If we don’t sign anyone this window it shows the club lacks ambition

We are done......."right player, right price", what happen to NEED?
 
We know the club doesn't have ambition from the past 3 transfer windows, so if we don't sign anyone it isn't a surprise.

I do not feel anyone at the club including Ole has the ambition to make United title challengers again. Top 4 is the aim but not a target. As long as the commercial money is coming, there will be no change.
 
manunited1919 said:
We absolutely need to sign at least 1 capable midfielder this January, and not because we need to show ambition; it’s more as an insurance to prevent the sxxt really hitting the fan:
  • Pogba seems to need a surgery
  • McT is out injured for some time
  • Pereira is terrible as a number 8
  • Matic’s legs are gone
So that leaves us with Fred playing each and every game. If Fred gets injured, which is possible due to playing each game, things can turn ugly very very quickly.
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Things were ugly when we sold Herrera and Fellaini without replacements. Last season when we had both of them along with our current midfield, that is when most of us thought that we needed upgrades.

Now we are without two out of our mid 3 of last year (Herrera-Pogba), our first choice backup (Fellaini), our promising youngster of last year (who is now a crucial first teamer, McT).

So essentially last year we had Matic, Herrera, Pogba, McTominay, Fred, Fellaini, Pereira as our midfield options.. Now we have Matic, Fred, Pereira. How can things get uglier? It is criminal that we didn't sign a replacement in the summer. It is beyond criminal that even now, we're not even bothered. It is a full blown crisis right now.
 
The fact we lack ambiiton has always been the conclusion. We are playing catch up and have been for some time. I am not getting overexcited about the January window despite the fact we lack in central midfield and up front. The fact we are after Can fills me with woe. Grealish makes more sense although i bet he won't be coming. We would have to pay stupid money to be considered. Maddison the same.

The interest in Longstaff and Declan Rice is a headscratcher. Two more midfielders who are not creative. And come with a huge price tag.

And i wonder if Rice might be on his way as West Ham are sniffing around Benfica's Gedson Fernandes.
 
I think some fans could do with living outside of their Football Manager bubble. It is 3 days into the transfer window, a window which is famous for late deals, it is way too early to start panicking.

I share other fans' frustrations with our lightweight squad, particularly in the middle of the park, but the club is trying to learn from past mistakes of buying players for name value or just to get someone in, we are looking for the right players and that will take time.

It's not like FM where you breeze through a month in an hour or two, take it a day at a time and relax a bit. Your blood pressure must be through the roof.
 
youngrell said:
I think some fans could do with living outside of their Football Manager bubble. It is 3 days into the transfer window, a window which is famous for late deals, it is way too early to start panicking.

I share other fans' frustrations with our lightweight squad, particularly in the middle of the park, but the club is trying to learn from past mistakes of buying players for name value or just to get someone in, we are looking for the right players and that will take time.

It's not like FM where you breeze through a month in an hour or two, take it a day at a time and relax a bit. Your blood pressure must be through the roof.
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This is not about "only 30 more days, why we didn't sign someone". It is that our manager said that he doesn't need new players("or maybe need one").
Is it because of him or Ed( Glazers) it is different story
 
youngrell said:
I think some fans could do with living outside of their Football Manager bubble. It is 3 days into the transfer window, a window which is famous for late deals, it is way too early to start panicking.

I share other fans' frustrations with our lightweight squad, particularly in the middle of the park, but the club is trying to learn from past mistakes of buying players for name value or just to get someone in, we are looking for the right players and that will take time.

It's not like FM where you breeze through a month in an hour or two, take it a day at a time and relax a bit. Your blood pressure must be through the roof.
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The urgency is there because unlike the summer we actually have competitive games to play. The earlier you can get someone the better. Don’t forget they have to uproot their lives and so as much time to settle as possible can only help.
 
sparx99 said:
The urgency is there because unlike the summer we actually have competitive games to play. The earlier you can get someone the better. Don’t forget they have to uproot their lives and so as much time to settle as possible can only help.
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I understand that, but as I said it's a window for famously late deals, usually because the selling club wants to hold on as long as they can for a number of reasons. It's not as easy as people think.
 
hungrywing said:
If Malcolm Glazer were still alive, I believe Woodward would have been replaced by now.

