‘No real direction with Manchester United transfer dealings’

Brendan Rodgers was under-valued at Liverpool, top-level scouting is “over-rated” and Manchester United’s transfer policy gets bashed in Friday’s fans’ forum.

 

Join in the debate here…

 

Chelsea backroom reshuffling 

Pagan, DOF are primarily executive roles and act as a go between between the Manager/Head Coach and the Board.

DOF traditionally have no role in Coaching or developing first team players they are developed by the first team Coach/Manager and his Assistants and the same applies at U21 and Academy level where the relevant Coaches for those squads are responsible for Coaching their own players in the relevant squads.

A DOF identifying the players that he wants and developing them himself isn’t in practice at any club to my knowledge certainly no major club and would almost certainly see Conte/the majority of top Managers/ Head Coaches walk straight out of the door were it put in place and or not be prepared to walk through the door in the first place.

The Manchester City structure includes two ex Barca execs in. Chief executive: Ferran Soriano (former vice president of Barcelona FC, ex-chairman at Spanair)
Football director: Txiki Begiristain (ex-Barcelona player and sporting director) both of whom had/ have a very strong relationship with Pep and were responsible for bringing him to the club.

nine nine nine

 

999, I think you may have misread what I said, as re reading it it is a bit ambiguous. When I said the DOF to developers players he wants, the he in this case is the first team coach.
Not really concerned about tradition, we need DOF that oversees the whole of the football ethos in the club, so there is a seemless transition style wise from academy, through youth to first team, with the coach of the first team setting the style.

However the style must remain similar whoever the first team coach is, otherwise if will cause havoc flip flopping between styles.
Yes the DOF has to operate at all levels in the club, if he hasn’t got a suitable player coming through the system then he needs to seek that player elsewhere, and provide the coach with what he wants, and that’s where he deals with the money men…Pagan

Pagan

 

Abramovich’s change in transfer philosophy

Just read this “Conte recently recently found himself in hot water when it emerged that the Chelsea owner wasn’t talking to him. The two sides have been at loggerheads since the summer, when the Coach wanted the club to buy him more players.

With the Blues struggling, technical director Michael Emenalo has left the club, out of fatigue if nothing else, potentially leading Conte to feud with No.2 Marina Granovskaia.

Ranieri claims that Chelsea’s owner “has a different transfer philosophy now. He wants the team to maintain itself.”

Not sure how accurate the background actually is but Ranieri’s view of how things are seems pretty accurate?

nine nine nine

 

Who will replace Emenalo?

I think any of the names being touted would work. Guess that Vialli and Gullit have that little bit more experience as they have been retired longer and both managed but that is not to say that Frank or Drogs would not be able to bring something to the job

As I see it, and this is only based on paper reports which I cannot validate, the main problem is potentially going to be Marina and how she would react to someone coming in who is probably more closer and more sympathetic to a managers viewpoint rather than just a yes man who would agree with her.

So long as she understands that her job is to buy players that the manager wants, providing within our limitations, then I can only see this as a positive step forward for the Club. KTBFFH

CFC1905

 

‘Brendan Rodgers deserves a lot more credit’

Rodgers deserves a lot more credit then he getsd. We were fantastic to watch back then. Saurez was a good player but he left us as a world class player and rodgers deserves some credit for that. He built the team around saurez. Saurez turned into a proper permier league goal scorer under rodgers. He missed far to many chances in his first season.we werent were we were just because of luis. Sterling,couthino,flanagan,gerrard,henderson,sturridge etc were allplaying at their very best level.

we went to old tarford and played a diamond. we went to spurs and played 4-3-3 and won v very easily. we had won 11 games in a row. we were on fire. There was no way we were going to chnage our tactics but lets be straight. we didnt go gung ho againmest chelsea. It was a very tight game until gerrards slip.

i disagree rob,i think we would have drawn that game and it would have set us up nicely to win our last two and i doubt we would have drawn with place as we were chasing goals in that game.

jose was smart. chelsea were missing a host of players. The widemen pushed back to play as full backs and the full backs pushed into to play as centre backs. It was a wall. The smart thing jose did was slow everything down. we started to get annoyed when chelsea were taking their time at 0-0. why? a draw wasnt a bad result. Jose played the crowd to a tee but i dont believe rodgers got his tactics wrong that day. We played like were playing.If we had of went to 3 at the back and lost people would have been going mad that we had changed our tactics to get us to that point. Faith wasnt with us and its the most disappointing thing ive ever expierenced supporting liverpool for over 30 years but lets give rodgers credit.

