Have Man Utd smashed this window or absolutely f***ed it with Onana fee?

Have Manchester United got everything right? Or are we ignoring the fact that they could have had Andre Onana for nothing?

There is also a return from Stewie Griffin on Arsenal and more on women’s football. Mail us at theeditor@football365.com to have your say.

Have Manchester United smashed this window?
Mason Mount in before pre-season starts.
Andre Onana is here on time for the pre-season tour (most of it anyway).
Rasmus Hojlund apparently on the way in.

Deadwood is starting to move out.

Ruthless decision made with Cristiano Ronaldo.
Ruthless (if badly handled) decision made with De Gea.
Ruthless (if badly communicated) decision made with Maguire – how in God’s name does Maguire & his team get to go public before the club there?!

We’re buying players that fit a playing style, not a commercial strategy.

Football novices upstairs are listening to the actual football manager.

We’re prepared (publicly at least) to walk away from deals rather than get our pants pulled down over the price (incoming & outgoing).

It would appear that we have solved the mystery of working on more than one deal at a time.

Whisper it quietly, but Manchester United are actually starting to behave like a real football club again. Far from perfect and even further from the halcyon days of Ferguson & Gill, but a hell of a lot better than any time in the last 10 years.

Erik ten Hag, Richard Arnold, John Murtough and co. deserve a lot of credit.

It’s only 13/14 months since Ralf Rangnick walked away from that pure dumpster fire of a team…

If the Glazers move on at some point, which admittedly is looking less and less likely as that mess drags on, it will be close to a perfect summer.

In fact, if nothing else had happened, but the Glazers moving on, it would be a 10/10 summer regardless…
James, MUFC

READ: Arsenal top as we rank Premier League clubs on taking care of transfer business

Oh but…
So, Manchester Utd have signed Andre Onana for £47m. Nice. Good signing. Good keeper, plays in the way they want to play. I like it.

Except… Onana left Ajax on a free transfer last summer. That’s Ajax, the club Ten Hag left last summer. So, Utd have just paid £47m for a player they could have signed for free last summer.

Classic Utd transfer master class.
Micki Attridge

What about the FFP charge?
Well, I’ve been having a good look round.

Haven’t seen any articles on it.

Is the increasingly curious Football365 deliberately not deeming it newsworthy?

(You obviously didn’t look very hard – Ed)

Haven’t seen anything in the Mailbox about it. Perhaps I missed it, after all?

Are some people, often called McDevitt, desperately trying to brush it under the carpet for fear of raging hypocrisy?

Can anyone explain why the likes of Tim Sutton and Graham Simons haven’t constantly written in, expressing their disgust, about matters appertaining to another club?

Is James Outram diligently scouring the internet, late at night, to look for spurious reasons as to why another Club is doing things differently?

Or, is it irrelevant, due to a glossy ‘nothing to see here’ statement from the said club?

After warnings that this might happen, Manchester United have been fined £250,000.00 for failing FFP and they’ve accepted the fine. Guilty as charged, m’Lud. A quarter of a million quid.

There, I’ve said it. Hopefully, this will appear in the Mailbox so that F365 can actually acknowledge that it’s happened.

Nobody else is bothered, of course. There’s only one Club should be asterisked, have its trophies removed, relegated and probably barred from the league, isn’t there?

Manchester United, Carabao Cup winners, 2023*.

Nah, doesn’t look right, does it?

Never mind, forget I said it, or at least, ignore it, huh?

Not helping this time.
Levenshulme Blue, Manchester 19
PS. Fat Man, lovin’ yer work. Piss boiler, extraordinaire.

Arsenal and The Big Lie
Hope you are doing well and enjoying summer! 365 I’m confused about something. As you well know, I’ve consistently panned Arsenal fans for their laughably low standards and absurd lack of ambition. Watching their fans pretend they’d achieved huge things last season (trophyless with less PL points than the forgotten Spurs MoPo team 🙄) was funny enough. But mystifying has been this consistent, years-long Big Lie that Arsenal are some hard-up paupers who spent little money.

The Big Lie was propagated by Arsene Wenger of course, to cover up his rank incompetence. By lowering the bar to encourage his minions to promote 4th place as some outlandish achievement (even as annual account after account showed Arsenal had plenty of cash and spent huge amounts on wages), the “plucky Arsenal” narrative was born.

From that moment on we have been faced with the farcical scenario of Arsenal fans starting each pre-season with ridiculously low expectations, ignoring the vast sums spent on transfers and wages. The common refrain from last season’s comedic Choke job was “nobody expected anything”. Which should be indicative of how weak the club mentality is if, a manager who had already spent over €400m on players can’t be expected to be competitive in the league.

