Steven Gerrard is right. That's the uncomfortable part. United spent £50m on Andrey Santos and a reported £70m on Carlos Baleba, and as of this week they sit 16th, one point and two places above the relegation zone, winless in eight across all competitions after a 3-0 home defeat by Bournemouth. You don't talk your way out of that with a slide deck. A squad assembled at those prices should not be scrapping to stay out of the bottom three. It is, so the squad is not good enough. Simple.
⚡ Upset:Bournemouth had a 33% chance before kickoff and beat Man United 3–0.
39%
Where Gerrard goes soft is on who to shout at.
Speaking on The Overlap Daily after the Bournemouth loss, he worked through the team player by player. Maguire's had a really good career. Shaw was top in his day. Santos, £50m, not a Manchester United player. Baleba, £70m, has potential but hasn't shown it this season. Amad, good when he's good. Then the knife: when he played against United, the touchlines had Giggs and Beckham, and now you look and see Amad. The soundbite flying around stitches four separate answers into one blanket demolition, and the real interview was gentler than that, full of "terrific talent" and "really good career" caveats that get trimmed off. The verdicts, though, land the same. These aren't the players a club of United's size should be building around.
Santos didn't phone himself up and agree a £50m fee. Baleba didn't set his own £70m price or pick the system he'd be dropped into. Players don't sign their own contracts or scout themselves. Every name Gerrard roasted was chosen, valued and paid for by someone else, and those people are still employed.
The target is Jim Ratcliffe, Omar Berrada, and the recruitment chain that keeps approving £50m and £70m midfielders without building a coherent team to hold them. The Giggs-and-Beckham comparison is lazy nostalgia if you use it to kick a few 20-somethings. It's devastating if you use it to indict the people who've turned a decade of spending into a side flirting with relegation.
Stop comparing everything to Ferguson and accept United are an average team now. Ease off young players held to a standard they can't meet. Nobody's asking Santos to be Scholes by Christmas. But easing off the comparison lets the board off the hook, and the board is exactly who it should be aimed at. Invoking the old United is a way to ask why, after hundreds of millions in spending, the club still can't assemble a spine.
Michael Carrick is the clearest evidence against the idea that the players are simply bad. He stabilised this club after Ruben Amorim was dismissed in January, won 11 of his 16 matches as interim, secured a third-place finish, and was handed a permanent deal to 2028. The same group of players that briefly looked like a top-four side under him now looks like a relegation candidate the moment results turn. If the problem were simply bad footballers, that interim run doesn't happen. It did. This is a squad with no settled identity, a worse verdict on the people who built it than Gerrard's player-by-player teardown.
Ratcliffe and Berrada have kept Carrick for Saturday's trip to Chelsea. That means they know the manager isn't the problem. Apply the same logic one level up: the men who signed the cheques should be the ones sweating, not the kids trying to justify fees someone else agreed to on their behalf.
Gerrard named the symptoms. The illness is wearing a suit.