Jose went into that game well wound up as we wouldnt change the date of the game as chelsea had cl and there was no way he was going to make it easy for us. He got is tactics spot on and one very unfortunate incident had us chasing the game.

that game showed us why i believe the god sare againest us. Our best ever player and captain that has carried us to trophies at times, goes and slips. You couldnt write it and thats just our luck all over.

he always defended the club. He was very proud to be our mmanager. He talked some amount of rubbish. His hands were tried when we didnt get sanchez when luis left. We fgooked up badly with the players we bought.

Sean the Sailor

 

‘Scouting is overrated’

Scouting at the highest level is overrated – I’m convinced I could do a better job of scouting top level players for Man United than some of our so called “world class” scouts have done.

Even back in the day, it was obvious to the highest degree that Robben and Sneijder were world class talents and that Real Madrid screwed up big time for letting them go, yet we didn’t go for them and spent the next 6 or 7 years constantly wishing we had signed them.

And how on earth do our world class scouts miss players like Kante, Dybala, Higuain, etc constantly?

Sympathy for the Devils

 

No real transfer policy

Reading a lot recently about how much we’ve spent and how we should be a much better team because of that investment. Whilst i generally agree (Our impressive early season form aside) i think part of the problem is that we have had no real direction with our transfer dealings as Tommy alluded to in a recent post.

Is that because we are torn between sticking to our traditions and trying to keep up with the spending of the City’s, Chelsea’s and PSG’s of this world? As a club the echos of the Busby Babes reverberate around the stadium, play youth and always attack. But the youth hasn’t been delivering for a long time now and i think it’s impaired our ability to be objective in the transfer market. Even though we buy big, we still try to invest in youth.

Martial, Bailly, Pogba, Lukaku, Depay, Shaw, sticking with Lingard and promoting Rashford, Tuanzebe and MacTominay from the reserves all point to a strategy that says “invest in young players”. And we have that very proud achievement of always having a youth product in the match day squad. Whilst i think this is a good strategy it also means we struggle to have a clear idea of how to invest in experienced players.

With each exciting prospect, Martial or Rashford, we’ve bought a Bastian Schweinsteiger or a Daley Blind to try to nurture these young players through. But where we’ve failed is in not buying the right experienced player. Maybe we spent all our money on the youth and therefore had to penny pinch on the experienced players? Or maybe we didn’t think the experienced players were as important as the young players and misaligned our focus. Either way it hasn’t worked because we’ve not managed to get the best out of the young players and the experienced players have all started to be shipped out. Almost ruining the careers of Shaw, Depay, Januzaj & Schneiderlin etc whilst having to ship out the likes of Schweinsteiger, Rooney, Valdes and Fletcher which has also left an awkward gap of players with question marks over them who fall into neither category like Smalling, Fellaini, Mkytaryian, Young, Lindelof and Mata.

Bit of a long post but, essentially, i think we need to redefine our transfer strategy. We’ve got the basis of a very good and young team why don’t we now try to compliment that with some of the best, experienced players in the world. The way City have done with Silva, De Bruyne, Aguero etc. I don’t hold out any hope for transfers in January but i do expect us to be going big for the best, most experienced players in the world next summer. Let’s maybe take one eye off these young players and bring in some players who can actually deliver consistent performances on a weekly basis. Cheers.

happyhurling

 

Stats with and without Pogba

Season stats so far this season:

With Pogba:

Chances per game: 14.8
Big chances per game: 3
Goals per game: 3

Without Pogba:

Chances per game: 7
Big chances per game: 1.6
Goals per game: 1.6

Besides us missing the footballing skills of Pogba since his injury, Mourinho has to take some blame for his tactics. I believe he has not shown enough faith in the rest of the squad in Pogba’s absence and has retreated into his shell tactically. It’s partly due to the fact that it is obvious that as soon as you take Pogba out of the team it loses it’s dynamism and “pizazz” in central areas but Mourinho should also be aware that he might have been able to push through this period through sheer belief if he was a better motivator.

There is also the Huddersfield loss which was a proper shock to the system – now that loss was purely down to poor performance from the players, it really

hatters

 

FA not fit for purpose

We know we lost the appeal and there is no turning back on that decision. What Millwall are doing is calling for a reform to the appeals process. In its current state its not fit for purpose as are most parts of the FA.

All you need to do it look at Henri Lansburys red card for Villa earlier in the season that was over turned then look at Jed Wallaces that wasnt. Two almost identical tackles, if anything Lansburys was worse. You wll never get consistenty on a pitch over 90 minutes but you should get consistency from a panel set up for this very thing.

Who are the panel?
Why the secrecy around them?
What have they got to hide?
Does a panel even exist?

Calling the FA currupt may sound harsh and most people think they are just incompetent, but decisions like this say to me this stinks of corruptoin. Millwall have made no fewer than 10 complaints this season fully backed up by video evidence that major decisions are going against us. Now this happens, Coincidence? I think not

NOLU