Manchester United - How did we get here? Strikers

The lack of any vision or planning has seen Manchester United spend £100m on strikers the past two years and still need another one this summer

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Let’s get right to it. Things are pretty bad for Manchester United right now. The team is worse than it’s been in a long time and the remaining 14 Premier League matches are likely to be as turgid as the previous 14 matches.

Through 24 Premier League matches Manchester United have scored just 28 goals. Only four teams have scored fewer. It’s pretty bleak. If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s not visible yet.

The worst part about accepting this season as a write-off is the realization that next season is likely going to be a write-off too. United didn’t make any big moves in the January transfer window, but sitting one window out isn’t going to magically solve their financial problems. It’s going to take some work. The team has far too many holes that can be addressed in one summer, or possibly even two.

According to Kieran Maguire United have spent the second most money on transfer fees in the Premier League this season. Over the past three seasons only Chelsea and Manchester City have spent more. Yet United have used that money to assemble one of the worst constructed squads you will ever see.

How did we get here? How did they spend so much money and come away with such a poorly constructed squad?

Those are questions that have many different answers - almost all of them valid - but today we’re simply going to focus one area: strikers.

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“I’m not looking for the best players Craig I’m looking for the right ones"

- Herb Brooks in the movie Miracle (2004)

It’s not a fluke or an accident that Manchester United are in the position they’re in. It’s the direct result of the choices they’ve made when choosing to sign the players they’ve signed.

The Poisson distribution essentially states there’s a probability for everything. If you went back to the summer of 2022 and said Manchester United will spend roughly £600 million to sign 15 or 16 players over the next three years - there’d be a probability that within three years United would be champions, a top four club, or a even a team on the outskirts of relegation.

The odds of United being a team just outside the relegation battle would have been incredibly small. However if you looked at every decision United made in isolation, the odds that those specific decisions would lead them here would be much higher. That’s because each decision that has already been made is going to have an effect on the outcome of each new decision. Whether decision is right or wrong in isolation can change based on previous decisions.

Last August, Liverpool’s former Director of Research, Ian Graham, gave an interview with James Pearce at The Athletic to promote his book How to win the Premier League. In that interview Graham touched on Liverpool signing Darwin Nunez as he discussed the most important aspect of squad building - understanding that not every good player will make you better or is necessarily right for you. The players you already have can’t be forgotten.

c: The Athletic

Essentially the data backed up the claim that Darwin Nunez was a really good player. But Liverpool already had Mohammed Salah. The team was built around Salah and rightly so. To help support Salah they had recently signed Luis Diaz but still needed additional help.

The thing about Darwin was he was a very different type of player to what they previously had. He wasn’t going to slot in and play the same role as Roberto Firmino. If Liverpool wanted to sign this player and get the best out of him, they were going to need to change the way they play, which was most likely going to mean not seeing the best versions of Salah and Luis Diaz. Then you also have to consider that Salah and Diaz may not be the best wingers at playing the type of football Darwin thrives in, which could hamper the strikers ability to be at his best.

The question that Graham tried to get through was simple. Is Darwin better than Salah and thus worth changing everything to build around him? You have to build around one or the other. You can’t have both. That doesn’t mean that Darwin isn’t a good player, it just means he wasn’t the right player for that team.

Now let’s go back to the spring of 2023.

Marcus Rashford records a 30 goal season for Manchester United and is handed a new contract that pays him north of £300k/week. Giving a player that kind of contract is the club telling them that they’re the main guy and you’re building your team around them.

At this point Rashford was pretty much an open book. He’s the kind of player that thrives when there’s room to run in behind defenders. That’s either on the counter attack or playing next to a striker that gets on the ball and helps create space for their teammates.

In 2022-23 Rashford played next to create-space-for-you types like Anthony Martial and Wout Weghorst - or he himself played as the striker - running onto Bruno Fernandes’ through balls to launch counter attacks. Obviously Rashford thrived. This was the ideal situation for him. When you put him next put him next to a more “classic” lead-the-line no. 9, Rashford had always been far less effective.

When you decide to make someone your highest paid player, the next logical step would be to bring in someone who would help create that ideal situation for that highest paid player. Instead, United decided to spend £65 million on Rasmus Hojlund, a “classic” lead-the-line number 9.

What was the thinking there?

If you look hard enough you can maybe see a potential plan in putting Rashford to the right of Hojlund with Jadon Sancho on his left¹.

You’d set it up this way to allow Sancho and Luke Shaw to combine down the left and offer creativity. If Hojlund made runs to the near post that would allow Rashford to make dangerous back post runs. If Rashford got on the ball, he could be more dynamic and more of a duel threat on the right. You’d be trying to replicate the success he had on the right when he played next to Edinson Cavani.

The additional benefit would be when the left footed Hojlund had to play with his back to goal, it would be an easy layoff pass to the ball-progression monster, Sancho, on the left wing. If Hojlund could turn on the ball and be in position to run at defenders, his left-footedness makes a pass to the charging or cutting Rashford to his right more dangerous due to the simplicity of the pass.

It’s far from perfect but if you squint hard enough, you can kind of see an idea behind it.

Now here’s the problem. United’s manager Erik Ten Hag preferred to have a left footer playing on the right wing². Furthermore at this point the relationship between Ten Hag and Sancho was already deteriorating - even before Ten Hag dropped him for the Arsenal match.

The preference was always going to be some combination of Rashford, Antony, and Alejandro Garnacho for those two spots flanking Hojlund. That’s not the best way to make use of the skills of any of those four players and doesn’t set your new signing up for success.

