Roy Keane responding to Van Dijk's comments: There's a lot of arrogance coming out of him, dissing #mufc like that. He needs reminding that he is playing for a club that has won one title in thirty-odd years." [Sky]
⚠️Can we set a few things straight?
🔺1. Bayern Munich in 23/24 is not a very good team.
Of the players we had on the squad tonight — only Bruno comes close to challenging for a spot in Bayern’s starting XI.
Player for player — there is just a significant difference in class between the squads.
How is this possible?
🔺2. We went into this summer being in a fairly good position. Players wanted to come here. We had started to establish an identity under ETH (although it required Martinez and Casemiro being available, when they weren’t — our game went down the drain).
But we also played more games than anyone else in Europe — and we know that a backlash can be expected after that as well as several injuries.
🔺3. We could have invested £500-600m in our squad this summer under the FFP rules had our owners supported the club with just a 90m investment and been willing to sell the players the manager wanted gone, regardless of the cost.
Those investments were needed. Our squad is very thin, and still had many players that just don’t fit what a top team must do on the pitch. There were also several individuals on the squad who just aren’t professional enough, don’t work hard enough and that just needed to be cleared out.
🔺4. This summer, that money should have been used to recruit at least the following type of players:
(a) Ball playing GK
(b) Top left footed LCB (Gvardiol would have been perfect)
(c) Top right footed RCB (KMJ?)
(d) Strong CDM (Rabiot?)
(e) A No 8 to play over Eriksen
(f) A top No 9 (Kane/Osimehn?)
(g) A young striker (Højlund)
(h) A left footed RW
🔺5. The money on these players — will — be spent anyway, but instead of recruiting them immediately when we had a need for them — our owners decided to put off 2/3s of this investment until the summer of 2024.
🔺6. The Glazers decision to put off this investment will most likely cost us (a) a spot in the CL next season and (b) a spot in the very lucrative new FIFA Club World Cup in 25’. The cost for this will be approximately. 200m.
How much did the Glazers save on putting off this investment for 12 months? They could have loaned the money for 12 months for a cost of 90m times 5% = app. 4.5m.
👉 This is mismanagement on an incredible level.
🔺7. But we invested £400m on our squad over two years — how can that not be enough?
First of all, it’s less than all of City, Arsenal and CFC have invested in their squads if we look at transfer fees, wages and agent fees since most of our signings are on relativity low wages. And to be clear, we spent £356m, not £400m.
Second of all, when finishing 21/22 we just did not have a good — enough — team. From that team, we have today lost 10 player — of which 5 where among the highest paid players.
Look at the below summary — the math just don’t add up even remotely — given that we got the injuries everyone knew we would get this season (and then some).
👉 I think it’s clear that the fan base must come together — can people who are stuck in for/against Ole, for/against De Gea and so forth just bin those pissing contests — and put pressure on the scumbags that run this club to do the right thing. I — cannot — understand how it can even be up for debate whether this fan base once again has been betrayed by our owners. And now we are told that no investments will be made in January either.
It’s a disgrace and completely unacceptable.