Premier league managers

Just stop letting him buy players, that’s his biggest downfall, he wouldn’t know a player if they shaaat on his head.

United need a proper structure behind the scenes - some footballing intelligence, ETH is a small part of the problem

Is ETH solely in charge of player recruitment? Has that been the model at Utd since Woodward left? Did he work with a DofF at Ajax?

How much of this is current form as opposed to the total body of work of his career, OP? Would you have placed him in 12th position in March of this year? Where would you rank Arteta, and was his ranking the same during the season he led Arsenal to an 8th place finish?

comment by Sticky Boy (U23092)
posted 26 minutes ago
Is ETH solely in charge of player recruitment? Has that been the model at Utd since Woodward left? Did he work with a DofF at Ajax?
----------------------------------------------------------------------

He just keeps raiding the Eredivisie and any fan that’s been following the Prem for 10 years or more knows how hit and miss that market is for English sides to recruit from. You might get Suarez, you might get Janssen.

By all accounts, ETH isn't hand-picking players, but he's one of the key voices in the committee. The extent of his influence on that committee isn't really known.

The 'only picks players he knows' charge is overblown. We have three players who used to play for him at Ajax. It's a huge stretch to suggest Mount or Amrabat were bought on the strength of ETH's observations of them as youngsters in the Dutch league, rather than their achievements since then, and Eriksen's Ajax connection is irrelevant to his recruitment. Malacia was a cheap prospect to add squad depth, and presumably not a top priority that Ten Hag insisted on bringing in. We've obviously also bought and attempted to buy a few players with no tangential connection: Casemiro, Hojlund, were after Rabiot, the CBs we were looking at in the summer were Kim Min-Jae and French players in Ligue 1 and the Bundesliga.

But actually all of this is beside the point, because if the sporting operations didn't have the expertise to find the right players and relied on the head coach to suggest targets, this would be a massive organisational failure. If you ask someone who isn't qualified to do this job, it's not their fault if they don't do it well. It's like if a construction business made the interior designer, rather than the architects and engineers, responsible for signing off on the structural plans.