Within a month of Hojlund’s arrival, Sancho would be banished from the first team. In isolation, the signing of Hojlund and banishing of Sancho were separate decisions made by separate people all for their own reasons. But in the big picture, United had now jettisoned the player who was likely most compatible with their £65 million signing and instead they flanked a striker dependent on service with wingers who liked to cut inside and shoot.

Everyone struggled. The tactical choices also did them no favors. Garnacho was the bright spot but he scored just seven goals and they were accumulated in just four of his 36 Premier League appearances. Over the course of the season Garnacho only completed 16 passes to Hojlund, just 0.9 per 90, while Rashford was better but still weak with 2.31 per 90.

Hojlund scored 10 goals in the league, six of which came in a five game span in January/February. Only one of Hojlund’s Premier League goals was assisted by a winger, and that for all intents and purposes was an accident - a Garnacho shot going wide redirected off of Hojlund’s chest and into the net.

Last summer United set out to sign another striker to replace the departing Anthony Martial. Perhaps United realized one of the things they were missing was the close combination play between their striker and wingers that they had when Anthony Martial played down the middle - specifically his relationship with Rashford. Martial was never the same player after his hamstring injury in the derby in January 2023 and made his last appearance for United in December 2023.

United targeted Dutch forward Joshua Zirkzee, a forward not known for being a high volume shooter but someone who had strong link up play qualities. Just before the season began The Athletic’s Carl Anka joined my co-hosts and I on The Fergie Fledglings Podcast where we discussed a key reason for singing Zirkzee wasn’t so much what Zirkzee will do for you, but how Zirkzee will have an impact on United’s existing players to bring out better performances from them. The player most likely to benefit from Zirkzee’s arrival would be Rashford.

Rashford only played 405 minutes with Zirkzee in the Premier League this season. They started three games together with Rashford scoring three times in those three starts. However those goals came against bottom of the table Southampton and the other two came in one match vs Everton. Two of the three were on set pieces, but the third was exactly what you were looking for from Zirkzee and why it would benefit Rashford. It’s too small a sample to draw any real conclusions, but that is the kind of production you would be hoping to see when you made this deal.

Within five months of Zirkzee signing new manager, Ruben Amorim, had dropped Rashford from the team citing that he couldn’t get Rashford to see football the way he sees it. Within six months of Zirkzee’s signing Rashford was sent on loan to Aston Villa.

That left United with a striker who liked to drop deep and create space for his teammates to attack, without actually having teammates who could attack that space. For all of his excellent quality, Amad Diallo is not that type of player, while Bruno Fernandes and Alejandro Garnacho have consistently proven that 1v1 finishing against the goalkeeper is not their strong suit.

They also have a completely different type of striker who somehow also seems completely out of place with his current teammates. Hojlund’s struggles have grown this year. One of his issues is his lack of making good runs in the box. Some of that is firmly his own fault. Some of it comes down to learned helplessness, when he used to make those runs the balls never came, so now he doesn’t make them anymore. He’s far from the first footballer for this to happen to, but everyone is struggling.

To sum everything up - in 2023 United spent a fortune to sign a new striker who didn’t fit their style of play or the styles of their existing players. Within a month they dropped the one player they had who maybe could have worked with him. A year later they signed a striker whose biggest asset was going to be getting the best out of one of their best players, only to get rid of that player in the next transfer window.

It’s true that none of these decisions were made by the same people. Hojlund was signed by the football structure that existed in 2023³, the decision to drop Jadon Sancho was made by Erik Ten Hag. Zirkzee was signed by a different footballing structure and the decision to drop Rashford made by a different manager. Each of these were all isolated incidents, but in the bigger picture, every decision went completely against the previous one. That lack of continuity on each unique decision actively helped United end up in the mess that they’re currently in.

When there’s so much change at a football club things like this are liable to happen. New people come in, they typically want to exert power and control to move the club in the direction they feel is best. But each decision doesn’t come in isolation, if you don’t look at the entire picture and the entire surrounding environment, you’re likely to dig yourself into an even bigger hole than you found yourself in.

The players you currently have absolutely matter when your trying to asses what kind of players you need. The more you ignore that, the more likely you are to find yourself in a situation where you spend £100 million on strikers in the past two years yet still need to spend another £70+ million on the position the following summer.

So how did United get here?

The odds of United spending £600 million over three years and becoming a near relegation level side were slim. But what if you asked what are the odds of United having a near relegation level attack after signing a striker who doesn’t fit the current players and immediately banishing the one player who might work best with him followed by signing another striker who really only fits one player and is here to get the best out of that player only to ship that player out six months later?

The odds wouldn’t just increase. They would indicate this as one of the most likely scenarios.

1. Again let’s go back to the summer of 2023. Jadon Sancho had started 10 of United’s final 13 Premier League matches (plus the FA Cup final) with United winning eight of them. After Sancho returned to the first team, only Rashford had more non-penalty goals than Sancho and only Rashford and Bruno Fernandes had more goal contributions.

2. Even taking Antony out of the equation. Having such a strong preference for two opposite footed wingers is always going to be a tactically limiting preference but that’s a story for another post.

3. During the summer Hojlund changed his agent to SEG - the same agency that represented manager Erik Ten Hag. Hojlund is never going to beat the allegations that this move was very contrived. There will also always be questions as to whether Hojlund was the best available striker, or simply the striker with the right contact information and the easiest to get a deal done (so many transfers happen or don’t happen for reasons just as dumb as this).