When you look across the list of players in the Manchester United squad, you can’t help but sort players into four distinct categories 1) Future building blocks, 2) Players who could potentially be useful, 3) Players who should have been sold years ago, and 4) Players who should have never been signed in the first place.
Distinguishing these players is often not difficult at all. Alejandro Garnacho and Kobbie Mainoo, for example, are very obviously building blocks for the future, and you’d be hard pressed to find many reasonable Manchester United fans who think Harry Maguire and Antony were remotely worth their price tags.
It’s an unfortunate reality, though, that Manchester United have far too many players in the third and fourth categories, but that’s typical for a fallen giant that just had their worst single season finish of the Premier League era and is currently sitting in the bottom half of the table.
Manchester United are particularly at risk of having failed transfers because they have went through so many managers who were either never backed properly (Ralf Rangnick) or were never good enough for the job to begin with (nearly everyone else).
Erik ten Hag keeping his job through the summer was the worst possible decision Manchester United’s new ownership group could have made, and it goes beyond the Dutchman simply being a bad manager.
Manchester United had to make signings to improve, and those signings had to be at least tacitly approved by Ten Hag. And now that Ruben Amorim is taking over, he has to inherit a group of players that may not fit his system or ideals – or they might not even be good enough for the squad at all.
Antony is likely in that “not good enough” category, but of the signings Manchester United made this past summer, all of them have at least managed to succeed in a league of some rigor.
Yet despite the success of Noussair Mazraoui and the promise of Leny Yoro, you can’t help but wonder if Joshua Zirkzee, important as he was for Bologna in their shock Champions League qualification last season, is yet another big name the Red Devils shouldn’t have signed.
The appeal with Zirkzee is that he’s an intelligent, hard-working, and well-rounded striker who is better at doing the dirty work to press and create chances for the other forwards.
But Manchester United didn’t actually need that. They already had a highly athletic all-around striker in Rasmus Hojlund with more upside than Zirkzee. And in Amad Diallo, Alejandro Garnacho, Marcus Rashford, and Bruno Fernandes, they had pieces in playmaking and wing roles.
What Manchester United were missing was goals. They didn’t have a striker who could score 20 goals in a season, have a box presence, and put away chances consistently.
Hojlund could potentially be that guy in the future, but that future is years away, if it ends up happening at all. Zirkzee, even in a career year at Bologna in a top five league, only scored 11 goals.
Quite frankly, that’s half the number of goals Manchester United should be aiming to receive from their starting striker if they want to get back to the Champions League level and push for the Premier League title, which is the standard a club of their size and financial power should be meeting every season.
Analysis of transfers has to be more complex than “good player or bad player”. Zirkzee is a good footballer. We saw that last season. But it never made sense to spend nearly 50 million euros on someone whose primary strength at striker is everything but goals when all Man United needed was goals above all else.
Amorim is already being linked with a move for his eagle-eyed goal-scoring Sporting CP striker Viktor Gyokeres, precisely because, for the 10th summer window going, Manchester United signed a forward who doesn’t score.
It’s mind-blowing to think that in the time since Manchester United had Wayne Rooney and Robin Van Persie together, their most clinical and consistent finisher was one season of Cristiano Ronaldo before the egomaniacal watch guy shipped him off to break more goal-scoring records in Saudi Arabia.
