Manchester United Overview So Far This Season

Eight games into the league season now is a good time to reflect on where Manchester United are as a team in this rebuild. Obviously we are in reality one summer into a full squad rebuild that will likely take three summer transfer windows to complete.

There are obvious areas of this squad and team that need to be improved to give Ruben Amorim what he wants and he is having to adjust his tactics to this team while also not completely compromising on his philosophy and style of play.

For a start the best midfield we have is Casemiro / Bruno which is obviously not a long term option and is a compromise to what Amorim typically wants from his midfield. Far more passing and very little effective ball carrying. However, this isn’t just a compromise due to a lack of ideal options available to him (Mainoo is actually an ideal profile for what Amorim typically wants, and he was a player Amorim was very excited to work with).

The other issue is Amorim’s ideal system has the ball playing coming from the CB’s, and bar Yoro none of our current options are really creative enough passers to give him that deeper ball playing he wants. So to balance that he needs more deeper ball playing from his midfielders, which in turn means they need to drop deeper more often that limits the teams ability to press quite as high.

We have seen at times our forwards have tried to press high, but then become too detached from the midfield that has dropped slightly deeper which leaves big gaps for the opposition to attack if they evade our press.

Amorim has adjusted by getting his team to press more in a mid block rather than a high press, this keeps us more compact in the middle. We have also seen more focus on our keeper playing longer balls out with an aim for us not to win the first ball but the second. Rather than trying to play out from the back.

The manager has made several key adjustments to his team, unfortunately the majority of fans have a fairly limited tactical understanding (due to very poor mainstream pundit analysis to be fair) . Because he hasn’t changed formation many people don’t see the tactical adaptations he has made.

Sticking to a regular team shape even when changing tactics can actually be a strength, especially when you are trying to teach players how to play a higher standard of technical and tactical football. Giving them too many complex instructions which might change several times during a game makes it much harder for them to consistently do the right…