For years, Arsene Trump’s Big Lie swirled and his red-cap wearing boys swallowed it whole. Let’s be clear: Arsenal “achieved” nothing last season. No trophies, but a title challenge. Sure, more than predicted. But the question is why are preseason expectations so artificially low? Arteta has spent over £200m – more than Madrid, Citeh, Bayern, Barca, ManYoo, Juve, Inter or anyone else. Now 365. Remember the days when Arsenal fans wrote Mail after mail about how it’s “impossible to compete” with a team who spends hundreds of millions in the transfer market? Curiously, those same fans are silent when asked for instance:

– How did Leicester manage to win a PL title?

– How did Klopp manage a PL, then a CL, whilst up against Pep’s Citeh and with a considerably lower budget? I’m not even adding his domestic cups. Klopp has actually been highly competitive whilst spending way less than Arteta. And no, Klopp didn’t walk into a ready-made situation. Liverpool were still playing Skrtl et al weren’t they?

Again, put those evidence to Arsenal fans and they flail into hilarious Brexiteer-la-land of denialism and deflection. But the excuses are Done. Arteta has spent an absolute fortune – far more than Klopp (who improved and sold players). Over £200m this window, and another small fortune the summer before. Spending £65m on Havertz seems like utter lunacy to me – but who knows, maybe he will learn to press and finish his dinner?

One thing is certain Arsenal fans: NOBODY outside the Emirates Kool-Aid drinkers is buying this bs “plucky wee Arsenal”. You can and should now compete with Citeh. The problem isn’t money, it’s that Pep is a better manager and signs better players, for better value. I can’t see Pep even blowing £65m on Havertz for instance.

So despite the hilarious crap written in by Gooners trying to preempt more failure with a “third place is all to be expected”, I’m just going to quote Arsene Wenger’s minions:

“It’s impossible to compete with teams spending hundreds of millions”

Right? 🤔. Oooh Wait – so there IS context behind that vacuous excuse-making nonsense! Riiiight. No excuses next season. It’s a title challenge right up until the final match-day plus a UCL semi. Minimum. None of this “we finished 4th but won a domestic cup” – because again, Arsenal fans were here claiming they’d had a better season than ManYoo. Were they not! No excuses left. Though they will find novel ones for sure (maybe inflation and Putin’s war of aggression?)
Stewie Griffin (Arsenal fans have literally copy-pasted “the future is bright” since the days of bloody Djourou. WHEN does this future actually arrive? Or should I ask Marty McFly for the bloody answer 🤣🤣)

Why are we even comparing women’s football to men’s?
The argument about who is watching/not watching women’s football is incredibly tedious. But I think there’s a couple of things that seem to get ignored or overlooked, and I don’t think it’s fair on the women athletes who are playing that they are.

Women’s football is as good as men’s. That’s the line from broadcasters and John Nicholson (again and again). I don’t think it is. But also, I’m not sure why we think it should be?

Women’s football was actively suppressed for decades by the FA. Not ignored or undervalued – suppressed. The women’s game has literally only just started to get the investment it needs and the growth since then has been huge. Yet this is really just in Europe and the US. Many of the countries competing in the World Cup do not have fully professional leagues. Even we, who pride ourselves on doing a great job in this area, are only capable of having a 12 team top flight in the women’s game. So the talent pool is much smaller than in the men’s game.

Likewise, girls were not playing football en masse until fairly recently, and even now participation levels are far below those for men. This automatically creates a smaller pool of potential talent. How many girls in the 90s and early 2000s could have been great players, but never touched a ball as they were pushed into hockey, netball or another ‘girl’s’ sport? This is obviously changing and it’s much more normal to see girls playing football. As this expands, the talent pool will increase and we’ll see a surge in great players.

I think we also suffer a bit in the UK from being concentrated on one thing – our men’s football team. My Spanish friends support Real Madrid, for example, and Real Madrid have a football team, a basketball team, a handball team and a women’s football team (and more). It was natural for these guys to support every Real Madrid sports team, and when the women were added, they supported them too. In the UK, the women’s teams feel separate still. Hopefully, as the large teams invest in this area, people will see the men’s and women’s teams of their sides in the same light.

I like women’s football. I liked the Euros and I’ll be watching the world cup (Kick off times allowing). I think it still has a sense of fun that men’s football has lost – families in the crowd, I think, contributes a lot to this. It also seems to lack a lot of the cynical cheating of the men’s game which I find really off-putting. I think it’s important for the sport to be different and not ape the men’s game.

I don’t think it’s as good as the men’s elite game, but I don’t see why, at this point, it should be. It seems really unfair to say that this sport, which has at best a decade of decent push and funding (at a push) isn’t as good as a sport which has a century of history and has a huge participation rate. But it is getting there, and I believe it will get there, but the constant push of PR telling people that it is exactly the same game seems unhelpful.

So vive la difference, I say. Enjoy the game for what it is without constant comparisons. Comparisons which we don’t seem to get in more established women’s sports. The 5 year old girl you see kicking a ball around in the park with her parents might well just be the start of the truly elite women’s game exploding with talent – and this current generation of women will have been the trailblazers and the role models for her.
Rich

You got your reaction, Johnny
The fairly hefty reaction to Jonny Nic’s article on the Women’s World Cup must have warmed his heart. It obviously got the clicks and stirred up debate, which I guess was the aim, since it’s what he’s paid to do. That includes my reaction.

