Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s words sound very familiar. Jose Mourinho needed two or three summer transfer windows. He had three. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer needed two or three. He had three.
The Bryan’s Gunn X account would not struggle for clips of pundits recommending “two or three windows”. Now the Ineos-era Manchester United need two or three.
There is a glaring problem. The incumbent manager has had two summer windows and is into his third. Another squad rebuild is underway after the previous rebuild crumbled.
And under the same manager whose recruitment hit rate is iffy, at best. This, despite Ratcliffe and his Ineos cohorts sounding out numerous potential alternatives to replace Erik ten Hag.
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As Ratcliffe noted to those of us who had an audience with him in February, the environment is the “central issue” at United, rather than the coach. Still, United actively sought an upgrade on Ten Hag.
With the recent Southampton director of football and a former cycling team principal at the Carrington coalface, Ineos lost their nerve. Omar Berrada and Dan Ashworth are still on gardening leave, which has admittedly compromised United’s restructuring and decision-making process. A 17-day end-of-season review that drew conclusions established long before the FA Cup final hardly tallied with the “high-performance” jargon Brailsford purportedly pioneered.
Football has a habit of making the rich look poor and Ineos’s about-turn will only be vindicated if United improve immeasurably under Ten Hag next season. The minimum aim has to be Champions League qualification and silverware.
That is eminently possible. Good eggs outnumber the rotten apples in the dressing room and Ten Hag has an enviable nucleus to build the team around. Seven starters offer a promising blend of youth and experience, supported by resilient professionals who have been around the block. The academy secured a triple-crown haul and United hope for more breakthroughs into the first team next term.
Supplement that talent with a proactive window of incomings and outgoings, as well as an overhaul of the medical department, and United have a chance. The usually bullish Ratcliffe did downplay expectations, though: “I’m not confident that we’ll solve all the problems in the first transfer window.”
The perfect summer window has been beyond United since 2007. Ins: Nani, Anderson, Owen Hargreaves and Carlos Tevez. Outs: Alan Smith, Gabriel Heinze, Kieran Richardson and Giuseppe Rossi. The squad Sir Alex Ferguson assembled is United’s greatest. There was no room on the bench for Ji-sung Park or Gerard Pique in the Champions League final.
Berrada’s delayed start and the failure to make headway with Ashworth are easy cards for Ineos to play should they have to excuse the team’s performances next season. The John Murtough-appointed Matt Hargreaves remains the point man for recruitment.
Ratcliffe told Bloomberg United “want to be where Real Madrid is today but it’ll take time”. Without wishing to sound too grave, the 71-year-old Ratcliffe may never live to see that day.
United once instructed new signings to bill them as “the biggest club in the world” in their introductory interviews. They ended that practice a while ago as the zenith of club football is, and always has been, Real Madrid.
Madrid, reigning La Liga and Champions League winners, have five times as many European Cups as United. The prospect of United winning six European Cups in 11 seasons? Not in my lifetime, as Ferguson infamously said.
Ratcliffe’s complaint about the Premier League preventing Ineos-owned Nice from selling a player, believed to be Jean-Clair Todibo, to United is not going to cut it either. United occupy the moral high ground in Manchester but would relinquish that if they arranged cut-price deals between sister clubs.
Jarrad Branthwaite, a young English centre half attached to a big Premier League club with recent international recognition, is bound to command a higher fee than Todibo. United sources say the club’s budget is in the tens of millions this summer (minus funds from any sales) and United have still approached Everton for a defender valued at between £70million and £80m.
Still catching his breath after the London Marathon, Ratcliffe drew parallels between United and a marathon runner, cautioning the club were “at the first 10k” of a marathon. He lamented Berrada’s delayed start and the impasse with Newcastle over Ashworth. “It takes you six months to a year, or 18 months,” he rued.
That would roughly encompass two or three summer windows.