‘Tiresome’ Man Utd are back to Bruno Fernandes being a problem… | OneFootball

We’re one game into the season and the newly-crowned PFA Player of the Year is holding Manchester United back…

The Mailbox ponders the Bruno Fernandes conundrum while bemoaning how tiresome following United has become.

As ever, get your mails in to theeditor@football365.com…

The Bruno problem We need to talk about Bruno. He is an excellent long range passer of the ball, who will create a ridiculous number of chances across a season.

However, the cost of that chance creation is possession concession; he gives the ball away a similarly incredible amount in search of the killer pass.

Multiple managers have tried to set up Man United to play possession football. Every single one has failed because – and this might sting some people – Bruno is in the team. At this point, he is the only common denominator in all those teams.

Ten Hag leaned into the counter attack style of the squad for his first seasons, while he tried to fix the squad; it went well. Then he tried to move things along and got cooked. Amorim tried to play possession and got cooked. Last season, Carrick followed the Ten Hag route to adapt his approach to the players available, and it went well; and this season wants to move things along…

United will never – I repeat, NEVER – be able to play possession football while playing a guy who either cannot or will not learn to retain the ball better. De Bruyne created fewer but picked his moments and didn’t just give it away needlessly.

Before anyone jumps in with “but set pieces”, his set piece delivery is average at best. It is not a strength, by any means. It’s a stopped clock at best.

He’s got his records and he’s had his flowers for them, and he still has a role to play. Just absolutely not against a low block. Never against a low block.

Oh, and btw INEOS, we do still need that rotation striker – at this point I don’t care who (other than please god not Delap) because a false 9 doesn’t work against the low block either. Badwolf

Bored of Man Utd You know, for a long time, I never dreaded getting older. I never saw ageing as something scary. I’ve always felt young at heart, and I looked forward to each new day being brighter than the one before. The greys in my beard never stopped me from enjoying life, whatever the weather.

But for some strange reason, I’ve been feeling really down lately. Maybe it’s because I’ve started thinking more seriously about how old I am and where I am in life. In a few months, I turn 40 (goodbye to my 30s). I have no kids. I work a pretty s****y job just to earn enough to survive in a city that is far too expensive. And the person I once thought I’d spend the rest of my life with is no longer in the picture.

Granted, that’s life, I guess. And I’m not asking anyone to bring out the violin for me. But one of the things that used to bring me so much joy is slowly becoming yet another thing on the list of things depressing me.

At this point, I think I’m tired of watching Manchester United.

Since 2014, every season, I’ve told myself the same thing: surely this is the year things get better. Surely we’ll finally turn a corner. Surely this basket case of a club will finally grow up and give us fans something to look forward to.

But it’s the same s*** every year.

Expensive flops. Managerial merry-go-rounds. Lowered ambitions. First it was winning the title. Then it was top four. Then top five. Then Europe. Now it seems like the ambition is simply to finish comfortably above mid-table.

Hell, even the football isn’t sexy anymore.

You watch the team and find yourself wondering: what is our style? Is the plan just to give the ball to Bruno and hope he does something spectacular?

Don’t the people running this club watch modern football and see where the game is progressing?

I’m not asking us to go back to the Fergie years. That’s damn near impossible. But come on. We shouldn’t be the club living permanently off past glory, simply turning up every season to make up the numbers in the Premier League and Europe.

So yeah, if I’m at the final stage of Manyoo grief, I’ve accepted it.

I just can’t see a way forward anymore. Gaptoothfreak, Man. Utd., New York (A depressed fan)

Liverpool’s stools I think one of the worst things as a fan is when your club go big on a player that it quickly becomes apparent doesn’t fit.

You try to resist and pretend it will be ok as rival fans mock and taunt but deep down you think, oh crap.

As a Liverpool fan of 40!years I’ve had plenty Andy Carroll and Christian Benteke spring to mind but I’ve never had a sense of impending doom like I did when I read a mail last summer saying Writz was going to be kicked around the premier league like a school boy, and he has.

But what’s worse nearly is the knock on effect his has had on the team. Remember two years ago we were untouchable with a title winning midfield of Gravenberch/Macallister and Szoboszlai in the 10 role. It worked. Szobo was relentless as 10 and set the press relentlessly.

So why change? All you had to do was build a side around this, finds Salahs replacement, a new number 9 back 4 but with the core in place it was all doable. Now it feels like everything is wrong. No matter what we do we can’t get the balance right, Wirtz as a 10 means we’re short in midfield, he’s never a 9 and too slow for the wing, essentially we bought a problem we can’t fix without dismantling our midfield further which we appear not to want to do.

So why did it happen? Bad ideas lead to bad outcomes usually. Phrases like “we need a plan b” “we’re too predictable” or in this case “we lack creativity” can be very dangerous if you believe them. Look at Arsenal, they committed to a style, ignored the noise and are now the team to beat. Did Mikel lie awake in bed at night worrying that his team were too predictable, unimaginative and boring, not a bit he doubled down, bought some more hybrid centre backs and said beat that.

At the moment we’re caught between two good ideas, and like the drunk sitting on the floor between two stools can’t commit to either.

It began with Trent leaving. We panicked and said how will be create anything now, we’ll be too predictable and boring and teams will just shut us out. The answer became Wirtz. It’s not a bad answer but if you want Wirtz feinting and laying off balls in the final third which result ina. Very high turnover rate then you need cover. It’s as simple as that.

Playing two attack minded progressive midfielders behind him against a counter attacking team with blistering pace is just plain stoopid. Whether Wirtz has the mentality and physique to succeed in the league is another question that needs answering by those closest to him.