You hear a lot of 'the Glazers could sack him' or 'they'll never sack him, they're beholden to him' - of which the latter is definitely a factor - but it looks a lot like the actual dynamic is that the Glazer children are varying degrees of clueless/largely apathetic. Sort of the godfather/king is dead and the consigliere/royal vizier running the show.

AKA any Glazers Out campaign might need to consider that rather than anti-Glazer it needs to focus on coaxing them into taking agency/giving them a possible 'out'.



Well, there sort of is/was. But we have non-gardeners tending it. Woodward is veeeery close to being in straight up thief territory. Robbing from millions of less well-off people.



The entire reason. Well, technically Woodward being in charge of that strategy.

Assuming Woodward is untouchable, there are two ways to correct this problem: first is the 'get the right manager' (haha). Second is decide to to run the club like a Dortmund for around five or six years. Might end up shorter, might even end up longer, but that decision itself stanches the bleeding. Trouble there is....



....Woodward and his insecurity-based need to 'be the big guy'.

Every major problem at the club currently comes from overpaying. End of story. There's room for debate as to why he's overpaying but the rest is all details. Can't move bad players, overpaying them. Got an overrated player who thinks they're bigger than the club, you paid him like he was. Running into a financial wall (contrary to what seems to be popular belief we can't spend 200m every summer), cause you're overpaying. Now clubs know you're desperate, and have even more leverage over you, cause you're overpaying. You're now regarded with contempt by many within the footballing world, which leads you into more overpaying, etc. Players underperforming/performing erratically, you're overpaying them. This is basic organizational leadership stuff. Even the most well-intentioned personality will be affected.

He and Judge have been overpaying, and it's created a culture of entitlement and desperation. Again, there's room for academic debate as to the psychological reasons those two might engage in this behavior. Could be that they know they're out of their depth and are resigned to having to overpay against the tide of contempt. Really though it's likely that they think it's a sign of projecting strength when it's actually a sign of weakness. This weakness permeates down through an organization like contaminant leaching into groundwater which leads to instability which leads to 'strength' projecting in undesireable ways.

The club right now is built in his image. Which in many ways is the opposite of SAF.

None of this is new information.
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What a superb post!

The only “right manager” for us is one who has the gravitas, but more importantly the tact, to be able to manage Woodward and guide him in a more pragmatic and logical direction. One who can come up with a decent strategy and sell it in a way that Woodward can believe it was his idea in the first place. Allegri maybe? Not Poch; while I rate him highly as a coach he’s far too emotional. The German hipster choices might be great under the right structure, but any incoming manager is going to have to build that structure themself.
 
youngrell said:
I understand that, but as I said it's a window for famously late deals, usually because the selling club wants to hold on as long as they can for a number of reasons. It's not as easy as people think.
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Depends on how well run the club is. Take Liverpool for example agreed a fee in December for that Asian player, already training and waiting to play now beginning of Jan. We will waste another 3 weeks of competitive matches and lose and then moan about no value in the market
 
Only signing 3 players last summer shows we done.

If Pep had our squad and the resources where he would be signing 5+ players and everyone here knows it.

They just are in denial so much they pretend a rebuild has to take a million seasons. Also pretend you got to go backwards to go forward.


These kind of people even if they don't mean too are complicit in defending the Glazers and Ed.
 
We know United are working to a budget, last summer was actually a good transfer window under the circumstances.

It would be great to get one signing in January but the selling club is going to have all the power, so we might have to wait until the summer.

