4 Comments
Jun 25, 2022Liked by Grace Robertson

Hi Grace, it certainly looks, from a distance, as if Utd are getting their act together and that, with some time they could get back to genuine top tier competitiveness.

I have two questions about that: first, do Utd fans and possibly the Glazers have an appetite for a five year plan? It's easy at this point to say that's fine but if City, Liverpool keep dominating, Chelsea give Tuchel the tools to break fully into that bracket, Conte superchargers Spurs (even if for a short while) and Newcastle's petrodollars catapult them forward..... that's a lot of comparative relative success in a sub-five year window. Do they really have the patience?

Secondly, and I'm not descending into an insulting 'farmers league' critique here, but how transferable is Eredivisie dugout excellence to England? We've seen it be a bit hit and miss on the pitch and De Boer and Koeman didn't set the world on fire (well, de Boer did but not in a good way). Hiddink was absolutely fine and I guess Van Gaal's stint at Utd is a matter of debate but their managerial careers had generally been in Spain/elsewhere than in the Netherlands.

If I were a Utd fan I would be a little worried that ETH has a steeper learning curve than he might be expecting - and if that turns it into a six or seven year project then is that acceptable? As a Chelsea fan I well remember the Scolari period: an undoubtedly talented manager who moved to a league he didn't fully understand. It was painful.

Expand full comment

Comparing them to Liverpool, it seems like it's gonna be a long-road to success for them. What people fail to realise about Liverpool is that the team and the manager probably only explains 65% of their success at most. Liverpool have (or at least had before Edwards left) extremely competent people at every level of the club facilitating all aspects of first-team performance. It has also given them an edge in recruiting backroom staff (as most successful tech firms will tell you, the best people prefer to work with the best people). This started with FSGs guidance, and I fear if United don't have a similar top-down influence they're in for more years of pain.

That being said, United have always been willing to spend far more on players than most other clubs, so I wonder if what they lack in their hierarchy can be compensated for by acquiring the best talent like City and Chelsea. Only time will tell.

Expand full comment

In my view, what United need more than anything is patience and an acceptance that things may get worse before they get better.

They should be five years ahead of Arsenal in terms of re-shaping the entire club to move away from it being so centric on one figure but their want to try and quick fix their way back to where they were pre-2013 has seemingly set them back in terms of consistency.

It took two 8th placed finishes and a bit of fortune that two potentially elite-level academy graduates have come through at the same time (Saka and Smith Rowe) but there’s a huge amount of optimism about Arsenal’s future under Arteta now, if I was Man Utd, I’d be looking at that blueprint of gradually overhauling the squad and making it younger and more attractive as a project to outsiders under ETH.

Expand full comment