously fine, there are valid arguments on both sides… but its absolutely soul destroying when every win or loss just becomes ammunition on here for days as an opportunity to say “I told you so”rather than a chance to talk about the tactics, squad issues or what’s realistically achievable.

Yeah there’s definitely something to that. We really struggle to break down low blocks at times. I think there’s some random variation in there too though.

If we played that Liverpool game out 10 times. I think we lose more often than not. They had tonnes of chances to bury us and we were fortunate at how wasteful they were.

West Ham on the flip side, we weren’t amazing but did more than enough to win the game. Villa similarly we should have created more but we win the game if not for Yoro and Sesko being more clinical. First half we were good and created enough.

Palace was an absolutely shambles of a performance I agree and two freak goals bailed us out. Bad vs forest too.

We did PSG a huge favour by spending all that money on Ugarte. I seem to recall that the word was that Ten Hag wasn't keen on the signing at all. And that it was being driven by INEOS. Once better replacements are found, I doubt they'll manage to sell him. He'll probably end up being a squad player and going out on loan.

Zirkzee was decent in Italy. Not surprised he's going back. Probably at the expense of Evan Ferguson at Roma, who I'd much rather in the United squad for the rest of the season than Zirkzee, if a deal could be done with Brighton. I've watched Ferguson play for Roma several times, and while he is still lacking the almost Harry Kane levels of all around brilliant forward play, that he had when playing at his best for Brighton a couple of years ago, he general play is pretty good. Only 4 goals so far though.

Exactly, and that type of focus on our club makes it an even more difficult job for the manager. Of course he has made mistakes but there’s no doubt that there’s more pressure on every decision he makes compared to any other manager.

Yoro was a poor signing and it's nothing to do with his ability or form. We finished the 23/24 season with Dalot as our first choice LB and you had AWB and Amrabat playing there that season. Then over £200M was spent that summer but a quarter of that was spent on a CB to come in as a squad player.

So our first choice RB was still our first choice LB and the back up RB we bought to cover Dalot was now also second choice LB covering Dalot. And you also had Collyer, Martinez, and Evans who played there during the season.

Move along to this season and Dalot is still our first choice to play on the left more or less.