Reality sucks.
 
red4ever 79 said:
Depends on how well run the club is. Take Liverpool for example agreed a fee in December for that Asian player, already training and waiting to play now beginning of Jan. We will waste another 3 weeks of competitive matches and lose and then moan about no value in the market
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That is a completely different scenario. The player is from the Austrian league, on a winter break so wasn't currently active and he also had a release clause.
 
youngrell said:
I think some fans could do with living outside of their Football Manager bubble. It is 3 days into the transfer window, a window which is famous for late deals, it is way too early to start panicking.

I share other fans' frustrations with our lightweight squad, particularly in the middle of the park, but the club is trying to learn from past mistakes of buying players for name value or just to get someone in, we are looking for the right players and that will take time.

It's not like FM where you breeze through a month in an hour or two, take it a day at a time and relax a bit. Your blood pressure must be through the roof.
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People say this every year and every year you are wrong. This isn't about one window. It's about the club and how it constantly acts.


As an article in I think the athletic said today there isn't a single club who would "rebuild" like United.


Look at the farce if last summer. Lose 2 first team players. Buy 3 arguably 2.5 cause James wasn't planned to be out straight in.

You can't rebuild like that. Improve defence on paper and worsen attack and midfield during a rebuild? Imagine we where after Pep. And outlined that's what he could do in his first summer.


He'd laugh in our faces, that how pathetic we are at recruitment.
 
laughtersassassin said:
People say this every year and every year you are wrong. This isn't about one window. It's about the club and how it constantly acts.


As an article in I think the athletic said today there isn't a single club who would "rebuild" like United.


Look at the farce if last summer. Lose 2 first team players. Buy 3 arguably 2.5 cause James wasn't planned to be out straight in.

You can't rebuild like that. Improve defence on paper and worsen attack and midfield during a rebuild? Imagine we where after Pep. And outlined that's what he could do in his first summer.


He'd laugh in our faces, that how pathetic we are at recruitment.
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That was my point – we have made mistakes in the past but I believe we are trying to address those and put them right. Part of that is letting go of bad or the wrong players ASAP, even if it means weakening ourselves a little for the time being.

We simply couldn't add a bunch of new shiny players while still keeping players like Sanchez and Lukaku about, it's not feasible.
 
"Sign someone"... sounds like call of desperation?

What decent player at CM position would come to us just now, the supposedly best all "round midfielder in the world" wants away and his agents telling the world United, as we are now, would have ruined the careers of a number of top players?
We are losing battles, not just on the pitch but off it as well. No one from the club seems to be speaking with any authority, Ole looks perplex after displays such as we put in at Arsenal. Even Woodward seems to have lost his voice.

A few months ago we told we were about to sigh a DoF, now it seems that has been put on hold, why is that? Can't we get who we want, is the idea dead in the water, we are sending signals outside the club as well as I suspect inside, that we don't know what day it is?

Sign someone... to show we mean business, don't make me laugh, we needed to do a lot more than that!
 
Andycoleno9 said:
This is not about "only 30 more days, why we didn't sign someone". It is that our manager said that he doesn't need new players("or maybe need one").
Is it because of him or Ed( Glazers) it is different story
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Imo it's quite clear from what Ole has said that he wants to bring in midfielders and wanted to do so during the Summer as well but he has to tow the party line somewhat in what he says publicly as there's no guarantee the club will bring anyone in.

The day he comes out and says something negative about the board or not being backed etc he'll already have one foot out the door.
 
youngrell said:
That was my point – we have made mistakes in the past but I believe we are trying to address those and put them right. Part of that is letting go of bad or the wrong players ASAP, even if it means weakening ourselves a little for the time being.

We simply couldn't add a bunch of new shiny players while still keeping players like Sanchez and Lukaku about, it's not feasible.
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If we where trying to address them we would have had a signing or two worked in months ago to be done when Jan window opened. Because even without injuries we needed signings.


