I was watching some old highlight reels of the early 2000 team over the weekend and came to the conclusion that not one of our current squad would be a starter. Most of them wouldn’t even make the squad.

comment by Vidicschin (U3584)
posted 14 hours, 4 minutes ago
I was watching some old highlight reels of the early 2000 team over the weekend and came to the conclusion that not one of our current squad would be a starter. Most of them wouldn’t even make the squad.
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Our standards, relative to our competition, have certainly dropped massively since that era. (As a tangent to the main point, in retrospect, I think we were starting to see the beginning of that trend before Fergie left. Teams were beginning to emerge that were based on a more systematic approach to football vs United's personal fiefdom based on canny tactics and recruitment. Our final league title was eked out when few would have said we had the best squad or played the most dominant football. City were already progressing based on having a coherent sporting and recruitment philosophy, and other sides were adopting more rigorously rehearsed movement patterns than Fergie's United ever had.)

But while agreeing with you about the drop in standards, I think that decline seems to be magnified if you compare Fergie-era highlight reels with the whole matches we are consuming now. There is always plenty of less-champagne football across the 90 minutes between the highlights, and when rewatching whole matches from, say, 2002-5, I find I'm quite surprised at how disjointed we are (and how noticeably slower the game is).

Random but had a thought today that Tielemans is a player I forgot to mention. I often think with I’m he’d have more success 10-15 years ago.