Louis Van Gaal Sacked

[Vim]

There's no point in buying a superstar winger/forward unless you've got the keeper-centre backs-central midfielder axis sorted.

[five time]

What's wrong with the central midfielders? A combination of Schneiderlin/Carrick/Herrera/Schweinsteiger would get in most teams.

[Kikó]

On paper not bad but two of them are probably past their best. The other two are underperforming.

[Lewis]

Michael Carrick isn't so much past it as permanently injured, so it will be interesting to see how much Jose Mourinho (or Rafael Benitez) chooses to depend on him.

[Kikó]

One for Smiff - http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/footba...e-ryan-7408760

[Lewis]

I'll accept Ryan Giggs if Carlos Queiroz comes back.

[elth]

What problems do you actually have?

I know it gets banded around a lot but I struggle to see (m)any.

There's nobody with decision making power at the club who has any ability or talent as football administrators.

Woowar's won all of the power struggles and he's a marketing guy, he just doesn't get football. All of the problems since Fergie and Gill left have come down to people not making good decisions as football people - Moyes maybe is understandable, but Woowar used that failure to completely remove Fergie and Charlton's influence in the boardroom. Since then it's been the big commercial decision over the good football decision every time - big names, big money, big splashes, big deals, no football administration in sight. The collapse of the youth academy is a symptom, not a cause, of United's decline - it's not important to guys like Woowar because it doesn't make a big commercial splash, it's too nuts and bolts footbally. Same with scouting, same with coaching. It's always "what's the big deal?" not "what's the best football decision?" Even the inevitable Mourinho hiring will fit into this mould, he's a splash signing, not a "how do we keep building a football institution?" signing.

The model might work if they had better people making the splashy decision, but when you have marketing chumps in charge of football decisions even those things are going wrong, because they don't know what they're looking for even in the strategy they're pursuing.