What we gonna do in the summer. Sell Pogba and buy 2 or 3 players? Will take us a century to get good that way.
 
laughtersassassin said:
If we where trying to address them we would have had a signing or two worked in months ago to be done when Jan window opened. Because even without injuries we needed signings.

What we gonna do in the summer. Sell Pogba and buy 2 or 3 players? Will take us a century to get good that way.
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Targets may have changed, due to said injuries. We are not in the know are we?
 
If there are no new faces, I would go further than saying that it’s merely a lack of ambition. I would say it is dangerous and reckless. It would be a sign, for me, that those in charge don’t care about the welfare of our current young players.

Fred and James are being run off their feet and seriously overplayed. Martial and Rashford are being relied upon to get us through four competitions with games coming every 4 days in February and our new signings haven’t really had a break since they arrived.

We have seen the results in the past when other teams have overplayed players and pushed them through injuries to perform (Owen, Torres etc...)

We need a few new faces to take the pressure off those players and look after their welfare, not even just to provide more quality.

It’s reckless to let it go on like it has been and then complain why rashford isn’t on it when he has to be 3 games in eight days because there is no one else.

It’s one thing to waste a season with an iffy manager, it’s another to be careless with our young players futures.
 
We keep falling for this. We need to realise that the structure at the club will not allow us to sign anyone.

We wont. No matter how many injuries we have.

Ole and the board will say, January is very hard to do business in. If you think I am wrong, just look what Ole and Ed have been saying, yes we are looking at players but also understand January is difficult. They have prepared fans for a January with no signings.

This is however incorrect because there are clubs who sign in January. If you want make excuses before the window, what do fans expect?
 
youngrell said:
That was my point – we have made mistakes in the past but I believe we are trying to address those and put them right. Part of that is letting go of bad or the wrong players ASAP, even if it means weakening ourselves a little for the time being.

We simply couldn't add a bunch of new shiny players while still keeping players like Sanchez and Lukaku about, it's not feasible.
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yeah, except Lukaku and Sanchez left....

every other club can handle sales and purchases at the same time
 
sparx99 said:
yeah, except Lukaku and Sanchez left....

every other club can handle sales and purchases at the same time
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So you're just going to ignore the fact we bought 3 players in the summer?

We made purchases, just not direct replacements for those that left, probably because replacements were not available. But we couldn't pass up the opportunity to offload these players anyway.
 
Our target in the summer was Sean Longstaff. It didn't sound bad until we were told there was no other alts.
Like really? Sean fecking Longstaff was our only option to strengthen this midfield.

Prepare for "there's no value yadada" I don't know what else people still expecting from this window.
 
youngrell said:
So you're just going to ignore the fact we bought 3 players in the summer?

We made purchases, just not direct replacements for those that left, probably because replacements were not available. But we couldn't pass up the opportunity to offload these players anyway.
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Yes, because it’s a dereliction of duty to sell Lukaku without having agreed a deal a replacement.

I just don’t accept players weren’t available. Maybe we baulked at the prices of some targets but thats not the same thing as not available. Get dirtier. Urge them to make a fuss. Or just walk away and sign the next guy on the list.

Supposedly only around 20% of transfers work out as successes. So you have to embrace a certain amount of churn. We could have signed similar profile of players to Depay, Blind and Schneiderlin and maybe we get lucky and hit on 2/3 this time. If not we sell them on and get our money back like we did with those three.
 
sparx99 said:
Yes, because it’s a dereliction of duty to sell Lukaku without having agreed a deal a replacement.

I just don’t accept players weren’t available. Maybe we baulked at the prices of some targets but thats not the same thing as not available. Get dirtier. Urge them to make a fuss. Or just walk away and sign the next guy on the list.

Supposedly only around 20% of transfers work out as successes. So you have to embrace a certain amount of churn. We could have signed similar profile of players to Depay, Blind and Schneiderlin and maybe we get lucky and hit on 2/3 this time. If not we sell them on and get our money back like we did with those three.
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So you want to continue throwing mud at the wall and see what sticks? Great.
 
