Marc Skinner makes passionate plea to United after Champions League exit | OneFootball

Manchester United boss Marc Skinner has urged the club to invest in more depth and match Europe’s elite clubs, after Bayern Munich knocked him and the team out of the Champions League.

Dumped out

United’s fairytale run in the Champions League came to an end on Wednesday evening as Bayern came from behind to rescue a 2-1 victory at the Allianz Arena and progress to the next stage of the competition with a 5-3 aggregate win.

Skinner’s side went into the return leg trailing 3-2, and they shed first blood to draw the tie level through Melvine Malard.

However, Glodis Viggosdottir cancelled out Malard’s opener as she headed home Carolin Simon’s corner in the 80th minute. Linda Dallmann put the final nail in United’s coffin as she thumped a volley four minutes later.

Skinner expressed his pride in United’s valiant efforts, attributing the loss to Bayern being fresher due to having been able to rotate in their previous match.

The 43-year-old coach has repeatedly called on United’s football leadership group to invest more in the team and he renewed his appeals again after the loss to Bayern.

Skinner’s plea

Skinner told reporters, “I think we will learn from what investment is really needed to go into this level of competition for consistent years. I think we’re still learning as a club, of course, we are.”

“Because we wear Manchester United’s badge, everybody expects us to be the very best team in the world. We have that expectation too. So that’s the pinch point, because we want to be the best.”

“We’ve got to grow because we’re eight years old. If we want to compete at this latter stage, we’ve seen what we’ve got to do as a club. And then it’s our choice now, isn’t it? We have to look at what we seriously want to achieve, and we’ll learn and grow from it.”

“Even as a club, we’re still learning. It takes, sometimes, a punch in the face to wake up.”

He continued, “We need to design a team of the highest-level experience. Having the depth needed to compete  – we’ve had a taste of it now –  to have the depth and the experience of that depth, is key if you want to go later in these competitions.”

“I’ve loved the competition, the levels of the competition, the different experiences, but when we have eight players out currently, we just couldn’t compete enough in that second half. If we’d had them, I honestly think we could have gone through tonight, that’s how well we played in the first half.”

“We’ve had a taste of it now. We need to design the squad with that depth of experience in order to go to that stage, if that’s what we want to do.”

United are next in action on 26 April when they go away to Tottenham Hotspur.

Featured image Maja Hitij via Getty Images

online polls

The Peoples Person has been one of the world’s leading Man United news sites for over a decade. Follow us on Bluesky: @peoplesperson.bsky.social