The Manchester United Rebuild, Part 1

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Welcome to rebuilds season. In it, your beloved newsletter authors shall attempt to rebuild teams various and sundry into something more competitive for next season. These are companion pieces to the podcast (YouTube version here and audio-only version here), where Ted and Patrick will talk through their thoughts on how to rebuild each team.

Why should you listen to us? Because we are professionally trained in doing this literal job for actual football teams, from the bottom of the English pyramid all the way up through the Champions League. We still get lovely little notes of appreciation and support from industry insiders after we produce insight like the Chelsea piece Kim wrote last week.

So yeah, we’re going to kick the tyres and light the fires on all the big teams in England, potentially irritating those who have done all the work, and helping those who have been too lazy to accomplish their transfer shopping lists so far. It won’t be perfect — after all, we are not a fully-funded analytics department, we are just normal men (and women), just innocent men — but it will likely be better than anything else you read in public on the topic.

So share the links, tell your friends, and buckle up cuz it’s gon’ get bumpy.

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Right, when it comes to Manchester United, it might be useful to set the stage on how they got here.

I have stories about this, so listen up.

First of all, for many, many moons the current owners mostly just let the football side get on with things. Sir Alex controlled everything at the club, and they continued using that blueprint from the time David Moyes replaced him, except as we know, Moyes did not replicate Ferguson’s success at United and was quickly replaced. The Glazers were massively concerned with the commercial side — the money-printing vehicle must print more money — but for about a decade, the football side was mostly left alone, eventually with John Murtough quietly, and officially overseeing it for quite a few years before he was replaced by Dan Ashworth in 2024 when INEOS came on board.

Now, given their financial firepower, the footballing side were not actually very good at doing their jobs, but that was mostly a secondary concern. And because it was a secondary concern, United’s football apparatus became a weird political animal with various and sundry regimes having partial fiefdoms overseeing different areas. Of footballing. Or general footballitude.

The recruitment side was especially weird. New people were hired that were attached to the manager/head coach choices with lovely wage packets, but then when those coaches left, the recruitment people mostly stuck around. The prestige of being at United plus the wages made it difficult for people to choose to leave themselves. It’s like someone forgot the org chart existed, (or the power structure made it impossible to get rid of people), and no one except coaches were ever given their walking papers. Which is nice in principle — people kept their jobs — but it was a fucking disaster in practice. People were concerned with having influence and maintaining employment, and that came at the explicit cost of building winners.

As for an analytics department, the final phrase above tells you how interested traditional recruitment people were in adding new voices into the mix. It’s not that they didn’t know data was potentially important — I had talks with people at United from back when Jose was present about what Brentford, Arsenal, and Liverpool were all doing in the space to change the game. They would send football people to attend the occasional nerd conference, but that felt more like folks learning how to pick up phrases and buzzwords, and less like people who aggressively wanted to learn the new way football was getting smarter.

At one point in the late 2010s, United hired an outside recruitment firm to search for a Director of Analytics. This recruitment firm was business-focused and not football specific, but I know for a fact that they were given many notable names to interview and pursue from myself and various other exceptional nerds.

In the end, they ignored almost all of them, dallying over the hire for years before eventually placing someone connected locally from business into the role.

Let me repeat that, because it bears emphasising.

We KNOW that sports analytics is one of the biggest areas with prolonged first mover advantage. The people that get smart early tend to stay that way for much longer than it seems like they should (again, here’s looking at Liverpool, Arsenal, Brentford, Brighton), because the learnings and lessons compound. And Manchester United chose to hire someone untrained and unpracticed in football analytics to head up their Data Analytics team.

So for a long time there was no analytics department to listen to, then when it existed, its competence/experience was immediately in question. And even if that department would have been good, there were strong incentives to sideline them so other people could maintain influence and keep their jobs.

tl;dr United’s football structure was a dinosaur that added up to being both extremely expensive and the perfect recipe for disaster.

So that’s how United got here, more than a decade after smart teams fully embraced the analytics revolution in football, with barely a clue in sight.

Current Status

With four matches left in the Premier League season, Manchester United are 14th in the table with a -8 goal difference. They are 13th in expected goal difference. Their attack has gotten worse under Ruben Amorim. They haven’t really been in contention for a league title in twelve years.

Their midfield is a fictional construct that occasionally features one player who was clinically dead (Eriksen) and another who merely plays like he is (Casemiro). Kobbie Mainoo was set up to fail. Manuel Ugarte is important, but can’t hold it together by himself.

Their strikers are two players who do not create enough shots between them to form an elite striker (Zirkzee at 1.58 and Hojlund at 1.19 do not add up to 3 per 90!).

The squad is old, overpaid, and looks like it has been constructed mostly via thrifting off Facebook Marketplace.

We warned last summer it would take at least three full transfer windows to rebuild it. That warning at this point looks slightly conservative.

What Should They Keep?

While a shitshow, it’s not a total disasterclass for a Premier League club. (Though it is for one with Champions League pretensions.) We genuinely like Amad Diallo and Alejandro Garnacho. Their combination of age and skillsets are exactly what you would want to buy if they didn’t already exist in the squad. You’d simply prefer to break them in over time, instead of featuring them as your starting front line every single week.

In Leny Yoro and Matthijs De Ligt, plus sundry academy kids, they seem to have some potential at centre back. I liked the Patrick Dorgu move and the price, and I think Noussair Mazraoui is legit good. Bruno Fernandes is fine, I guess? Andre Onana, when on form, is very good but whether that form will be consistent from here out is anyone’s guess.

As for the rest… 😬 

What’s the Budget Look Like?

That is anyone’s guess. They do not appear to be ready to spunk large amounts of money on this squad to buy premium players. That could change at any moment because they are owned by exceptionally rich people, but it’s not been part of the briefs to the press this spring. As such, expect a couple of normal-ish Big Club buys, bolstered by any useful sales they get in shopping Diogo Dalot, Mason Mount, and potentially Rasmus Hojlund to someone who hopes to add shot volume to his key traits. (Which almost never works, but coaches love someone else’s young talent they think they can change and improve.)

Anyone can tell you that United should sell Mount and one of their strikers. The problem is getting enough for them to avoid a PSR hit that damages their buying power. Mount will need to fetch a fee of approximately £33m for PSR break even, while Hojlund will require £38m, and Zirkzee £29m. If United can’t get that much or relatively close, it’s actually the better financial move to loan them out — which is exactly what happened with Jadon Sancho and Antony last year.

They’re getting a bit of wage relief with Victor Lindelöf and Eriksen departing, but those guys aren’t the big fish. United really need to get Casemiro and his estimated £18m+ off the books. Sancho, Mount, Antony, Harry Maguire, and Marcus Rashford also have salaries that run the club £10m+ per year, and in Rashford’s case, £15m+.

Thankfully, Rashford appears to have generated a market for his services with some good play at Aston Villa, but the others will be tough sells. It’s yet to be determined if Chelsea will pay the £20m clause they agreed for Sancho, or a reported £5m penalty to get out of the deal.

It’s not great news, to be honest. United kind of need to hope the academy produces undervalued gems for a bit (like Arsenal’s have been), so they can either sell them on to reinvest, or so they can fill the gaping hole of squad minutes with players younger than Jonny Evans.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we work our magic in trying to make United competitive for next year.

—TK + KM

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