Big Three? It’s a Big One but the Man City era ‘will end’

Editor F365 02 Oct 2024 8:00 AM

Erling Haaland and Kevin De Bruyne of Manchester City

Haaland and De Bruyne are the early PFA front-runners

There’s actually only a Big One and it’s Man City right now but it won’t be forever. We’re sort of moving on from Man Utd.

Send your views on any subject to theeditor@football365.com

There’s just a Big One
Mark from Devon wrote in on Tuesday morning to say that there is no Big 6, only a Big 3. Well, as a Man United fan that never really bought into the Big 4 (which were United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool) can I just say that I somewhat agree. Only one modification: Let’s call it The Big 1.

There is only place that matters, and that is first. The rest are just the losers in a structured order. I think it was Wenger who introduced getting into the top 4 as some sort of achievement, and now that could be the top 5 depending on the results of English teams in Europe.

There’ll never be a fixed Top Four, Top Six, Top Whatever. That’s the beauty of football — it fluctuates and as much as that hurts me now, I can also appreciate that it wouldn’t feel great to win if you didn’t lose every now and then.

All rival supporters are loving United’s demise and so they should, because when United were all conquering for 20 years under Sir Alex Ferguson, it must have felt like it would never end. It did, and so will City’s current grip on the title. Meaning that if there is to be a Top Anything, that would either have to be based on emotions and subjective opinions or on historical results. So, I guess United is the Top 1 with 20 league titles.

That made me feel better. (It really didn’t).
Kim Johannesen, Copenhagen

READ: How Moyes, Hodgson, Mourinho, Rodgers fared after starts as bad as Ten Hag’s Man Utd

…To paraphrase Kendrick Lamar; there’s no big 3, it’s just big me. And that Big Me is Man City.

They are streets ahead of everyone else, despite Arsenal and Liverpool running them close. And they will remain the big me until/if something happens with the 115 charges.
Culk the Younger

It won’t always be a Big One though
Watching Ipswich vs Aston Villa brought back childhood memories of 1981 when Ipswich ran out of puff (players, injuries, too many games, too many tournaments) and lost 4 out of 5 of their last League games to gift Villa the first division title. We won the UEFA Cup and came second (to Liverpool) the following year.

Then we imploded…

Fast forward to the current day. Liverpool dominated for years and then imploded, as did Man U, Arsenal, and Chelsea after separate periods of domination. Spurs did a couple of second places…and now we have Man City.

There is no God-given right for them to dominate going forward. They may or may not have been shooting steroids to get them in the game (those 115 charges relate to another era). In the current era, they’ve just been better at pretty much everything than everyone – recruitment, management, tactics, infrastructure, strategic planning. On almost every front, ManU has outspent them and all the other top 6+ generate squillions of pounds – certainly enough to put a competitive team on the table.

No one seems to mention it, but the PSR rules seem to be working…even Man City have to make an actual profit (or at least only lose a sustainable amount).

There’s absolutely no reason why a well-run Arsenal or Liverpool cannot compete, and it is highly unlikely that Man City will replicate the Liverpool boot room that ensured succession.

Each era ends…the Guardiola era will end.

As a final point – why have Man U been so bad? Actually, Ferguson is the anomaly. With the exception of Busby 20 years earlier, ManU have never had decent managers, and have always been badly run. No idea why…it’s just the way it is.
Matthew (ITFC)

Do Man Utd need to write off a couple of seasons?
At least we can finally all agree Man Utd really are shit. We just don’t agree on what the problem is. Some blame the players, some the manager and some the management. It’s all of that and more.

Since Fergie left Utd, both the club and fans have had a level of entitlement that it’s just a matter of time before we start winning. The reasonably regular cup wins aid that nonsense as have the distant second placed finishes we’ve had. The reality is that Fergie’s last team had no right to win the league – that squad he finished with should have been ecstatic with getting top 4 let alone a title. We were already going backwards then when others were going the other way.

