Mourinho was Chelsea manager at this stage in the 2004/05 and well on his way to his first league title in England. He won the Champions League with Porto in 2004 and was snapped up straight afterwards.
Failed to check the year. Original post amended. You know the point I was making though.
Cheers.
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Is Juan Mata still knocking around? Strange one when he got the new contract around the same time as Phil Jones. Great player in his day but seems to have vanished off the scene completely.
Yeah supposedly being groomed to be a coach. I wouldn’t mind seeing the back of Mike Phelan at this stage. Could be a good shout as assistant manager like Arteta was for Pep.
The club were probably right
Yeah saved £40m on Sancho and probably the same on Rice, if they sign him.
How is Sancho doing? Is he justifying the £75 million transfer fee yet.
He has barely played for Manchester United since signing.
Mind you it’s far from unknown for great managers to make a high profile signing and then not use the player. Brian Clough did it with John Sheridan. Clough won two European Cups.
So it’s definitely not a pointer towards the manager not having a clue what he’s doing - quite the opposite in fact.
Not yet but early days in fairness. Seems to be bedding in time when moving from the Bundesliga when you look at Havertz and Werner too. Fabinho only made his competitive debut for Liverpool towards the end of October when he joined Liverpool.
Not sure I’d agree with that. Sancho was bought as a high profile attacking player. Plus being English is going to be much easier for him to settle in. The biggest issue, IMO to his slow start, is that Utd didnt plan to get Ronaldo and he has essentially usurped Sancho now and is left with Sancho on the bench. The Ronaldo move was a strange one for me. Great nostalgia and brilliant for commercial reasons, but long term, after buying Sancho and trying to change to a high pressing gameplan, the transfer really didnt make sense from a footballing perspective. Ronaldo has to play, but he shouldnt be. The Van de Beek transfer makes even less sense. Almost like the Schweinsteiger transfer, but at least in that one it was Mourinho who fucked him over but didnt buy him. For Solskjaer to buy DVdB and never give him a chance just seems really odd. It makes me wonder how much say he has in transfers considering the moves being made.
Wouldn’t agree with this. He had never played a senior game in the EPL so faced the step up in standard from the Bundesliga, regardless of his nationality.
100% agree - if it was a non-EPL club going for him they wouldn’t have signed him.
I’m convinced this was an Ed Woodward move in order to get any transfer across the line and was sold to Ole as back up in case Pogba forced a move.
Sancho played over 100 times in the Bundesliga and has 20 or so England caps. There is fuck all step in standard that he had to make that he isnt considered as good as Rashford or Greenwood or Daniel James who all were young and pretty much thrown in straight away. None of them had better or more experience than Sancho but yet all given decent game time. Take Ronaldo out, and I’d bet Sancho is a regular starter this season.
Sancho would have been a good Liverpool signing
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He has to pick three from Ronaldo, Cavani, Fernandes, Rashford, Sancho, Greenwood, Lingard and Martial. Because in the big games Bruno plays as a forward
Possibly but there have been plenty of instances in recent years of players from the Bundesliga struggling to adjust to the pace of the EPL at first. Havertz, Keita and Werner were tearing it up over there and took them a while.
Ronaldo is definitely impacting Sancho’s playing time as Greenwood wold have been alternating shifts at 9 with Cavani.
Ole likes to play with two holding midfielders to account for the luxury players in attack. Van De Beek isn’t really a cdm but also isn’t as good a cam type playmaker as Bruno so there’s no real slot for him. A very strange signing when they evidently had no position in mind for him. He was very highly touted back in 2019.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer being landed with Ronaldo is like that episode of the Simpsons where Bart wins an elephant.
At first everybody in the neighbourhood was awestruck to see Bart’s elephant, and all the kids wanted a ride on it. Then after a short while people got bored of it, and it unsurprisingly became apparent that the elephant was extremely high maintenance, extremely expensive, and required particular expertise that the incapable Bart didn’t have. Despite its outward magnificence, the elephant fulfilled no particular purpose, did no work, took up space and was a general nuisance. The elephant had a bad personality. It was, in the words of the expert from a wildlife refuge who came to have a look at it, “a jerk”. In general it was far more trouble than it was worth.
Inevitably Bart had to get rid of the elephant and gave it to the wildlife refuge, who could look after it.
In this case the wildlife refuge is probably Los Angeles Galaxy.
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DvdB is criminally underused. He has a better touch, eye for a pass and drive than either fred or Mctominay. He has been shafted royally. I’d swap him in for Mc T right away but I’d imagine he’ll just be sold. He will be a super signing for someone.
He’s the new Shinji Kagawa.
Looking at that list shows how incredibly good a manager klopp is. I would safely say that in almost every position the United players were rated higher than the Liverpool ones at a certain stage in their career. Klopp has just made the likes of, Trent AA (wan bissaka), Robertson (Shaw), Matip (Maguire) Henderson (McTominay), wijnaldum (pogba), fabinho (Fred), Salah, mane, firmino (take your pick from about 20 attacking players over last 5 or 6 years) better players while their equivalents in brackets who were all highly rated at some point have stagnated or disimproved. The only player to exceed expectations in about ten years at united is Bruno. Klopp has a list of about 12 of them. If united and Liverpool swapped managers pool would be 8th and united would be favourites to win it all.
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