Wouldn’t it be nice though if he could still generate such levels of interest by writing about something pertinent to actual football and worthy of debate like in the old days, rather than resort to such shit-stirring, dismissal and baiting towards anyone who doesn’t share his rather extreme point of view.

Or maybe he genuinely believes what he wrote in which case he’s plainly just an idiot.

Neither scenario reflects terribly well on him.

As for the condemnation of Anon in these pages, well, you and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals and I’m pretty sure that Psychologists and Sociologists will confirm that we respond to sexual signals either consciously or subconsciously, whether we like it or not, and whether we try to suppress it or not.

But if you want to condemn someone for admitting that a few million years of biological evolution has left him unable or unwilling to fully suppress such a natural instincts and thoughts, whilst otherwise being able to function like a considerate human being, you go right ahead on your delusional high horses.
Kevin Villa

F365 among those to blame
Reading John Nic’s article, coupled with this morning’s mailbox, left me compelled to write in.

I grew up during the 90’s and early 00’s as a football mad child. I comsumed all the football content, from Match magazine to FourFourTwo & F365, whilst playing Football Manager and FIFA throughout. I played football daily and with everyone, girls and boys, until the girls stopped.

Women’s football was barely a footnote in any of this content.

As a result, I have been conditioned to consume only men’s football.

Now, in the 20’s, women’s football is more than a footnote. The Guardian have equal coverage of what happens in the men’s and women’s game. FIFA and Football Manager allow you to control/be women’s teams. The BBC shows the Women’s World Cup, as well as men’s.

These institutions realise that it is on them. The more they give us, the more we consume. Football mad children growing up now will see and learn the names of both men and women and consume it all.

England won the Euro’s in 2022.
How many Weigman Ladders have we seen since?
How many previews for the World Cup in 2023?
How many Winners & Losers of a WSL season that had four potential winners playing each other in the 3rd last game week?
The only articles this website publishes on Women’s Football is John Nic giving off to anyone not watching it.
Yet we get countless articles of what Jamie O’Hara or Gabby Agbonlahor say on TalkSport, tarted up as news.

It is not on us to retroactively learn all that we weren’t taught. It’s on the teachers to teach us.

England will be watched this summer and read about this summer. If they do well, they’ll be watched more this summer and read about more this summer.

Some people won’t watch it. Some people will actively not watch it.

Yet all of this will happen away from this website – where we’ll only read people defending or lambesting watching Women’s Football – without discussing the actual football.
Conor, London

Agreeing with Edwards and Agbonlahor
I’m not happy to find myself agreeing with the likes of Luke Edwards and Gabby Agbonlahor, but after reading today’s Mediawatch and re-reading the news articles and reaction pieces to Hannah Dingley’s appointment as Forrest Green’s (caretaker) manager two weeks ago, I reluctantly find myself in this position.

As much as Mediawatch is technically correct when it makes the point that it was just a caretaker appointment, and that Hannah Dingley reportedly did not even apply for the full-time position, I still feel it is entirely fair for someone to accuse Forest Green of doing this as a PR stunt, even if that ‘someone’ is clearly a d**kh**d.

I still feel it is entirely fair for someone to point out that Dale Vince is “attention-seeking” and that it was blatant he “loved the limelight”, even if that ‘someone’ would also clearly be fairly described as an attention-seeking moron who blatantly loves the limelight.

The appointment of a woman to be the manager of a professional English football team was always going to make major news and put the club, the woman and the team under a microscope. If there was never any plan for Dingley to apply to be the full-time manager, you would expect the comments from Dingley and Vince to reflect this. You would expect the Media reaction pieces to the news to reflect this. They really do not, even with the benefit of hindsight. The appropriate reaction would have been “guys, relax, it’s no big deal, she’s just leading their training for a few weeks while the club interviews the 100+ men who applied for this job, which she herself is not interested in continuing on a long-term basis”.

If anything Vince played up the possibility that she would be applying for the role. (Why was a League Two club appointing a temporary manager even newsworthy, in the context that the individual had no interest in being the full-time manager? I can barely name any club managers who work in the Championship, never mind League One or League Two).

When I read the news of the initial appointment 12 days ago, I thought it was fantastic news and found it ridiculous that the likes of Edwards/etc were belittling it as a PR stunt. This is not a case of me saying “hah! I told you so!” – quite the opposite. It’s more like I feel like my time/attention has been wasted on an utterly banal temporary appointment which did not deserve any fanfare to begin with.

If this was not a deliberate PR stunt (and I am willing to believe that it wasn’t), it was at the very least badly misjudged and utterly pointless. Respectfully, I think that on this occasion the d**kh**d was right and F365 is wrong, the claims that this was a “huge moment for women in football” does feel very weak today.
Oliver Dziggel, Geneva Switzerland