Utd have not been a regular top 4 side for years yet we start every season with title aspirations and it is ridiculous. We are competing with the biggest teams for the biggest players to our own detriment (but in reality we’re not even competing for the biggest players – they are going to clubs where they can win things, we just compete for the expensive players no-one else wants). What big name player is really going to want to come to Utd? The biggest players we’ve managed to sign have mainly been past their peak and rapidly decline when playing within our environment.

So who’s to blame? I’d say it boils down to expectation. Everything at Utd boils down to how we win the league next year. It doesn’t work like that. I feel we need to hit rock bottom before we can start improving and unfortunately rock bottom could be quite a way to go at the current trajectory and magnitude of delusion.

If Utd admitted where we find ourselves and actually wrote off the next 2 or 3 seasons and simply built a playing style around young, hungry players we could start moving in the right direction. However, we’re not going to do that as the business model won’t allow it. We’re going to throw the manager and a few recent signings under the bus and repeat the cycle so enjoy the show lads.
Jon, Cape Town (Unfortunately, I fear the squad actually might be good enough to finish 5th or 6th which will make all at the club feel they can continue with this circus)

MORE ON THE MAN UTD MESS FROM F365:
👉 Top 10 Manchester United lows under the doomed Erik ten Hag
👉 Big Midweek: Ten Hag sack, Arsenal v PSG, Aston Villa host Bayern, Foden, big Championship clash
👉 Next Man Utd manager: Who should Red Devils appoint if they sack Ten Hag?

As if Man Utd would do that…
Vinnie Pee wrote in that, essentially, Man Utd need to get rid of some underperforming players, get some new ones in, and then, in his words, “bin a couple of seasons” to allow the team to reset.

Now Vinnie isn’t the only Man Utd fan I’ve heard/read come up with this suggestion. It’s something we hear every year from Utd fans. Get rid of some deadwood, bring in some young players, write off a couple of seasons; this approach will allow Man Utd to develop a young, fierce team ready to fight for the league.

They might be right, in fact they probably are right in my opinion, the issue is that it’s the Man Utd fans who don’t have the patience to write off a couple of seasons.

Last season, I remember reading countless mails from Man Utd fans expressing who is deadwood and needs to go. Scott McTominay, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Donny van de Beek, Mason Greenwood, Hannibal, Raphael Varane, Jadon Sancho and Anthony Martial – “GET RID” were the cries, “get younger, better players in” were the howls. Incoming were the likes of Leny Yoro, Manuel Ugarte, Joshua Zirkzee, Noussair Mazraoui and even Matthijs de mutha-funkin Ligt.

All of those players – all of them! – are upgrades compared to who departed.

So, as far as I can see, Man Utd HAVE got rid of the deadwood, they HAVE brought in younger, better players. Man Utd have done their part, now it’s the time for Man Utd fans to do theirs. This is what they wanted, they wanted to write off this season… so calm down and write off this season. You wanted this.

And as for the manager, I also seem to recall Man Utd fans being very protective of Eric Ten Hag after he won the FA Cup – “he deserves another shot” were the yelps. I agree with them, and I’m not being sarcastic, ETH deserves this chance, but he can also reasonably expect the patience that Man Utd fans promised him.
Dale May, Swindon Wengerite

How can it be the players’ fault?
Ahh, the “It’s the players” argument again. Did you know that this claptrap started a few weeks into David Moyes’ reign (as Fergie apparently left a paradoxical team of deadwood premier league champions), and inexplicably has hung around for 10 years and approximately 100 players? How much money has been spent since then on “clearing out the deadwood”? Billions isn’t it? You have got through a lot of players since Fergie left.

Sure, some purchases will have been ill-advised but no club is that good at ‘buying the wrong players’ so consistently. And it’s funny how many of those players did not have an attitude or ability problem at their old club, and mysteriously found a new lease of life again on leaving United. Only United are capable of spending so much money and still manage to maintain a perennial existence in the purgatory of being “5 years off challenging again.”

Of course the manager has been replaced 7 times too with each leaving the club in shellshock at how much work there still is to fix the club, even as other managers turn lesser clubs around in half a season with a few shrewd purchases and a review of team ethics. So all that is left to conclude is that the very entity of United is the problem. I can only guess whether it is the ethos of the club, the owners’ influence or maybe the tea lady is secretly Gríma Wormtongue and has been poisoning the minds of all in the dressing room for a decade.

