My Take On The Manchester United Striker Situation

I’d like to consider the Manchester United striker debate from a slightly different perspective to how it’s been looked at so far. Last season our biggest problem was a lack of goals. We created a decent amount of chances, but wasted far too many of them.

Now this was for two reasons, firstly the players we had who were taking the most shots are not our most clinical players. For all his faults in Højlund, we actually have a striker who finishes at a well above average rate, but he hardly ever gets a shot. While Garnacho has a terrible conversation rate (worst in our squad amongst the forwards) yet he takes the highest amount of shots per game in the squad.

Secondly, a lot of our shots are taken from poor positions, too far out or too wide of the goal. This is due to our players’ poor attacking movement and decision making. Players not making the right runs at the right times, or when they do the player on the ball doesn’t recognise it or only realises too late.

For both issues the biggest factor in the problem is the quality of the players more so than the system they are playing. Now a lot has been made about the striker, ‘the guy who’s responsibility it is to score the goals’. Or at least that seems to be what the majority of the fan base have been saying.

However, the club faced a problem; there are very few elite strikers who you can rely on to get you 20 league goals. In fact across Europe’s top 5 leagues, only 15 players scored 20 or more league goals. Now not all of these 15 players are central strikers, in fact only 8 of them are.

You then have some playing for clubs such as Real Madrid or Bayern Munich. Clubs where we aren’t going to be able to take their best player, or rival English Premier League (EPL) clubs who won’t want to sell to us, and will charge a premium for their players. While if we sign a player with no EPL experience then we run the risk of them not being able to match their goal output in our league.

So with so few elite options available, our limited budget and with better placed competitors for those few signings what could we do to solve the issue? Well we did compete for a couple of those premium elite options, yet we were either priced out or they chose to move to a team that is better placed to challenge for major honours over the next couple of seasons at least.

I actually think the club have been really cute with their approach to this transfer window. Instead of going all out and fighting what was always likely to…