You don’t need to sign players, you need to change the coaching team.
 
Define ambition.

There has been a divide from day one with Ole (since he was appointed permanent manager) based on where people (posters on here) stand with regard to long-term ambition(s).

What's the aim? Finish in the top four, as if this were an aim worth throwing in the kitchen sink for? If so, overpay for whoever can be considered an upgrade on...whoever. Sure. Hardly a sustainable strategy, though, if those upgrades will be considered "deadwood" for a team actually challenging for the biggest prizes down the line. They will very likely cost an arm and a leg in transfer fees too - not to mention wages.

Whether people like it or not, the basic principle of steering clear of "upgrades" for the sake it makes plenty of sense. Buy players - and offer them contracts - according to a long-term plan. That's what we should do. If we can pick up players who fit that bill now, in the January window, all the better. If not - don't panic. We have overpaid for unsuitable players for years now - it has brought us nowhere closer to where we want to be.
 
Walters_19_MuFc said:
Financial muscle we have, but spending for the sake of spending is the reason why we're currently where we are.
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But we wouldnt be spending for the sake of spending. The squad clearly needs improving.

Im not buying the line that targets arnt available either, if you have a competant recruitment system you d have enough targets to at least secure one that will improve the squad.

Theres plenty of players out there. Find them
 
romufc said:
We keep falling for this. We need to realise that the structure at the club will not allow us to sign anyone.

We wont. No matter how many injuries we have.

Ole and the board will say, January is very hard to do business in. If you think I am wrong, just look what Ole and Ed have been saying, yes we are looking at players but also understand January is difficult. They have prepared fans for a January with no signings.

This is however incorrect because there are clubs who sign in January. If you want make excuses before the window, what do fans expect?
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I hope you are wrong but think you are you are right. You make good points which are very convenient excuses for Woodward to hide behind when he has no intention of buying any players at all.
 
Nickelodeon said:
Things were ugly when we sold Herrera and Fellaini without replacements. Last season when we had both of them along with our current midfield, that is when most of us thought that we needed upgrades.

Now we are without two out of our mid 3 of last year (Herrera-Pogba), our first choice backup (Fellaini), our promising youngster of last year (who is now a crucial first teamer, McT).

So essentially last year we had Matic, Herrera, Pogba, McTominay, Fred, Fellaini, Pereira as our midfield options.. Now we have Matic, Fred, Pereira. How can things get uglier? It is criminal that we didn't sign a replacement in the summer. It is beyond criminal that even now, we're not even bothered. It is a full blown crisis right now.
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When you see this happen to a big club like Manchester United, fans have every right to ask questions and be worried. If there is no one brought in this window, we all know where we are heading. Down the Arsenal road.
 
If we were going to sign anyone, it needed to be this week imo.

We have 2 fit central midfielders, and 9 matches that will determine our season. Signing someone on the last day of January is simply too late to impact this year.

Given that, it probably makes more sense - from a long term view - to just wait.

Give Tuanzebe and Fosu-Mensah some minutes in midfield. Hell push Maguire up there, he cant be worse than Matic defensively.

Fans need to forget this season. It's over.
 
Some fans don't learn. Liverpool spent nearly 0 this summer and improved. This notion that signings are the only way to improve a team is a FIFA/Football Manager mentality. What if the signings don't perform? More signings?

Signings should be about need instead of signaling ambition, especially in a competitive league like the PL. I convinced if United was collectively managed by the Caf the club would have a roster filled with aging deadwood players.
 
What ambition can we even talk about seeing how a manager who is delighted that we lose only 1 game a month is still in charge? There is no ambition, it is clear for some time now. Our targets moved from TOP 2 to TOP 4 to TOP 6 to top half of the table.
 
If we bring anyone in it'll likely be through a loan deal.
Going by the recent rumours ,Emre Can would be a solid addition.
 
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