I get that when you have replaced so many managers you might have a look back at the players, but it is unfathomable that anyone following the club long enough to have seen United unravel could possibly still be thinking that clearing out yet another round of deadwood is going to fix this! I mean you have just seen another batch of shiny new signings from top teams in Europe play like competition winners against Tottenham. Think again!
Nick (Seriously, it’s worth checking if the tealady is indeed Wormtongue. Would explain everything.)

A stopped clock
Yet again Sp*rs fan proving consistently how small time they really are with two days worth of beggy ‘please talk about us, we scored 3 against Man United’ letters.

That’s like me feeling proud I beat my 4 year old at FIFA.

Pathetic.
Danny P

A scientific review of VAR
Reading Top 10 Manchester United Lows Under the Doomed Ten Hag, point 5) reminded me how much I hate VAR. But rather than put forward a subjective argument, he’s a scientific one.

Coventry should have won the FA Cup semi-final last year. They had a decisive goal disallowed for a marginal offside, an offside which was too close to call for VAR to intervene.

VAR works at 60 frames per second. A professional footballer sprinting at top speed runs at approximately 10 meters per second. Therefore within a single frame, a player can cover approximately 16 cm, which is therefore the error tolerance of the system* – the point the passing player makes contact with the ball is measured by VAR to the closest frame.

On this basis, if a player is determined to be offside by VAR for a distance of less than 16cm, the decision could be wrong. As I believe it was in the semi-final.

In reality, when judging offside, this tolerance should be taken into account. My belief is the on-field decision by the assistant referee should stand unless VAR determines the player to be offside by a greater distance than the error tolerance of the system.
Rob
* Note – For the sake of this example, I have oversimplified the calculation and assumed the defender is stationary, if the last defender is sprinting in the opposite direction this potentially doubles the distance covered in a single frame. The true tolerance is actually 30cm, which is just silly.

A capital explanation
Reluctant as I ordinarily would be to respond to someone who still calls it the Premiership, I can perhaps offer a suggestion as to why bigger clubs haven’t come calling for Eberechi Eze, Yoane Wissa or Bryan Mbeumo: they have, but unsuccessfully.

All three of those players, in their different ways, would make a positive contribution to any club from the highest reaches of the Premier League, so it seems impossible none of them, not even Spurs or Manchester United, have made even the slightest initial approach.

The boring reality is that neither Brentford nor Crystal Palace are in a position where they need to sell one of their most important players, so can, to an extent, price people out of the market, for a few reasons; chief among them is the cost of replacing him, with selling clubs knowing they’ve just received a huge amount of money from a sale, so the replacement’s potential cost goes up, and as a knock-on effect, so does the cost of selling their player in the first place.

At Palace at least, there was a difference in circumstances for Eze and Michael Olise. Olise agreed to a new contract last year, around the time Chelsea were making a lot of noise about trying to sign him, that contained a release clause for a team in the Champions League.

Knowing he was likely to leave this summer, Palace will have been extra resistant to any interest in Eze. I’d imagine, though I’m happy to be corrected, Brentford had a similar situation with Ivan Toney, in that he was likely to leave this summer so keeping hold of their other forwards was important.

It’s not a geographic thing, it’s a football transfer thing.
Ed Quoththeraven

Actual Peak Barclays
I bank with Barclays in the UK. They seem to reach out to contact me once every year to ask me how things are going, if I’m happy with the service, if I’m having any problems or have any feedback, etc.

This is mostly irrelevant to the F365 Mailbox, but today the conversation ended with the kind person at Barclays offering me two free tickets to a Premier League match of my choosing, among available tickets/clubs. I was able to pick from West Ham, Fulham, Brentford, Southampton and Wolves; in the end I will be going to Brentford vs Bournemouth with a friend next month!

Just sharing this PL-related story because Barclays really made my day today (Thank you Jacqueline)!
Oliver Dziggel, (formerly of) Geneva Switzerland

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