I can't imagine any way in which Utd would have loaned Garnacho to the Championship in the second half of last season. Pellistri already only seemed vaguely plausible. Also, would Spence have really picked us ahead of Ligue 1 Rennes for a loan? Picking Arajo instead of Archer was just a rubbish decision though. The lame signings of Ferreira and Araujo seem firmly to be placed at the door of Manga and his team - but I think we already knew that given Costa's network and that Manga basically admitted that he'd underestimated the Championship initially.
Ferreira wasn't too bad was he but got injured and never really re-gained his place. Arajo was too lightweight - mind you we had another striker who was supposed to be perfect for the Championship and he was rubbish too.
This is a hit piece commissioned by the club. I could believe Sissoko, Livermore and Spence. Not Archer or Garnacho though. We had a budget of £2m. Plus the wages we'd have sunken on those to boot. I don't buy all of it. I completely believe there being too many cooks in the kitchen. I think though the wrong chef got sacked.
Does sound like there were some ****-ups, if it's true that we turned Spence and Drameh down for Ferreira, and Archer for Araujo, those would have to go down as bad ones, but imagine the reaction if we'd signed Livermore in January? He's been a pleasant surprise, but he wasn't getting a place in the West Brom team (and as the only midfielder of his type, him signing alone wouldn't magical fix everything as he won't be able to play every game)
Wasn’t Garnacho part of the Man U squad? Maybe they mean the other young player we were linked with who Bilic wanted .
Even if Manga has basically admitted that he got it wrong in January, I'd still rather have had his input rather than Giaretta and Duxbury, only at a push Hoedt (a Bayat bargain bucket deal) and Porteous (an opportunistic punt on a player whose contract was expiring) were what we needed, the rest were young players with potential but either unsuited to English football (Araujo and Ferreira), or just far too wet behind the ears to immediately succeed in the rough and tumble of the Championship (Koné and Martins)
Certainly wasn’t commissioned by the club! In fact, nobody working there now contributed to it. If some look worse than others then that’s how it is, but nobody comes out of the whole mess looking good.
Even if it were a smear job on Manga to make him look like a clown, it won't reflect well on the club as they appointed him in the first place!
Or make sure the manager at the time wanted to work with him ? Mind you we’d probably had 2/3 in the time Manga was appointed to when he came !
Looks like he is getting a job back in Germany . https://twitter.com/berger_pj/status/1788839625793962260
Where he will be hugely successful and we suffered our worst season under Gino Pozzo because we backed Giaretta.
We didn’t back Giaretta for the record here (on this matter). Giaretta’s role was always largely misunderstood - which is the clubs fault as they billed him as something he wasn’t. But he was a pen-pusher who was there to have his name put to things and go and do jobs when others wouldn’t/couldn’t. I still don’t like him as he was blindly beholden to Pozzo. But the vitriol he gets is misguided. Manga was sacked because of Ismael, not Giaretta.
Really seems like the club backed Ismael initially just to make a point that they had changed, only for it all to come undone through poor recruiting and Ismael himself being underwhelming. Must say I always assumed Giaretta was behind all this, but he's one of numerous people (see Dowling, Duxbury, and a whole host of managers) who have been made out to be convenient scapegoats when the real problem goes higher
Given the wild reputation he seemed to have, you'd have thought a bigger club in England may have been in for him.
Wild reputation? Not sure you can argue with what he did at Eintracht Frankfurt. With every passing day, it looks more mental that we backed Giaretta and Ismael over this guy. Reality is that Ben Manga came in, tried to do the work he was given the remit to do, and Gino quickly realised that he didn’t like not having control of everything.
He was exactly what we needed - finding gems to sell for big money to help get us out our financial hole. Frankfurt sold Muani to PSG for €95m last summer, just 14 months after Manga and his team landed him on a free transfer. Sold Lindstrom to Napoli for €30m (after buying him for €7m 2 years earlier) and that was just the top 2 sales last summer.
Probably general Pozzo short termism - within 3 months he'd not bought in several players for peanuts, who turn out to be stars worth over £50m, so sack him.
Biggest irony being that at the time he got Muani out of Nantes, Bayat was heavily involved in their transfers, same as he was at Charleroi when Osimhen left there. For all the talk from Pozzo of Bayat being able to do great deals, that's two excellent players where we had an insider in the selling club and both went elsewhere.
We were interested in Muani but rather unsurprisingly he rejected us for a club who were playing Champion's League football.
A year after our interest was reported... Edit: he ran his contract down so that was probably always his plan! But anyway, what's the point of having Mogi around strong arming young players into moves they don't want if he can't get the good ones to agree to join us!
The amount of dumb things Pozzo has done is hard to keep track of, but hiring a renowned DOF with the specific of idea of trying to emulate what he did extremely well at his last club, only to sack him in favour of an average manager who is infinitely less capable of doing the same job, has to be up there as the one of the dumbest. And yet we still have fans on this very page defending it.
Like a spoilt child, unable to give anything and jumps from one "brilliant" idea to the next, burning money as he goes.
