DUBLIN — There isn’t an all-out mutiny yet, but an uprising is brewing. Manchester United supporters already feel vilified by their own club’s attempt earlier this summer to eradicate touting, which instead made criminals of their most loyal.
A net transfer spend a third of Ipswich’s so far has done little to placate the discontent. I felt the full force of the vitriol last week when I dared to suggest United were perhaps due a careful summer window, after 13 years of profligacy over player purchases.
Let’s just say the majority were in disagreement, with the more reasoned responses making a valid point: it is United’s new hierarchy who set their “Project 150” goal of winning the league by 2028, how are they supposed to do that if they don’t spend any money, when every other “Big Six” rival has now breached the £100m mark for one player? (Lads, it’s Tottenham.)
Why I felt compelled to defend Ineos’ conservative approach was that they do seem to be willing to learn from previous scattergun attempts to buy marquee names, regardless of the individual’s suitability, who can restore United to its former glories. Caution is long overdue.
Given there are two weeks left in the window, and from the way the club has been speaking off the record, officials were opening the door to the possibility that Youri Tielemans, Andrey Santos and Karl Darlow would be the only arrivals in the transfer market this summer.
There was the acknowledgement that other targets would be pursued – there remains a real admiration for Lewis Hall – just not at the prices being mentioned. Caution being the modus operandi.
Sitting down with Michael Carrick for his first major interview of the summer in the grandiose surroundings of Carton House just outside Dublin, where United are spending the longest amount of time during a rather less extensive pre-season tour than usual, changed my thinking somewhat.
“We’re delighted with the players we’ve brought in, first and foremost, I think we’ve improved the group, balance, quality and the direction we want to go in,” Carrick told us. “I think we’ve done really good business and we’ve got really some top players.
“But we always want to improve, we want more, we need more, we keep looking for how we can do that, so that never stops. We’re pretty clear in the messaging (to the hierarchy) that we need to keep pushing.”
That should be music to United supporters’ ears. Carrick has been very guarded with every word since taking over from Ruben Amorim in January, wary of how every utterance reaches far and wide, given the scrutiny the club is under.
We firmly expected further Carrick reticence when quizzed on transfers, but a pre-season sit-down allows any manager to relax and talk through season plans in greater depth, while reflecting on why United have lagged behind in the transfer market.
“For now, we’ve got to make the most of the position we are in,” Carrick continued. “But we’ve got to keep pushing and push everything every boundary that we can to be able to win again. That’s the challenge at the end of the day, whether that’s this season or hopefully the one after.
“The money doesn’t guarantee you (success). It needs to be the right player and a better player for what we’ve got. It’s something obviously over time we need to be pushing to look to enhance the squad all the time in different ways.”
As the naysayers in the fanbase are keen to highlight, it does represent an almighty risk, at this juncture, for United to go into next season without spending any more money.
A left-back and another midfielder are the priority, but a wide forward now appears very much to be off the agenda, with Carrick confirming Marcus Rashford is firmly part of his plans for the coming campaign.
Given United had identified these weak points months ago, I had assumed the moment for much squad upheaval had perhaps passed. Maybe not.
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“There’s one or two areas where we’d like to improve,” Carrick added. “But again, that needs to be something that we can do that makes us better and improves the group, whether that’s quality or whether that’s a little bit of depth. That’s something we’ve got to manage.
“We feel we are a stronger group now. We’ve definitely got the potential to achieve something really special. I’m not hiding from the fact, and we should aim to do that, but I can’t give you a definite answer on that (challenging for the title). It’s certainly what we’re pushing to do because we have to, because that’s the club we are.”