#850

Fwiw, Guardiola took a much better team that should have been winning the league anyway, and had been planning for his arrival for several years.

Mourinho took over a team that was an absolute mess from an ageing squad, which had been further muddled by bizarre scattershot Woodward signings. On paper, he’s improved it massively with his signings. Results wise (points don’t lie) he’s made them the second best team in the league.

Not taking anything away from Pep’s achievement, Mourinho will never have a team playing like that, but we were several steps behind them in the first place and I imagine Pep would still be having last season City type struggles and frustrations with United at this stage.

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#851

City and United finished level on points in 2015/16

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#852

Transfers out in the first two seasons under Abramovich - they let go of some proper great players (in bold) amongst the dross.

Albert Ferrer
Gianfranco Zola
Jody Morris
Graeme Le Saux
Ed de Goey
Winston Bogarde
Juan Sebastián Verón
Marcel Desailly
Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink
Mikael Forssell
Mario Melchiot
Emmanuel Petit
Mario Stanić
Jesper Grønkjær
Carlton Cole
Hernán Crespo
Boudewijn Zenden
Neil Sullivan
Marco Ambrosio

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#853

yeah^this

just to provide some contrast, the one time I saw him play in the flesh (Sweden v Argentina friendly) the amount of running Aguero did off the ball was insane. He never stopped or seemingly slowed the entire time he was on the pitch

#854

you’ve not bolded jimmy floyd there by mistake

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#855

Duly noted.

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#856

love him despite playing for chelsea AND leeds, underappreciated how he was able to maintain likeability while surrounded by such scumbaggery

#857

And both the the Danish and Italian Ryan Giggses.

#858

Was obviously being a bit ironic there. Pretty clear though that the squad Pep took over was both better and better suited to his methods than United’s to Mourinho (which is all about mental toughness, I guess, and our players were completely fucking broken).

#859

At this point, I think whoever fetches up at United next has a job on their hands to avoid becoming something approximating England’s PSG. It’s surely occurred to Woodward and the rest of the board that not playing good football and not really winning much (triple excepted) hasn’t impacted on being the most floatable club in the world. Pogba was surely bought with the number of shirts he’d shift first and foremost, and the number of ageing superheroes you’ve gone in for recently stink of exactly the same sort of thinking.

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#860

Fully agree. Commercial concerns will trump footballing concerns until the club is sold (probably to become a billionaire’s plaything or a state-backed vanity project)

#861

We shouldn’t forget that Jose’s binned off a full team of players around the fringes of the senior team. Don’t think it’s true that he’s not been able to move a lot of dead wood on. Just had a look…

Valdes, Love, McNair, Blackett, Schneiderlin, Scheinsteiger, Powell, Januzaj, Mkhitaryan, Depay, Rooney, Keane were all in the senior squad.

Fletcher, Rathbone, Rothwell, Reid, Dunne, Weir, Goss, El-Fitouri, Harrop have all been released. Maybe they were shite, but…

Johnstone, Pereira, Borthwick-Jackson, Wilson, Varela, Tuanzebe, Fosu-Mensah, Henderson, Mitchell, Poole, Willock, Byrne, Scott, Redmond, Riley have all gone out on loan.

36 players have left in less than two years, 21 permanently. There’s not a huge amount of dead wood there now - Zlatan, Fellaini, maybe one of the left-backs and one of the centre-halves, but it’s a pretty trim squad.

Need a new job, lads…

#862

I think we’re all forgetting that Pep inherited a team with player of the year elect Otamendi already at the club

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#863

Just shows how shit our squad was all that, doesn’t it

#864

and despite that we’ve still got yer Blinds, Darmians, Rojos (to a lesser extent), Smallings, Joneses that he’s having to rely on to varying degrees and has “only” bought in eight players to Guardiola’s fourteen or so.

That list you just posted just speaks volumes of what a shitshow of a squad we’d assembled after three years of dicking about replacing decent, experienced league-winners with players that weren’t upgrades in any way.

#865

Sorry, but that’s bullshit. The team and squad was a mess being propped up by two or three standout players. Outside of that - Hart, Clichy, Demichelis, Fernando, Mangala, Navas, Sagna. It’s weird how we’re revising the quality of these players given how hilarious many of them were at the time. The current United side would easily beat the City side of Pellegrini’s final two seasons.

They should have been better in 14/15 and 15/16 in the sense that they had the means to be, but the recruitment after the first PL title was as bad if not worse than United’s post-Ferguson.

#866

In Aguero, Silva and (in theory) Kompany you already had an incredible core. IMO it’s like Fergie managing to turn around United’s second great team, and after a few fallow Djemba Djemba years form a third one with bits of the second remaining. The team Mourinho got was shit. All the great players from our last great team had left or were done for.

#867

I’m that annoyed that i’m not doing anymore formation posts or saying who’s shit for the rest of the season.

Thank fuck i’m going out on saturday night so i can’t watch the cup game. Might go away for the weekend when the Derbys on.
If it ends up a liverpool v city champions league final the tele is going out the window.

#868

Watching the highlights back, they got away with it last night, really. Sevilla could have easily added a third, fourth, fifth after their second. Not sure Mourinho would have recovered from that.

#869

If they’d started Ben Yedder instead of that Muriel it would have been done and dusted after the first leg.