Fresh on the back of Sunday’s 4-3 victory over Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool side at Anfield in the FA Cup quarter finals, Manchester United fans have something new to celebrate this week, as new part owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe has officially taken up his desired football operations duties.
Fans of the Red Devils will love our action at the weekend. We entered the March international break with the greatest of highs, but with Ineos and Ratcliffe having their minority investment confirmed (27.7% of the club) last month, there is even more reason for optimism within the fan base as we move forward with half an eye on next season and the 2024/25 campaign.
Plenty of fans have had issues with our off pitch performances in more recent years, as there has been a heavy trend towards signing big money names, for big money, who have often not quite lived up to their billing when it came to their performances on the pitch, but Ratcliffe has already made two big moves in an effort to solve that. Clearly he no longer wants the club betting on corners strategy and he actually wants us to think out a proper strategy that is not a risk.
We have taken Omar Berrada from rivals Manchester City and appointed him as our new club chief executive, and as we all know, we have already made moves to bring in Newcastle United’s Dan Ashworth as our inaugural sporting director, and they will simply be two of the first decisions made by Sir Jim as he begins to get his feet firmly under the table and gets comfortable with his new role.
One of the other decisions, well plans, that have been raised very recently is his thoughts and aspirations on Old Trafford itself and his desire for a new 100,000-capacity stadium. At this stage, Stadium improvement talk is just talk, but it does ably show his overall ambitions for the club, but right now investment needs to be on-pitch related, and whilst some fans will agree with the issues he has raised with the dating of the Theatre of Dreams and how it could be improved, it is the least of our problems right now.
Sort our off pitch structure out, get a sensible first-team plan in place when it comes to sensible recruitment that allows us to grow and challenge properly again, as opposed to overpaying on former players who offered little (unless it was in their interests) or signing flavour of the moments who simply do not fit their colleagues, and we will be in a far better place.
Naturally, despite the Stadium comments, this has not escaped Ratcliffe’s mind given his actions so far, but fans will have to wait and see when it comes to how much of his focus is on structure, when compared to the summer transfer window.
To the disappointment of some, it does sound like structure takes precedence as he is looking long-term, but if that proves to be true, there will be many in the fan base who are fully on board with that decision and believe that not rushing for 2024/25 would help set us up far better to really challenge again when it comes to 2025/26.
It would certainly chime with the thoughts of former skipper, and now pundit, Gary Neville, as he has made no secret of the fact (on regular occasions) that although the structure of the first team had been a massive problem for the club for a good number of years now, our biggest problem had been a complete lack of vision and joined up thinking off the pitch, which had naturally disrupted our on pitch efforts.
Let us see what the summer brings, as there will again be those fans who fully agree with Ratcliffe’s other comment that he has no intention of signing someone like Kylian Mbappe because you cannot buy success, you have to build it and his focus is on finding the next Mbappe. That would make football and business sense but ‘It’s not that clever, is it, buying Mbappe, in a way. Anyone could figure that one out.’
We have tried that before, let us try something new.
