Thread by @SensibleUtd

Thread:

The sheer pace at which Ole has lifted #mufc from the rut to contention means many see the job he did as easy. He has steered a top to bottom revamp under constant scrutiny with 0 room for error.

Most managers fail if the situation isn't ideal. Ole's the opposite ⤵️

Ole has been our manager for just 2 full seasons now. The squad he took over was bloated and unbalanced. To make matters worse, many of them didn't want to be here and also were on ludicrous contracts.

But the issues at the club didn't stop with the squad alone.

United's famed academy had been neglected. There was no pipeline in place for academy talents to move to the first team.

The club had fallen behind in data analytics and had neglected the sports science department leading to us being the most unfit squad in the league.

When it comes to recruitment, we had until them followed a system of buying big talents hoping they will improve us without really considering how & here they will fit in. This lead to key positions like cb, fb's, creative mids and rw's being overlooked.

Add to that the huge transfer fees/wages we paid for some players and suddenly you had a recruitment department that was quite literally winging it & instantly became the butt of jokes not just among fans but also other clubs.

The famed United tax became even higher due to this.

These problems also lead to the biggest issue which was a disconnect between the club, the fans, the staff, the players and the board. It all seemed like different factions when in an ideal world they should all be working together as a family.

Many people don't realise that a club is also a workplace and if your workplace is not happy, your work won't be good.

Players spend 90% of their time at the club. It's not even a 9-5 Monday to Friday job, it's literally 24x7.

Every waking moment of their life is spent trying to help this club so if the club doesn't feel like a family from top to bottom, from the board to the kit man to the drivers to the canteen staff to the coaches, it becomes even more difficult to perform at your highest level.

United was always a family, from the kitman to the canteen staff to the cleaners and the drivers, they're all United & every single one of them being inspired to work at their very best is what made us the very best.

This feeling was lost. What made United great had disappeared.

So Ole didn't just take a team struggling in 6th, he took over a club struggling to stay relevant after having made multiple bad decisions for 6.5 seasons.

It remains one of the hardest jobs in football just for the sheer scale of work that was left to do.

Since taking over Ole has fixed almost all of these issues, the first thing he did was meet every single staff member and told them how important they were to on field success.

The first noises we heard from inside OT about Ole was that it feels like United again.

Since then he's paved a linear path for the academy talents into the first team. He's revamped our loan structure and consistently made it a point to introduce youngsters into the senior setup.

There's a clear plan to introducing talents:

- Have them train with the first team first
- Then make them travel
- Give them a few games both home & away on bench
- Give them 5 min appearances
- And then introduce them over long term

This pattern is evident in every talent.

Next he set about fixing the work culture at the club. The first three signings filled not just massive holes but also fit in very well with the work ethic we wanted to set.

Our first major signing is our captain. Do you know how ridiculously well planned and executed that is?

James and AWB work their back off and the 3 signings Ole made instantly made it clear the kind of hard work he wants to see from the rest in training.

Obviously this isn't something that gets fixed overnight. Players like people are reluctant to change.

They complained initially about our training being too fitness intensive but that was also because they really weren't fit.

A few months later we were seeing the likes of Pogba, Martial, Rashford, Shaw, Lindelof, McT, Fred all playing at a level we hadn't seen from them.

As Ole was unearthing new talents from within the squad he also set the precedent of setting long term targets in recruitment. Be it Bruno, Sancho, Varane or even Cavani, the idea was to not target players on whom we don't have extensive scouting information on.

This also lead to United completely revamping their scouting network making it the biggest in the world. Similarly across the next two seasons the sport science dept finally had enough data collected from our players to see how to maximize their fitness & endurance.

With each passing month the club got a little closer to the modern world. New staff were hired, new systems were put in place and step by step plans were put in place to create a self replicating sustainable system that can compete at the highest levels consistently.

Most clubs have had such structures in place for a decade. United were run as a day to day club with no real thought about the future (except for the financial side) until Ole came in.

The job wasn't just to make it a better side, it was to make us a better club as a whole.

And now we can see it, there's a DoF, our scouts consistently identify great talent, our academy is filled with prospects, we attract the best in the game and the team has gone from considering top 4 an achievement to now seeing it as a failure.

All that in just two seasons!!

This brings me back to the first point, if you're looking only at the on field progress, it is amazing considering its been just two seasons.

Not only are we finally a squad that attracts anyone but we've shown a consistency (3rd & 2nd) that we haven't seen post SAF.

But if you take the off field aspect of the rebuild too - sustainable academy, new DoF & recruitment structure, coaches, work ethic etc - you'll see the progress is monumental.

I genuinely don't think many other managers are capable of doing all this in such a short time.

No other club had issues quite like ours and no other club has been able to replicate the pace that we've been able to achieve in such a rebuild either.

Teams like Chelsea had a sustainable system from top to bottom in place and all it needed was a coach. United had neither.

Ole came in, ripped the walls down as he himself stated and started building this club from the ground up again. In two years he has us mightily close to where we need to be. Trophies are an eventuality not an exception.

I'm patient bc he's far exceeded the pace I expected.

There's a lot right at United, if you zoom out and check the bigger picture you'll see the positives far far outweigh the negatives.

But at times I feel the positives don't get any mention because quite honestly Ole has made them look easy to achieve when they clearly weren't.

I've talked about a lot of these aspects multiple times before in multiple threads. You can see a collection of some here:

Peace.

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