SAF’s biggest mistakes

And let’s face it there wasn’t many.

The man is a legend. He is my greatest sporting hero and it’s fair to say we will always be grateful. However even he wasn’t perfect and made some mistakes in his time.

Signing Berbatov

We’d just done the double. We were probably the best side in Europe with a reasonably young side. While you should never stand still in football the first team didn’t really need any alterations. Rooney and Tevez has formed an excellent partnership and while we were light in that area we probably should have went for a young promising striker rather than try to shoe horn Berba in.

He turned out to be a failure of a signing. Didn’t score enough goals, was hot and cold, rarely influenced big games and in fact generally wasn’t trusted to play in most big games. It also disrupted Tevez and led to his departure and imo he was by far a superior player.


Not replacing Ronaldo

Ok there wasn’t really any replacing him but Real wanted him so badly that we probably could have asked for 70-80 mill plus Arjen Robben or Wesley Sneijder if we wanted. Instead we replaced him and Tevez with Valencia, Obertan and Owen and got the old there’s no value in the market line when around that time the likes of Ibrahimovic, David Silva, Aguero and Yaya Toure moves for similar prices to what we’d paid for players years earlier.

It was probably the Glazers fault but with that 80 mill in the bank we could have probably anyone other than Messi at the time.

We won and challenged for titles after that until he retired through his brilliance and the likes of individuals such as Rooney and RVP but we never were anything like our 06-09 side.


Playing Rooney at home to Bayern in 2010

He was nowhere near fit to play and cost him the rest of the season and possibly the title that year. Arguably Rooney was never quite the same again after that season also but it again showed how little faith SAF had in Berbatov.


Ignoring the midfield for years

Anderson was the last midfielder SAF bought. We went through years of playing substandard players in midfield such as Gibson and Cleverley and only continued to be successful due to SAF. The fact that we brought a midfielder out of retirement said it all.