We’ve been trying to move defenders on. Smalling, Rojo, and Darmian, all would be sold if the right offer was on the table. Possibly Bailly too, had he not got injured. Young is decent cover and nearing retirement age anyway, no problem with him staying. Jones is the only odd one for me, but perhaps he’s happy with a squad role & Ole sees a use for him.
It might be a rough year but I think we need this. It can’t all be fixed in one summer. Clear a lot off the wage bill and don’t panic buy, but bring in the correct targets in future windows. I’m happy with how we handled the Dybala situation because I’m sure that in previous years we would have offered him silly money he couldn’t refuse. Not anymore, and that’s great.
It’s not going to happen overnight but I genuinely feel like we’re moving in the right direction and building a proper team. I hope we can keep ticking over this season and not have a total collapse because if we can keep what we have and add to it, we’ll be in a good place.
I'm pretty sure that if we really wanted to move Smalling on, we'd have done that. As for Darmian we've had the rumours all year long about Inter/Juve coming in for him yet he's still here, perhaps because we've been haggling over a milion euro here and there while we're happy to pay X% of Sanchez's wages so that we can loan him out. Again, this is not a strategy, it's a scatter gun approach that we're witnessing year in year out ever since Fergie and Gill stepped down. Woodward is about as clueless as you can be. If Ole is seeing use for Jones then he's making his own bed, which leads me to the next point.
This season it seems pretty certain that we'll lose out on CL again, 2nd year in a row, rememeber those articles a couple of years ago that there's an agreement with addidas that if we miss out on CL in subsequent seasons there'll be some cut in the finances? Those articles will start reappearing around new year when it's dead obvious we're not getting into CL. Now this is what will speak to Woodward - numbers, we're losing those, provided he doesn't give a shit about games lost, he'll care about money lost. That's the moment Ole's walking on a thin ice, you genuinely cannot believe that Woodward will keep him for the long term overhaul that we're in such a desperate need for. He'll pull the trigger on him the second things go south. He's done that with his dream signing in Mourinho who was a brand in itself no matter which way you look at it. Ole's not a brand, he doesn't have the glamour about him, he'll pretty much share Moyes' fate here. So a new manager comes in, probably one with a new vision (given we still don't have anything that remotely resembeles a DOF), will need new players, the players will need time to adapt to his philisophy, rinse, repeat, same shit, different season.
And here arises another problem. Building the squad is bound to be problematic when 1) your core players want to leave and 2) you've got nothing to appeal to the players (finishing 6th, 7th, whatever we finish on this season). Do you really see Pogba sticking around when we finish outside of CL again? He's here this season purely because neither Madrid nor Juve were desperate enough to force our hand (it's another matter that in their eyes he's simply not worth fighting tooth and nail for), they'll just wait around for him to kick the shit up via his brothers or Raiola again and force us to sell him for lower price to whoever comes in for him. DDG's another guy who'll probably jump the ship when the time is right, and even considering his recent 'blip' in form, he's still pretty much a vital member of our XI. I don't like Pogba and I'll be happy to see him feck off finally but the fact is he is important to the team and he'll inevitably leave.
So that leaves us with having to spend about ~70-80 mln euro upwards if we want to get a DDG replacement, feck knows what to spend and on whom with Pogba leaving. So there's another year where our budget is forced to be spent on purely replacing the players instead of bolstering and adding to the squad, questionmarks over quality of the replacements too. Take into consideration the cut in money from addidas, yearly talk of 'the market is this way now' (newsflash: it won't be any different next year, or the year after, or the year after) and here we are, perhaps even worse than we have been with no puzzles in the right places again, instead with a shit smeared all over the jigsaw. And this is an
optimistic scenario where Pogba/DDG's departures don't trigger other players to reconsider their future (Martial having a good season perhaps? He'll probably jump the ship too; Rashford having a good season and everybody's leaving? His 'logcal lad, academy product' label will be tested to say the least).
It's not doom and gloom, it's pretty much making observations of a last couple of years, taking notes and predicting the scenario based on the info gathered. For me we're inevitably rushing into yet another season of a vicious circle we've been in for some time now. With very few glimmers of hope.
️