But like the drunk with bleared eyes vision and wobbly knees we have to commit to either moving on from Wirtz and re establishing Szobo as our main man and number 10 or leaving Wirtz there and buying a proper 6 to play behind him and benching 2/3 of Gravenberch/Szobo/MacAllister or selling one of them. All unpalatable choices to the faithful but themes the stools and we gotta choose or end up on our arse again as Arsenal walk out the door with the girl. Dave LFC

Saudi and privilege In reply to RHT/TS, I think you’re falling into the modern black/white, right/wrong fallacy of modern life and ignoring the nuance. Taking the money from somewhere like Saudi is completely subjective and context specific.

Compare and contrast Ivan Toney and Jordan Henderson. The former has spent most of his career in the lower leagues. He’s not earned life altering wealth beyond Joe Bloggs’ wildest dreams, even as a Premier League footballer. Jordan Henderson? Yeah, your criticism is probably fair enough, sure he made plenty captaining Liverpool.

But then you move into the realm of the non-British player. I remember reading about Rivaldo’s childhood. He was dirt poor. And I mean extremely poor by Brazilian standards. No shoes, walking miles barefoot to training as a child, so poor his teeth wore away levels of poor. He played as long as he could and earned as much as he could. Who can blame him wanting to put as much buffer between himself and that?

People coming from those kind of backgrounds often aren’t trying to just support themselves, or their immediate family, it’s very often aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents… scores of people for whom you’re the golden ticket to escape poverty.

If you’ll excuse the pun, I think it’s a bit rich of us in the developed west to expect someone that’s grown up without running water and with scant education to turn their noses up at eye watering wealth.

Our ability to take moral stances against certain regimes is not wrong, but don’t think it’s not at least in part contingent on the benefits of being born and raised in one of the most developed nations in the world. Lewis, Busby Way

FFP, PSR, FFS By and large, I completely agree with Jim (THFC)’s assessment of PSR, whom it protected and how. That said, I don’t think I’d agree that PSR was biased in the sense that it was intentionally set up to protect the “cartel clubs.” It wasn’t so much biased as it was badly designed to meet its goals. And I myself get annoyed when my fellow Toon fans bitch about PSR (few seem to know that those rules no longer apply). I understand how they feel — especially after the 2021 “emergency meeting” the EPL called to ban related-party sponsorship deals, an obviously illegal move clearly aimed at NUFC, though it took four years for the rule (passed by 18 member clubs) to be deemed “void and unenforceable”– but PSR predates the Saudi takeover by eight years, and during those eight years — orat least, the ones in which we were not in the Championship — the club believed it was benefiting from them.

As Jim says, nobody wants utter and lasting success to be straight buyable, least of all the already successful clubs with the highest revenues, but non- (or small-) petrostate ownership. And why would, say, Brighton welcome the richest dudes on the planet rolling up with a very large wire transfer to short circuit a decade of hard progress? The last thing they or any other club wanted was for the House of Saud to buy into the EPL, and even this NUFC supporter can see their point.

For what it’s worth, though, NUFC has only opposed the majority of the League’s clubs in these affairs on that one occasion in 2021, when they were entirely justified but still prevented for four years from using a multi-club development model that’s become increasingly common across Europe and the Americas. I’ve always taken this respect for the majority to be a smart, humble-seeming, move on the part of the Board, to be contrasted with City’s militant PR and legal defensive posturing. It does not seem to me that the owners ever believed they’d be able to show up and start raking in trophies, either.

All this is to say that PSR rules weren’t really biased; they were just badly designed and inadequately reconsidered while in place. One hopes SCR will work better, though The Athletic published a fantastic piece on EPL SCR that makes me think it will continue the concentration of wealth and success that has characterized the EPL. It also made me imagine the Chief Compliance Officer at every club with a smartphone widget displaying his club’s current SCR by EPL and UEFA calculations from some wildly complicated Excel spreadsheet.

NUFC, which voted with the 14-club majority to replace PSR with SCR, evidently thinks it will work better. But that majority deserves a note: 14 was the minimum number of voted needed for the rule change, and the majority included three subsequently relegated clubs, but not Bournemouth, BHA, Brentford, Palace, Fulham or Leeds. That the dissent included some of the most stable and some of the most upwardly mobile clubs in the league makes me wonder whether they’re right. Chris C, Toon Army DC

Get your geek on Hello Gramps and F365 readers, I have been moved into writing back into the mailbox after years by your email.

Getting straight to the point, yes all that collected data is used in football. For everything from fitness, scouting, tactical strategy and set pieces. Now I only know examples from my beloved LFC and keep in mind that these examples are now from years ago so they may well be reasonably outdated now given how quickly the field moves. Also the best way to learn things is to read straight at the source!

Here are my 3 resources to get started: 1. The easy read- How to win the Premier League by Ian Graham, former Director of Research at Liverpool FC. A relatively high level overview of the analytics that goes into decision making, not much detail.

2. The Hard Science Papers for the more technically minded – First is called Game Plan if the link does not work – what we can learn about AI systems by studying football. From the incredible scientific team at Google DeepMind and Liverpool FC.

3. TacticAI. Once again from the AI Research group at Google DeepMind and Liverpool FC. A look into modeling set pieces with a relatively more niche field of AI(A great introduction to geometric deep learning for CS students in university too). There are simpler blogs too on the same works above that can be found on the DeepMind website if you want a gentler introduction. I hope this scratches your itch for an insight into the science of football. I also hope that it might inspire those interested in learning how to use these incredible tools we are building today, but might not have had the motivation to get into it. Learning to adapt to modern technology never hurt anyone after all. Have a good time reading and stay curious all. Regards,